BMG

Received my BMG order today: 7 CDs.

Ripped three: Coldplay, The Cure and Bob Dylan.

Current iPod track count: 1248

My Future Sonics EM3 headphones arrive tomorrow. I can’t wait!

Spending Friday night with Pop for his birthday.

Finished Red Rabbit

Finished Tom Clancy’s Red Rabbit on CD->MP3->iPod a few days ago. Nice book. I’m a big fan now of books on CD. Knocked out one (abridged) novel in just a few evenings.

One perhaps oft-overlooked benefit of books on CD: You can “read” them in the dark, so your significant other doesn’t have to stay up with you and you don’t have to read in the living room.

Saturday, Books on "Tape"

Went to the Library today. Picked up numerous books on CD:

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stphen R. Covey

Red Rabbit, Tom Clancy

How Ronald Reagan Changed my Life, Peter Robinson

The Darwin Awards 3, Wendy Northcutt

Real Estate Riches, Dolf DeRoos

Shark Trouble, Peter Benchley

Ripped two of them to MP3 and transferred to my iPod.

Also ripped some CDs including Dido’s No Angel.

Current iPod track count: 1178.

Had a lonely dinner at Pizza Hut with a $2.99 salad bar (score!), accompanied by Tim Dorsey’s Florida Roadkill with cameos by Carl Hiassen and Dave Barry.

I wish I had gone to dinner and movies with A. and her mom. =(

Gmail

A nice guy on the quattro@audifans.com mailing list (whom I have never met) sent me a Gmail invitation. Thanks, Emre!

Gone fishin’

My other Camaro is a Jesus.

Went fishing tonight. Stocked at a scary bait shop with a backed-up toilet. Staccato bites all over my legs, cried out like a little girl when the biggest mosquito I’ve ever seen landed on my hand. I could only stand the flying vermin for about an hour.

Didn’t catch anything, but watched the people around us pull in some saltwater catfish. Threw away the majority of three dozen (huge) dead medium shrimp. Fouled my line but good twice in a row.

All in all, had a great time! I definitely recommend fishing on Tuesdays. Try it sometime.

Didn’t add any songs to the iPod.

More rippins

Ripped two more albums:

- 8 Mile movie soundtrack (for Eminem’s Lose Yourself)

- Soulfound’s Tomorrow Can Wait.

Current iPod song count: 1086

List: quattro@audifans.com

Signed up for the audifans.com Quattro electronic mailing list. Busy list. Messages started coming in immediately. Ah, community.

They have lists for other Audi models as well. Check out the list of available mailing lists.

Monday, Monday

Boring Monday. I’m ready to move. Maybe Asia.

Current iPod song count: 1059

NOAA’s my home page

I made NOAA’s site the home page in my web browser yesterday. If you’r in the Southeast United States, read what they have to say.

Here is their Hurricane Ivan projection map from 11am EDT Saturday 11 September 2004 (today).

The Quick or the Dead

Bear with me here, it’s 11:07am and I haven’t had my coffee yet.

The question is do I stay or do I go now. Here’s my view:

Some important factors are:

- I’m in a second-floor apartment in a three-floor building.

- I’m in Florida.

- I’m made of meat.

- I can’t fly.

Some more subjective factors are:

- I work for a living and would like to get back to work as soon as possible after the predicted Ivan strike.

Okay, maybe just that one factor for now.

Our choices are simple:

1. Stay; or

2. Go.

Let’s explore those more deeply. I’ll talk about departure first. Possible methods are: Walk, drive, fly (via plane). We have feet, cars and an airport nearby.

If we drive out, we have to drive a long way to get out of the likely paths of this beast. North out of Florida, then either further north or far west. Going East or South is just not that appealing, though East may make more sense if the hurricane seems it will be skipping Orlando.

On the way, we’ll be fighting with the same thousands of motorists for the same gasoline and lodging for a long way. The farther away we get, the less we’ll be fighting for gas, but the first 200 miles seem risky to me. And during that time, we’re in the car. We’d damned well better not run out of gas out in the open like that–I’m not weathering a hurricane in my car by choice. Risky.

If we drive far away, we have to drive just as far to get back. And the drive back will likely be messier than the drive out. If the hurricane strikes us good, it’ll be an outright mess. And it may even be harder to get gas than on the way out if gas trucks have trouble delivering.

On this drive back, our home is exposed, abandoned. As is our garage. I don’t like this either.

And through all this time, if (big “if” here) my business has power (fat chance, but possible) I’m missing work. This is not a major factor.

If we fly, we are likely to be even farther away than if we drove. And we will have to get back. We’ll have to hope that the airport here at home will be functioning (likely). But we’ll be fighting with hundreds or thousands of other people to get back again. Similar to the car scenario. Everyone leaves at the same time; everyone comes back at the same time. I don’t mind sleeping in airports, but that’s time I could be working on the recovery of my home immediately after the storm.

Okay, walking away is not a real option.

