DL

November 27, 2007

Princess Cruise Lines Customer Service

Filed under: Uncategorized — Dave @ 10:53 am

I know there are worse things happening in the world (the Iraq war for one) but these kinds of stories just make me feel so sorry for people.

This 78 year old woman saved for 10 years to go on an Alaskan cruise through Princes Cruise Lines. She let Princess book the air flights and ended up with this tortuous route through three different flights.

Well, something went wrong and she ended up missing the cruise. It’s Princess Cruise Lines policy to keep all the money. Apparently that’s an industry standard. The airline refunded the money but since PCL booked the flights, they’re keeping that too.

What PCL did might be legal but I don’t know how a corporation, which after all is made up of people, can be so heartless. I can’t imagine the disappointment of saving $250 a year, over 10 years for something that gets snatched away from you, along with the money.

How do corporations become so sociopathic?

Story vie the Consumerist

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November 18, 2007

Posted from Windows Live Writer

Filed under: blogging,Technology — Dave @ 3:55 pm

I heard some tech podcast and they seemed very impressed with this tool. It allows you to write your post offline and post later when you are online. I’m curious about what’s so cool about it. One clear advantage I can see is that you can write posts in a situation where you can’t be online, but that’s not the advantage they were talking about and it’s not such an advantage to me since I’m very rarely at a computer that’s not online.

Another advantage I can imagine is, if you have several blogs and they are all on different platforms, you can have one interface that works for all your blogs. I do have a couple of blogs but they’re both WordPress and I’m not considering any other platforms, so that’s not much of an advantage for me either.

Yet another advantage is, if your blog’s editor is poor, this does seem to have a nice, responsive and full featured WYSIWIG interface. Again, that doesn’t do much for me, the WordPress editor is pretty nice as well.

If you write your posts over a period of time and your blog platform doesn’t provide the ability to save drafts, Live Writer lets you save a local copy. WordPress does allow drafts.

This is what the interface looks like. I just inserted this picture of the interface. I’ll admit, if this works, it was much easier than putting a picture into a post with wordpress.

The text is wrapping and I just had to select a wrap option rather than going into the HTML code and adding a class to the img tag.

Another pretty sweet touch is, when you set it up, it attaches to your blog and pulls down information about your blog configuration. For example, it pulled down my blog’s categories and the list is available in Live Writer. Pretty sweet.

There are shortcut links on the right for inserting common items, such as pictures. Also hyperlinks, tables, maps (microsoft maps, not google maps), tags (but I can’t tell quite what they mean by tags) and video.

It’s free, but it’s windows only. So far I like it well enough that I’ll use it at least for my next post.

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November 8, 2007

Timed Art

Filed under: Music — Dave @ 12:56 pm

I saw a lifehacker post about NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month, which is this month (November). Then my girlfriend told me about NaSoAlMo, which is National Solo Album Month. Write and record an original solo album (of about 30 minutes) in the month of November. So I started looking around for other timed art events and found that this seems to be a “thing” people do.

Most of these have a specific start and end time while a few can occur on your own schedule as long as you adhere to the time limit. Also most of them have no judging – it’s just a matter of finishing.

Here’s a few that I found:

Song Fight
New week a new fight. They post a title, you email them a 128kbs MP3 song and the internet votes.

Album a Day
Write and Record 20 minutes, or 30 songs in a 24 hour period. This one does not have a common time period.

the 3-Day Novel Contest
A more ambitious challenge. Write a novel in 3 days over labor day weekend. It’s actually a Canadian based contest but the world is invited. The winner gets published.

Script Frenzy
Write a 20,000 word script running about 120 minutes over the month of June.

24 hour comics
If you like pictures with your stories, here you can attempt a 24 page comic book in 24 hours. Any 24 hours will do.

48 Hour Film Project
This is a bigger deal. Sponsored by Visa and it tours from town to town. You have 48 to produce a short film of 4-7 minutes. You’re given a genre, a character, a line of dialog and a prop to help ensure the creation occurs in the alloted time. The 48 hours must encompass screen writing, rehearsal, all filming and editing and delivery to the judges.

