After searching for an MP3 player on the car i bought a cheap player and a harness. After finding a howto video onYoutube i went ahead and installed the radio.

I lost two screws during the installation. The previous radio had a piece of metal that attached to the radio and to the car, each side with two screws. I lost one of each. How? I'm glad you asked. The attach-to-the-car screws were too hard to unscrew with the Phillips screwdriver, so i used another screwdriver that i got at Dollar Tree to go around the sides of the screw. That worked. The first came out nicely. The second did too, except (for some unknown reason) i stopped in the middle and continued by hand, which ended in a lost screw.

The attach-to-the-radio screws were simple. I had this great idea to attach the piece to the new radio. There was only space for one screw, but who cares, one is better than none. So, i tried installing the radio with dangling metal piece in the car. Wondering why i could not find the piece from under the dash, it hit me that the radio, being half the length, would not reach the bar. Duh! Seriously. I knew it was half the size, i even took pictures of it being half the size. But it still didn't dawn on me that half as long meant it would not reach to the same distance. Anyway, upon removal of the radio the screw fell. I now have two screws loose in the car. During the installation, when taking one of the panels off, a Canadian nickel fell out of a drawer which i dutifully put back. Too bad it wasn't a dollar. Had it been a dollar you could say there's a loony in my car with a couple of screws loose. Come to think of it, you can say that now anyway. Hmm... if i listen to music, we could work tune-ey into that pun. And yes, the former was probably the main impetus of writing this JE. I admit it.

The USB worked. Well, i thought it worked until it started playing the same mp3 over and over again. So, i re-downloaded LoTR, this time including The Silmarillion by another reader. Once at it, i downloaded The Hobbit by the same reader, in preparation for an upcoming trip. On a side note, i realized these are actually for sale at audible:

• The Hobbit
• The Fellowship of the Ring
• The Two Towers
• The Return of the King

Unfortunately, those are expensive. LoTR itself would be over $100. Being i liked the recording so much, and now i now it is still for sale, i would think of paying for it. But not at that price! I would rather not have listened to it at all for that, or just use some cheaper. So, what will i do for The Hobbit? But, i digress.

I tried listening to the mp3s. Previously, i deleted all mp3s except the appendix, which is what i am up to. The player played the first one over and over again never advancing to the next file. So, last night, not finding LoTR on my computer, i downloaded LoTR (including the Silmarillion) and The Hobbit, and put them on the USB (i deleted the earlier files forgetting they now existed in .Trashes) as there is no reason to split the mp3s anymore. On the way to office it played the introduction to the appendix over and over. Using next or the +/-10 didn't help. Random did, but only while random was selected. Deselecting it made it repeat what file it was on (unless it was the appendix that it played). Perhaps this is due to having more than one level of sub-folders.

I really need to leave hidden files showing on my mac. Now to delete .fseventsd, .Spotlight-V100, .Trashes, ._.Trashes, ._.DS_Store and .DS_Store from the usb key. Done. The next test will be on the ride home.

Interesting article: http://evolver.fm/2012/10/04/guest-opinion-why-24192-music-downloads-make-no-sense/

President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama forces striking Philadelphia Transit Workers Back to Work. While he didn't go so far as to fire them, he did break up the strike for at least the next 1-4 months.

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I forgot it was silly season. Mind you, it is the off-year one, the Winter Olympics to Superbowl Tuesday's buffet of awesomeness, so one really cares, including me.

Still, though, props to Brat for achieving trivia question notoriety. It's almost a shame his votes (should he actually make it to Congress) will be in line with his party waaaaaaaaaaay more often than not.

And congrats to the Democrats as well. Always nice when the other team commits an unforced error.

As the two people exited the elevator, they started to talk about kids and graduation, who was in college and who in high school, one mentioned that she still had a son in high school (iirc): "Why did i space out the kids like that? If i only knew then what i know now."

I was listening to LoTR in the car while going around town, and made some progress during a Sunday drive to Cleveland. Moving along, i finally finished, with just the Appendix left.

With the ring destroyed, the cheap mp3 player died, having served its purpose for less than five bucks, who can complain? But now i want more. I want to listen to more books in the car.

MP3 players abound and so do FM transmitters of varying quality. Some MP3 players are also FM transmitters (or is that the other way around?), but none seem to include the simple feature of remembering playback position automatically. Finding that in MP3 players alone seems to be hard enough.

