2008.08.04
I need to commit to getting my life in order. I'll give myself to the end of the month.
I mean this September should be a new start... 1988 was the start of high school, '92 was college, '96 was real life, '00 was (engaged and, "thanks" EB) married life, '04 was single life... it's a pattern of 4s, with some action on the 2s.
Music Geekery of the Moment
Annoyingly my car stereo does not have an iPod hookup or audio-in jack (also annoying: most car dashes seem to have a "double height" radio slot, but most replacement car radios are single height. Which work in the double height slots-- if you don't mind ugly mounting kits and a big expanse of blah surrounding the radio itself.) However, the manufacturer stereo will play CDs with MP3s on them, a fairly nifty feature for a 2004 car.
Before my trip to Virginia, I took an hour or so to dump all the music I put on my iPhone (around 1500 songs, everything rate 3 stars or higher) onto a series of 10 CDs. After two long car trips, I'm just starting disk 5.
It was kind of an interesting way to divide music: because most of my MP3s have the track # as the first part of the filename, the songs were mostly sorted by track number first, then by name. Except, oddly, the end of the first disk had a weirdly high concentration of my Paul Simon and Beatles... it was frustrating, 'cause while I like Paul Simon and I like the Beatles, have a big mix that's just bouncing between the two when it should be playing a broad selection is annoying.
I investigated, and it turns out they got such a bump because a lot of their music came on multi-disk sets and the numbering scheme had the first number be that of the disk, rather than the track. Ta Da.
But it got me wondering about which track placement tended to meet my criteria for listenability, and so I hacked together some Perl and came up with the following chart -- even less interesting than I expected, but hey:
| 1:211 | 2:155 | 3:131 | 4:136 | 5:113 | 6:101 |
| 7:88 | 8:93 | 9:88 | 10:77 | 11:65 | 12:54 |
| 13:48 | 14:29 | 15:24 | 16:25 | 17:13 | 18:11 |
| 19:9 | 20:9 | 21:0 | 22:3 | 23:0 | 24:1 |
| 25:1 | 26:0 | 27:0 | 28:0 | 29:1 | 30:1 |
| 31:1 | 32:1 |
Just to cap off the geekery, I took a look at the first word of the titles:
| I:54 | The:51 | Track:19 | What:16 |
| You:16 | My:14 | I'm:11 | Take:11 |
| A:11 | Come:10 | All:10 | Don't:10 |
| Good:10 | One:9 | It's:9 | We:8 |
Just needed to get this out of my system. And onto my website.
Just met the girl of my dreams in a dream, smart and funny and bold. Plus, I was smart and funny and bold. So it worked out dream-well.
My Epitath: "What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us Stronger. ...Whoops."
Automated "sorry, please RE-enter the code without any dashes or spaces" systems are retarded. Programmers are lazy or stupid or both.