The National Film Challenge
Is basically the same thing but, doesn’t travel from city to city. It happens worldwide in October. Also it doesn’t seem to have a big sponsor.

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October 10, 2007

Another iPod annoyance explained and a minor mea culpa

Filed under: personal,Technology — Dave @ 9:02 am

When I got my new 160gig iPod classic I was very excited. I had recently outgrown my 60gig 5th gen iPod and now I was going to have so much elbow room that I’m trying to grow more elbows.

Although it was now going to be able hold all my music, podcasts AND all the video bits that I’ve been accumulating, I didn’t want to wait for it all to sync so I only synced a few of my most listened to lists. Almost right away I discovered a problem. My smart play lists are not working. Specifically, they have stopped live updating.

Trolling around the apple support boards I find that many people profess never to use the smart play lists (SPLs). Maybe it’s because I’m a geek but I can’t imagine using my iPod without SPLs. When I listen to a list of podcasts I don’t want to hear podcasts I’ve already heard. So my podcast list requires podcasts to have a playcount==0.

I’ll listen to songs more than once, but I don’t want to hear the same list that I heard yesterday, so my music lists usually pull the songs from a least-recently-played list.

SPLs are the number one reason I stay in the iPod camp. I would gladly experiment with other MP3 players (they’re cheaper) if they would implement live updating SPLs.

So I’ve been frustrated and blaming apple, but it seems like it was my fault.

Many of my SPLs contain other SPLs. Apple has had problems in the past with nested SPLs and I thought “Now it’s back” but I found that the iPod will not update SPLs when the SPLs it contains are not also on the iPod.

Ok, I can understand that to a point. If my list A has a rule saying that, among other criteria, a song must also be in list B, and list B is not available, I can’t really figure out what list A should be. So Apple’s approach on the iPod is that list A is calculated in iTunes, where list B is available and then written to the iPod as a static list. The list will not update until the next time you connect to iTunes.

The fix to getting SPLs to update on the iPod as songs are played is to make sure that any and all included SPLs are also on the iPod. Or, in my case, my lists are nested multiple levels deep, I just sync everything again.

Problem solved.

I still blame Apple to some extent though. They could have handled this differently. They could have silently included dependent lists and hid them. Or they could have put up an error informing me that I’ve marked a list as “Live Updating” but that I’ve neglected to included dependent lists during the sync.

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October 8, 2007

The best pizza downtown is gone

Filed under: Uncategorized — Dave @ 11:46 am

…. at least temporarily.

Brenda and I went to Tremont to get pizza from Edison’s only to find out the at the deli is closed for renovation. The bar is still open but…. no food.

I don’t know that I got the complete story but there’s been some upset in ownership at the deli. Someone involved in the deli is opening a new place nearby, but I don’t remember where and someone else will be re-opening the deli.

The unanswered question is…. which location will be making that pizza?

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September 28, 2007

Workaround for iTunes podcast annoyance

Filed under: Music,personal,Technology — Dave @ 12:46 pm

When apple finally started supporting podcasting the implementation was so shoddy it felt like they were forced to support it but that they really really hated the format. Well, it’s taken apple, what, two years? and finally they’ve left it … still poorly implemented.

Of all the problems though, to me the biggest was, somehow they made podcasts downloaded from iTunes behave differently from podcasts downloaded through other mechanisms.

They created a special section in the menus for podcasts. But it didn’t trigger off any particular metadata (that was editable through iTunes) so I couldn’t take podcasts that didn’t come through iTunes and fix them up to appear there.

Ok, so podcasts downloaded from iTunes get to go into the new section and podcasts downloaded any other way just goes into the music pile. I guess that’s OK. Through smart play lists I can create my own list to hold my podcasts. They have their list and I have mine.

But wait, iTunes podcasts were showing up in my lists. As far as the smart play lists were concerned, iTunes podcasts were just like regular podcasts. Cool, I can just use one list, my smart play list to get at both iTunes and non-iTunes podcasts.

Denied! Although iTunes podcasts show up in the smart play lists, they can’t be played from there. (!?)

