I was told that moving between PC & Mac was no trouble. So that I could set up my wife's playlists as part of the surprise, I hooked it up to my (windows) laptop first.

As it turns out, it appears that this made it "optimized for windows", and while she can see it on her mac, it doesn't want to update (firmware update, songs haven't been a trouble) from the mac. My laptop is not convenient, because I almost never boot the windows partition on it.

Only solution we've found is "reformat". Which loses my lovingly crafted playlists, because I haven't yet found a utility to import the playlist from the iPod to the Mac.

Now, I can export my playlists on my laptop, to a text file, but it has hard paths in it. This leaves me pretty skeptical that I will be able to use these playlists on the mac without lots of dinking with them. Yes, I know, I have perl on the mac, and it's not a terribly difficult thing, unless of course there's some stupid hitch like a checksum or something else.

So the question for the assembled geniuses (hi Sam! :-)) is whether I need to do anything special to import the playlists on her mac. I already have imported the music with yamipod or whatever that is. A lot of it started on hers anyway. But the playlists were kind of the point of doing anything with it beforehand, and yamipod did not deal with that. Thanks for any help or suggestions :-)

I think Alito should be confirmed. While I have some misgivings, as I did with Roberts, about the tilt of the court from conservative appointees, I think that Alito, like Roberts, is respectful, well considered, and is as impartial as one can expect any human to be.

And on the other side, I'm really really sick of the Democratic Senators harping on such minor and easily explained "problems" with Alito's record. If I hear one more Senator say "Vanguard" or "CAP" or "percentage of results" I'm going to smack 'em.

So there you go. Confirm him, get it over with, and move on to the next battle. If that's all the ammunition you can dig up, you haven't got a case against him other than "we don't like him because he's >gasp< a conservative!" Which is horsehockey.

Check out HTML X-Ray. Then to truly horrify yourself, X-Ray http://csszengarden.com/ first and then http://slashdot.org/ second. The dot may be CSS now people, but it's still an ugly ugly hack.

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?