I muffed it. :-)

The items: 1 cheap-ass MP3 player, 1 silicone skin in the iPod box, and the nano in a tree-shaped box used as an ornament on the tree.

MP3 player was first, and got the expected very non-plussed reaction. She told me afterwards she was thinking "you got a life drive and you bought me this cheap piece of crap that looks like you got it free from a bank?"

The nano box was next, and was just a confused "what?" And since she didn't even know the nano was supposed to be in the box (not having seen one before, and the "artistic" nature of Apple's packaging), it was not the "ok, cool, here it is" that I expected.

So at that point I had to get the nano box out, simply to get any kind of reaction beyond "eh". Of course she loves it. I also got her good headphones (sennheisers; she hates earbuds) and a set of "clamp on the lid" speakers for her iBook (for when she doesn't want headphones, say our son's naptime when she needs to hear when he wakes up; built in speakers are a bit tinny...).

The other bit of amusement was that she told me that she had started to go to my journal a while back, saw the title, and didn't read any further. She thought sure that "torture" meant that I was going to do what she explicitly told me not to: no pink accessories and no pink iPods! Luckily I was smart enough to know better than to try that :-).

So all told, amusing, but not the sequence of reactions I expected (other than the initial one). Probably doesn't help that we were up beaucoup late last night getting ready, or that the relatives got delayed by weather, or that last night's planned viewing of the Polar Express with the train-obsessed boy turned out exactly like the theater last year--"turn it off" after 20 minutes. Sigh. He likes the IDEA of the Polar Express, but the movie scares him because he's worrying about the boy walking on top of the train, and how loud it is. Ah well, that Christmas tradition can wait until he's ready.

Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Festivus, etc. etc. FSM needs his own birth/winter holiday. :-)

I'm trying to find origins for a phrase I have heard about 3 different, totally unrelated places recently. "How d'ya do, and how d'ya do, and how d'ya do again".

It's in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, coming out of Charlie's mouth as he's introduced.

It's in Misty Moisty Morning by Steeleye Span, but I presume that since most of what they do is traditional, it's actually a trad. song they arranged.

And I don't remember the third place offhand, but it's somewhere else in my consciousness recently, not related to those first two.

So....it seems like it's some kind of common phrase, probably British, with some sort of connotation, but I don't know what. I'd like to know. Anyone have a clue, or a source to look for a clue? Google is not much help searching for phrases that can be spelled in many different ways given that they're colloquial pronunciations. The hits I get are links to the lyrics or the text of Charlie.

Check out these pedals. I never play and I want one :-)

My wife has asked for, and will receive an iPod nano for this holiday season (and here's hoping that she doesn't decide to come drifting over here any time soon; she doesn't usually read my journal....)

But what I'd like to do is give her something else as a "replacement", and then come out with the iPod later. I can't give her coal, because she definitely has not been that bad a girl this year :-). I'm pulling a blank for something that cleverly "replaces" the iPod while still being reasonable in cost (a nano is no small investment after all). Anyone have any good ideas?

To perhaps further clarify, I'm looking for something that implies that I'm "unclear on the concept". A good example is when I was in HS and desperately wanted D&D stuff, and my dad bought the cheezy "dungeon" board game and a copy of the greyhawk manual instead, not realizing they couldn't possibly work together. Since I had no dice, and no DM manual, no monster manual, none of that, the greyhawk book did me no good.

And for those of you who thought this was about something else, shame on you. I have plenty of ideas for that stuff.

But if you like Squirrel Nut Zippers or tight female harmonies with askew lyrics, you need to check out The Ditty Bops. Of course if you read WWdN you already knew that.

A buddy convinced me to go see Los Straitjackets with him last night. If you haven't heard of them, they're a surf/rockabilly band that does instrumentals (mostly). Their schtick is that they wear mexican wrestler masks, and while I'm suspicious that they (band members, not masks) aren't really mexican (based on a number of observations), they address the audience in fast, Sabadoh Gigante style spanish except for song titles and people's names, etc. And did I mention that I think the masks are piss-takes on KISS's makup? The bassist is a demon, one of the guitarists has the Ace Frehly thing going on, and the drummer has stripes on his cheeks.