So if you had a smart play list that was limited to the 20 most recent podcasts and let’s say 3 of them were downloaded through iTunes, you’d see 20 tracks in iTunes and on the iPod, but when you started playing the list you’d see the counter said it was playing 1 of 17. Why? To serve us better I guess.

Ok, I guess I just have to subscribe to all my podcasts using the same mechanism. But wait! Not so easy because iTunes does not support opml files for either import or export. So I have to move them all by hand, one by one.

I moved all my subscriptions into Juice, which has it’s own issues but at least mp3 files which happen to be podcasts will behave like mp3 files with respect to play lists.

But how to I get all the old podcasts that I still have to listen to out of their special, iTunes only, resort menu?

I tried pulling the MP3s out of iTunes entirely and re-importing them but NO, iTunes still knew they were special and treated them that way. So clearly there was something about the files themselves.

I finally found out what that was.

When iTunes downloads a podcasts it adds a special extended tag ITUNESPODCAST=1, to the MP3. It doesn’t expose that tag through the iTunes interface, so you can’t change it easily. But using a tag editor such as MP3Tag you can find this tag and delete it, turning this “special” MP3 into a normal MP3 that obeys all of your finely crafted smart play lists

Oh, except smart play lists are now broken on my new iPod classic.

Damn!

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September 20, 2007

The spammer community LOVES my music!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Dave @ 12:09 pm

I mentioned sometime ago that I was working on a music podcast/blog. It’s almost ready to go. I’ve shown a few people for feedback but I’ve not widely announced it yet.

However, about a week ago, I started to receive comment spam, about one a day, all drug related. I have it set up so that comments are moderated unless it’s a commenter who’s been previously approved so no comment spam has actually appeared but they still come.

Spam is so cheap to send that I don’t suppose their lack of success in getting their ad on my site will ever deter them. Once they find a blog to spam it’s far cheaper to just keep spamming than it would be to check to see which sites are accepting the spam. So I imagine I’m stuck with it forever.

Still I feel a little freaked to have been “discovered”. The spammer community LOVES my music!

I wonder if there’s a way to change the comment link so that it’s easy for a person to see and access but spam bots would be confused?

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September 8, 2007

While I’m going through flickr

Filed under: personal — Dave @ 12:28 pm

I’ve always been amazed at the speed with which viewers would appear on pictures I uploaded to flickr. Sometimes, even late at night (I know it’s always noon somewhere) I’ll upload some photos and, as soon as the uploading is done, I’ll go look at the pictures to add them to a set or something and some pictures will already have viewers.

I don’t know how these viewers appear so quickly. Perhaps it’s just a sign of how huge flickr actually is.

I once posted some pictures of a couple friends of mine from the hessler street fair. Monday, I got back to work and I emailed her that the pictures were up there. She already knew. She said another friend of her’s had seen the picture and emailed her.

I typically put some kind of tags on my photos and I suppose many people have RSS feeds for certain tags. I wouldn’t be surprised that, after an event like hessler street fair, many people start looking for such pictures. I assume that’s how this happened.

I did solve a previous mystery related to viewers. Flickr allows you to see your photos ordered by number of views. I went to a party with a camera where most of the guests were very internet involved. I posted pictures of the party and sent the link to the invite list. Those pictures quickly became my most viewed by far.

Then, out of nowhere, a picture shot up way above the other pictures. It was a different picture from that same hessler street fair series. The weird thing is that there seemed to be absolutely nothing of interest in the picture. It was a random crowd shot. No one seemed particularly notable.

I’d link the picture here but, why give it more help?

Not only did it become my most viewed photo, but it continued to grow in views. Each week it lengthened it’s lead over the next most viewed. It’s now about triple the views of it’s next most viewed picture.

Eventually, I started googling for the name of the photo and I found that my picture was linked to from a fairly popular local blog. Mystery solved.

I assume most people come to pictures due to searches, especially tag searches. I don’t take a lot of overtly sexual pictures but I recently posted this picture of a poster that I saw on someone’s porch in Toronto.

Along with all the tags that went with the series of Toronto pictures I thought I would, partly as a joke, partly as an experiment, add the tag “Breasts”. Let’s see if that eventually moves up to my most viewed picture.

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