So, it seemed to me i should purchase the mp3 player and transmitter separately. After some searching, i found the Sandisk Sansa Clip+ amongst their other players which has this sought after feature, and includes a nifty speed option. That can be gotten for $30 or so, especially if going refurbished (and not for the plus?), but then there's the transmitter cost and quality.

Some more searching found someone recommending to simply install a receiver to play MP3s, if the need is just for the car. Good idea. Amazon has a cheap player (or another) in which the comments express its cheapness but usefulness as an mp3 player. Some questions and comments mentioned the need of a harness. Another pointed to a cheap one on ebay.

And that is where i am right now. I wonder how hard is it to install a receiver and if this is a good idea.

Slashdot has become almost a go-to for finding new anti-government conspiracy theories. Yet only yesterday I heard for the first time that there are Sandy Hook Truthers who believe that the 2012 massacre never actually happened. Really, this conspiracy theory isn't any more crazy than some of the ones that are popular here, and it connects just as well to the POTUS.

Thinking about jumping ship from my cheap but reliable 3GS into the android pool. I'm assuming it's all about the hardware, right? Apart from the Samsung offerings, which everybody raves about (yet I'm not a huge fan of the form factor), has anyone got any recommendations?

A single DNA tweak leads to blond hair. Talk about dumb ideas. Maybe i can forget that, sort of.

I see someone just found my comments which were foolishly mod-bombed. They then moderated them "funny". I suspect whoever did that knew that a "funny" mod does not move karma.

What they might have not realized, though, was that the mod bomber didn't move my karma either.

If people want to waste their mod points on my comments, they can certainly do so. If they think that it will change my karma here, they are sadly mistaken.

At least people are paying a little bit of attention to this case of an 18 month old boy killed by an unsecured gun. Unfortunately there is no indication that the irresponsible idiot who owned the gun will face any consequences for his stupidity.

Apparently, in Arizona, the right to carry weapons wherever one pleases is more important than the right to not be senselessly killed at a young age as a result of some shithead's inability to keep their weapon secured.

... some mod bombers never learn. To my mod bomber, just consider this. If I cared enough to report your mod-bombing, you wouldn't have mod points anymore. You might get your jollies off of seeing me mock you publicly, but you aren't accomplishing anything more than that.

Courtesy of just one slashdot conservative:

Liberals need to prove innocence when accused of wrongdoing

Senate Democrats voted on a letter asking for the Washington Redskins to change their name. This is, of course, a total waste of time as the team can do whatever they want and the Senate doesn't have any way to change that.

Is this a total waste of time? Of course. Is it a bigger waste of time than launching yet another investigation into Benghazi? Not even remotely. It also costs nowhere near as much money as what republicans have already spent drumming up support for their silly witch hunt.

Hence, if the Senate Democrats want to learn how to waste American time and money on the pursuit of meaningless political points, they need to look across the hall.

Any reasonable person knows that there is no good reason from this point for the GOP to push the Benghazi conspiracy any further. They have assembled another committee in the house to investigate the attack. However, if impeachment is their goal - and it certainly appears to be - then they have basically zero chance to achieve that. The reason I say that is because the time has already run out for that to lead to a successful impeachment of President Obama before his presidency ends in 2017. There is no chance that the committee could come up with sufficient charges in time for the pre-trial and trial to happen before then.

This means that in the most favorable - by which I mean most damning possible conclusions from the house committee - situation, the GOP will still be wasting taxpayer time and money when the 2016 election happens. In the - more likely based on what previous investigations have shown - scenario where the committee does not produce something worthy of an impeachment hearing, the GOP will have to face the fact that they wasted millions (if not billions) of taxpayer dollars and a great amount of time on what is clearly a political witch hunt.

Similarly, while conservatives are almost uniformly (and mostly alone) convinced that Obama himself somehow caused the Benghazi attack (presumably as part of his NWO aspirations, by use of his time machine and weather control technology), they also seem convinced of one other thing - that Hillary Clinton will be the democratic nominee for POTUS in 2016. Frankly I am not convinced that she will win the nomination, but that is a different matter. More so I am left to wonder if the GOP fears Clinton so much that they have actually decided to throw the 2016 election in the interest of trying to start framing a better 2020 campaign now.