The Big Rip

In the wake of the realization that my music collection has gone the wrong direction, quality-wise, I have decided to re-rip my entire CD library in Apple Lossless. I expect this to keep me busy for the foreseeable future.

Why apple format instead of flac? Because iTunes supports it natively (and it is a nice ripping environment) and the format is playable in Linux and convertible to other formats. The thing that sucks about any format is that there is no one perfect choice. MP3 is the only real generic choice for lossy, but there is no similarly universal format for lossless. So I will need a minimum of two copies of my entire library to support my existing audio needs. Possibly three. Sigh.

I don't actually expect the ripping to be the really painful part of the process. I expect incorporating the lossless items into iTunes without losing anything or duplicating anything and without hopelessly wrecking my playlists to be the hard part.

The way my luck is going lately, my hard drive will probably crash halfway through the process. I should get a Drobo, but I want a Mac to attach it to. Or I could take a chance and attach it to linux (formatted hfs+), I suppose...

48 disks down, lots and lots to go.

David

The Lure of iTunes

If you had asked me two days ago whether I buy a lot of stuff on iTunes, I would have said, "Some, but not too much. I'd rather buy the CD so that I own a higher quality copy. But I like it for the ability to explore and find new music."

Well, I would have been lying apparently. I installed doubleTwist to mess around with and I was astonished when it started "liberating" my iTunes music. Not because of the liberation - I was obviously expecting that. But because of the number of bloody songs there were to liberate. 854, not including the 245 iTunes Plus selections. Sheesh.

Score one for iTunes and a marvelous store interface. It totally sucked me in.

Ironically, the ability to liberate the music (without burning/ripping) actually makes the store more attractive. I may need therapy.

David

Spiraling Economy

The US economy appears to be in a deep spiral. I seriously wish that I had some capital to invest right now - bargains are starting to abound in the stock market. I also seriously hope that I don't get downsized until after a rebound of some kind.

I wonder what the reason is for the particularly bad hit that Las Vegas is taking from the mortgage foreclosure debacle? Was it particularly bad lending practices in the area? Or is it just that the Las Vegas economy is only good when people have spare money to gamble with? Or both? In any case, this might be a great time to pick up some deals in Las Vegas real estate.

David

Confusing Web Trends

I am puzzled. I discovered Google Trends a while back and I have the Gadget on my Google home page. I look at it from time to time in the hope that I will find something interesting going on in the tubes. I haven't yet.

At this moment in time, the top two search trends are for "amuse bouche" and "i sound my barbaric yawp". And Trends claims that these searches are related somehow.

I know what an amuse bouche is only because I am a foodie. It means to amuse the mouth in French and is a kind of very small titillating appetizer.

I know the phrase "I sound my barbaric yawp" only because Dead Poet's Society is one of my favorite movies. This is a Walt Whitman quote that Robin Williams' character uses to break his students out of their shells.

What they have in common is... Nothing. Nothing at all.

This must be an experiment (possibly by aliens, but more likely by a sadistic developer over at Google) to see what happens when people notice.

I would be sad if it just turns out that Google Trends has a monster bug in how they determine that trends are related. It is more fun to think that they might be somehow.

But how, darn it?

I don't know and seemingly neither does Google.

David

Google Sets, Text Mining, and Enterprise 2.0

I was browsing on Google Labs as I do from time to time to see what the alpha-geeks are up to.

I had never looked at Google Sets before and when I looked at it this time I almost immediately dismissed it as useless. I mean who cares if I can create sets of things? But then I had the idea to type in some bands that I like to see what happened (the starting set was peaches, shiny toy guns, dresden dolls, goldfrapp, and the knife).

It instantly popped up with a long list of bands many of which I know and like and some that I have never heard of. It's the ones that I had never heard of that got me thinking.

This is exactly the kind of problem that pharmaceutical scientists are trying to solve every day. They have a bunch of things that they know are related and they want to find the other things that are related that they don't know about. But the text mining tools that they use to do it are very expensive and painful to use.

This set interface is so simple. So intuitive.

I imagine that the algorithm that Google Sets is using is some kind of basic co-occurance test, so there are lots of tools out there that are more sophisticated. On the other hand I didn't get any hits for sharpening stones, so it has to be at least a little more than that.

If everything inside the pharmaceutical firewall (or better inside+outside) could be indexed into a tool like this would it be useful? Yes, I think so.

It seems like a big problem, but it is a tiny problem compared with the one that Google has apparently already solved.

David

My Political Compass

I am a bit hesitant to enshrine this for all time on the 'net because it is bound to change over time. But the results surprised me a little, as did the layout of the compass itself and the descriptions surrounding it. So here is my political compass:


To put it in context, this puts me dead center on the left-right line between Milton Friedman and Ghandi, but a bit more libertarian (in the classical sense) than either of them.

I don't think this test is anywhere near the whole story. I am socially liberal and economically conservative. Someone who is the opposite could have the same score and we would agree on almost nothing. I think that some multi-dimensional visualization techniques could give a more useful view. Still, it is an interesting exercise.

David

(via PharmaGiles of all things)

A Great New Poker Book

I have been familiar with Tommy Angelo for a long time. Several years ago when I was unemployed and full to the brim with free time I spent a lot of time reading the forums on 2+2.

Back then (before the poker boom) there were exactly four places to get good information about improving your poker game. Rec.gambling.poker was one, if you were willing to wade through the dreck to find the gems - the signal to noise ratio is MUCH worse now, but even then it was bad. Roy Cooke's regular column was another (this was before he released his first book). A very small number of good books existed. And there were the 2+2 forums.

In the old days the 2+2 community was pretty small. It was the place that all of the INTP poker geeks went to find out what all of the other INTP poker geeks were thinking about. Many of the regular posters from back then are fairly well known now. A couple (like Greg "Fossilman" Raymer) are household names and a host of others are authors or otherwise moderately well known (Bob Ciaffone, Jim Brier , Gary Carson, Steve Badger, and of course NPA Ed Miller the TV star).

Tommy always had interesting things to say and always said them in an interesting way. He tended (probably tends) to post on the meta-game.

His new book, Elements of Poker, is an excellent book for a good poker player who wants to get better. It is the best compilation that I have ever seen on the meta-game.

All of it is good and some of it is brilliant. Like the Elements of Performance chapter. I have always loved poker, but now thanks to Tommy it will become part of my practice (in the zen sense of the word).

David