Where to stay. I consider myself safer in my second-story apartment than at ground level or on the top (third) floor. With the people below me getting flooded and the roof coming off of the people above us, if it gets really bad, I intend to spend the storm in the bathtub.

I consider myself better off at home (with my food, water, blankets, guns, doors, etc.) than somewhere else.

Even in a hotel, I’m in less control than I would be at home. I’m not going to rely on someone else to ensure I have water to drink and food to eat on an immediate basis.

So do I stay or do I go now? I stay. Is it because A man never abandons his home? No. A man (or a woman, for that matter) does what is best for his family. My reasons are listed above.

Power!

Power came back on at the office around 3pm today.

They called everyone in from their houses for a 2pm announcement. I didn’t go. The announcement: We hired someone. I’m glad I couldn’t make it.

Started making preparations for Hurricane Ivan today. Couldn’t find a large gas can to save my life. But I did find a siphon with a bulb. So I can use one of the cars as a gas can. Not exactly the same thing, but it’ll do.

Some thoughts on two cars vs. one car with a spare can of gas:

Two identical cars with identical gas on an identical course can get the passengers of one car 1.5 times the distance one car can. Travel with both cars for half a tank. Then transfer the remaining gas from one car to the other. Then drive that car (now full of gas) for a full tank of gas, having already traveled for one-half tank.

But this solution isn’t identical to a gas can. For example, if you only have one driver (no one to drive the second car); or you have more than one destination….

School’s out for… Tuesday.

Went to the office today. It was warm and dark. But not empty. The power went out yesterday around noon. I went home to work.

Rip!

I can’t stop ripping CDs to MP3!

Current iPod song count: 1047

gtkpod update

I upgraded from gtkpod 0.72 to the latest, 0.80.2.

iPod ID3 cleanup

I also used gtkpod to clean up the ID3 tags on many of my MP3s today. It looks like it edits them on my Gentoo Linux desktop machine and on the iPod immediately and quietly. Nice! I was very happy with how this went. And it’s great to have my ID3 tags more consistent.

It makes the iPod much more pleasant to use.

I also ripped about ten more CDs and synchronized them on the iPod.

Previous iPod song count (as of yesterday): 809

Current iPod song count: 957

Today, Email Monday

No work today. Too windy. The Labor Day holiday didn’t factor into it.

Today I tackled the email portion of my Win2000->Gentoo Linux data transition.

I’ve been working happily with Gentoo on this computer since November 2003. But I had yet to move all my data (including old email) from my old machine.

I moved the raw data over yesterday (Sunday). Today I imported one mbox file at a time into Ximian Evolution while I watched Sean Connery battle an asteroid aimed at Earth in Meteor.

To get the data into mbox format for import into Evolution, I first installed Thunderbird on the laptop and used it to convert the email from Outlook Express’ proprietary format into a useful, standard format: mbox.

It’s all in Evolution now (probably 20K+ new but old messages).

Yesterday (Sunday)

Sitting inside all day avoid deadly wind, rain and flying car parts, I set about moving all my user data (including a voluminous email message store) from my old primary computer (a Win2000 Sony laptop) to my main computer, a four-year-old desktop from Polywell Computers running Gentoo Linux and FVWM.

It went very well. I found that I had better luckunzipping my zip files with the opener supplied by Nautilus than with Konqueror’s Zip file abstraction. Konqueror complained that many files were expected to be folders (they were folders!) and the result was that it made (worthless!) empty files out of them, their contents lost. =( So I redid my unzipping work with Nautilus. Worked like a champ.

My user data included tons of digital photos taken with my old digitcal cameras. It had been a while since I’d seen those pictures. It was nice to move them over.

It was a productive day.

Frances

Tropical Storm a.k.a. Hurricane Frances has nearly left the building. Like Charley before her(?), she just gave us some wind and rain here. Not even great kite-flying weather.

I’m glad we were spared the brunt of her fury.

Wal-Mart

Last night at 10:30 I went to my local (Oldsmar) Wal-Mart Supercenter. I was bored and wanted get my first commercially-produced prints of digital pictures I’ve taken over the years.

I was disappointed to find the photo processing area unattended and mostly dark. One machine was left on: the Kodak digital photo processing machine.

There was an employee in the area, a nice black gentleman who let me know that the photo processing center was closed for the night.

Too bad. However, since the Kodak machine was on I decided to give it a try. I was excited.

Well, the machine was $0.36/4×6″ print. Compare with the advertised price of $0.24 for a 3×5″ prints, but that machine was turned off.

So I made one print apiece of the eight JPG images on my 64MB CompactFlash card. In less than a minute, all eight prints popped out the front. I waited for a receipt or a prompt to slide a credit card somewhere in the machine.

No luck, aparently these pictures were free.

I sought out the gentleman who had helped me before. He was not an isle over sorting through some inventory. I told him the situation and asked him how to pay for my pictures.

to be continued…

East Coast Represent