A good online advertisement

I must have seen millions of online ads, and ignored nearly as many, but this one, despite not being a smoker caught my eye. Good job Nicorette advertising dept.

Flip Camera is Fun

 

Digging through my Flip Camera’s settings today. Found the following in a ‘settings’ text file in a SYSTEM folder. (I was trying to figure out if firmware was updated).

[
#release:"1022590",
#object:"Have a nice day"
]

Gee, thanks flip software engineer. You have a nice day too.

Procedural Drawing

My Creative thing for today, using this tool:

these are the good ones.

Foobar setup sort by Album Artist

I noticed something very annoying when I ripped my new Galactic album in my library. It is sorted by track artist, not album artist! This also happens with Wax Tailor, and other artists that have guests.  Well, I need to fix this visual problem!

Checking the tags, all of the artists are joined together by ‘album artist’. So I went into my preferences, and made some changes.

I changed that to this:

%album artist%[ / %album%]

Then, everything works as I want it to:

Nice and Tidy!

 

The rest of my Foobar setup is currently based off of this guys. I started there, and am still tweaking things. I want a better way to see ‘now playing’ and I want support for my Logitech G15, but baby steps.

A different system of movie ratings

I dislike rating movies. They are way to subjective, biased, and unreliable. of a 0-10 scale, only the numbers 0-1, 5, and 8-10 will appear. People do not have a solid way to rate things. YouTube changed their 5 star system to a ‘thumbs up, thumbs down’ system to get past inherit human disability of rating things. People would only bother rating if they thought it was great, or sucked, so a better system needed to exist.

For my own personal movie reviewing system, I got rid of the 0-5 system, and I decided to use a ‘hated-disliked-meh-liked-enjoyed-loved’ scale. Works better than numerical, but most of the movies are liked or enjoyed, and the ratings only use is finding loved or hated movies. So When I get around to reprogramming my system, I will be changing the ratings once again. I had a sense of an idea last time, where I included ‘don’t recommend, meh, recommend’ as an option. For someone going to the website looking for movies to watch, this is a much better system for movie ratings. It is no longer a subjective opinion based ‘is this good compared to all other movies?’ question, it is a ‘Do you want other people to see this? should they?"’ question. Add my new ‘never-don’t-meh-worth it-yeah-RIGHT NOW’ scale with the area open for free response. ‘I recommend this documentary, but its still a documentary’ to give users a reference point and further opinions. In my mind, this is a much more ideal system for reviewing movies. I will try and implement it soon.

Some Thoughts on Government

I am taking my high school senior mandatory Gov class. I dislike it, as it makes me think and I would rather sleep. Anyway, wrote some stuff down during classes. Taken from notebook, expanded slightly.

• Interesting: A liquid system of Gov’t where the size/influences of parties (geographic, party, interest group, branches, wings, organizations) is recalibrated regularly as needs change over time. During a hurricane / natural disaster, war efforts decrease. (a generals opinions on war would be less effective at policy changing/lower on agenda), and homeland efforts increase. Not due to need, as how current system deals it out (IE: we see hurricane, put money into homeland). but due to opinion influences changing. (during hurricane, homeland people have more power.) The system that would control this is difficult to conceptualize so practicality is farce, but imagine liquid governing.


• One individual person cannot represent one sole idea. So take this out. A representative represents his peoples opinions, all of them, multiple issues. “this guy is pro-choice”. No, he's a human being with an opinion on all or most or many issues. we want the representative to represent out opinions as best as possible.


• Compromise wins. Congress, wake the fuck up.


• Purist theory will only work with compromise. But with compromise, it is in my mind a very well-working theory. Policymakers must be in right mindset for the government to work, government cant just work because of its institutions, the people have to be willing, wanting, and knowledgeable for it to work.


• Want: an Open, transparent government, with all data available for statisticians and regular folks to analyze. Sweden?

Every Day Carry

My EDC as of now:

As for paranoid induced survival:

• Leatherman Black Oxide Surge Multi-tool
• Swiss Army Knife
• Leatherman Straight/Serrated blade Drop-point Knife

General EDC, or when at school (no knifes allowed):

• Fisher Price Spacepen
• Sharpie Pen
• Moleskin Reporter style black notebook
• Swiss army brand tri-fold wallet
• ‘Lucky’ Dollar coin
• Cell Phone
• Small Notebook with school’s class schedule glued on. Used for school assignments
• Class Ring
• Fossil Watch with broken face
• Car Keys on lanyard, with multi-key-tool, USB drive
• A daisy chained length of 550/Para Cord, length about 2.5 feet, maybe 7 inches in chain.
• Sailors Bracelet (have had one of these on for the past 7 years. Haven't gone one minute without it – I put new one on before cutting old one. Been through 3 in the 7 years)

Sometimes on me

• My mp3 player (an XMp3i) – too much of a hassle to have with me, I want better music solution, a better phone could do the trick. Works great in dock, I am too addicted to XM.
• Sunglasses/my aviators.
• Hat, gloves, etc.
• Harmonica in pocket. I swear I will practice more.
• Deck of cards – used surprisingly often
• Nook. for reading books.
• Book. for when Nook is out of juice
• Crumpled post-it note in pocket reminding me to do something deathly important.
• Chinking Coins
• Titanium Spork. Yes.

Want-to-but-Don’t. Things I wish I had on me at all times but don’t

• A small, tough flashlight – haven't found a good one, often bulky/heavy in pocket.
• My aviator ‘driving’ sunglasses. Afraid I will break them, too bulky to have on me, not needed enough. Leaving in car works well enough 97% of use is when driving.
• Cash. (awww, I’m broke!)
• Camera. The times I see something I want to take a picture of but can’t. Cell phone will not cut it! Damn!
• Lighter – not enough use for it.