Making it more interesting, they had The World Famous Pontani Sisters with them, coming out to dance about every third song. Oh, and did I mention that this was mostly Christmas music? Yeah.

If you have a chance to see this show, it is definitely worth it, unless of course you hate surfabilly.

So what's your favorite off-the-beaten-path Christmas music? I'm also a huge fan of Brave Combo's Christmas shows....

update to clarify: I realize they're real mexican wrestling masks, but it just seemed an odd coincidence that the bassist was a demon, etc.

Many moons ago, there were discussions in other journals about useful MP3 tools to recover from messed up files. I bookmarked the discussion at the time, but of course, the bookmark monster ate about 1/3 of my bookmarks a couple months back, including this one apparently.

I've got a bunch of MP3's I've ripped from a CD burned from my wife's mac (among other things I wanted some stuff she'd bought from iTunes and didn't want to mess with all the fiddly bits). I didn't realize/forgot that iTunes will not burn any CD Text so I had no way to identify these bad boys.

I did find ID3man, which identifies tracks based on their audio signatures--it has about 50-60% success rate, which is a good thing, but some of its failures are spectacular (it labelled the instrumental version of "Killing Me Softly" by the Fugees with some horrible long impossible name of a remix collection somewhere). I've identified all the songs now, but I still need a relatively easy way to get the tags all squared away, and I'd like to copy ID1.1 to ID1.2 or ID3 tags too.

I've messed with a handful of freeware MP3 taggers, and I haven't found one yet that is easy, batchable, and intuitive to use all at the same time. Suggestions or pointers to that old discussion are much to be desired. Thanks!

I'm trying to figure out the best headphones to go with my new palm lifedrive. The ones I have lying around at home sound like crap, particularly for audio books at 160kbps. I'm sure part of it is the quality of the output circuitry itself (lots of complaints around the net), but I also want to be sure I'm at least getting the best that's possible with it.

Palm's support website has nothing, the docs for the unit have nothing, googling for "palm lifedrive output impedance" gets me nowhere, and I don't have a plethora of headphones with known impedances to test it with. Anyone know/have suggestions where to find?

Says it all.

So where I see this trend going is this: someone comes up with a way to wirelessly stream your iPod to a DJ who picks and chooses among the various streams available in the audience to make it happen. Then it gets built into the iPod. That would be cool, though perhaps scarily like the drum people (it was drum people, right?) in The Diamond Age by Stephenson.

Is it really true that the dot front page hasn't updated in 7 hours?

I finally get a first post, and of course I did it as an anonymous coward. Sigh.

I have a BOATLOAD of CD/DVD media with various forms of informal backups etc. etc. Probably a hundred disks or so. Much of the information between the disks is clearly redundant, different snapshots of my photos directory for one example. But not entirely, because I have on occasion deleted swaths of things I knew I had backed up (usually right after doing the backup).

This is out of control. I have NO idea what is where. I don't know how much overlap I have. I keep kicking around the idea that I should write some perl (yah, this is windows, but I have perl for that too) to go out and checksum and catalog all the files and just run the media through the mill. But that's a fair amount of work. And it seems like such an obvious thing that someone must have solved this problem before.

Problem is, every time you try to search "catalog cd media" or similar things on google, you end up with a billion links to crap about music collections. Not what I'm looking for. Adding "data" to the search only confuses it further, dragging in other junk that's also irrelevant.

Does anyone here have any suggestions for what a good DATA CD cataloging system that is already out there might be? If it's good enough I'll even pay money, but I'd want something I could at least try out before spending anything significant.

Danke....

(there needs to be an icon for politics in general instead of insisting on republicrats of one color or the other)

The reason the right wins with nasty tactics and the left loses with nasty tactics may be pretty simple:

Nasty tactics appeal to the lizard brain. Right wing causes also frequently appeal to the lizard brain. So they're aligned. They have synergy. They reinforce each other. Left wing causes often appeal to a higher vision (though I can't say I think much of their tactics) which is dissonant with the lizard brain of nasty tactics. The two don't pull together.

If you think your agenda is a lizard brain topic, you might get some traction with lizard brain tactics of fear and anger. But if you think your agenda is higher than that, then you need to find a different approach that might actually work.