Month: August 2008

in Eugene less than 12 hours, already addicted to Yumm! sauce

We met up with Dan and Tracy last night. Dan fixed us an epic chicken salad, with the local delicacy of Yumm! sauce. Yumm! sauce is somewhere between almond butter, hummus and mayo, except not quite any of them. It’s good; we had the chipotle.

A purported recipe for Yumm! Sauce must be tried.

(Dan was disappointed that I hadn’t mentioned that dog treats were sampled after the meal: they were.)

on missing the boat

Nothing quite like missing the Tsawwassen ferry by one minute.

(And this post was photographed and sent entirely on blackberry. The geotag I cheated and used my Garmin. I had time to kill …)

hooray for heather’s

We arrived in Vancouver yesterday, and in the hotel hit a snag: the combination lock of my case wouldn’t open. I don’t remember setting one, so the prospect of going through 000 .. 999 to get at my clothes would be tiresome.

Thank goodness for Heather’s Luggage Repair. They reset the combination, and showed me the annoying little feature of combination locks that can cause this to happen.

less than 100 CDs to go …

1492 Artists / 999 Albums / 15245 Tracks / 34.9 Days / 62.12 GB
(and here’s me thinking I had about 2000 CDs, too)

CDs that wouldn’t read: 0 (so far). That’s not to say that there weren’t some difficulties (copy-controlled CDs can go die, glitching and gronking in my drives) and my oldest CD (XTC’s Skylarking, my copy of which I think has just turned 20) had a ton of retries.

Lost CDs: Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick is somewhere in the house, but nowhere I’ve looked.

Found CDs: My long-lost promo copy of the (Portland) Decemberists’ Picaresque, which I thought had vanished in a road trip to Missouri. It was lurking in a long-forgotten portable CD player in the bottom of a storage bin.

Pleasant surprises: that freedb is generally better than it used to be.

Peeves: copy-controlled CDs (see above); flappy cardboardy cases that only have the title on one spine; oversized CD cases (Japanese imports, I’m looking straight at you), dark blue text on a black background, idjit freedb submitters who insist on Band, The syntax or worse, submit whole albums called sdfsdf;aefhsdf; bonus DVD “premium” releases (who watches these?).

an appropriate use of company time

$ pbmtext Hello | pnmcrop | pnmtopnm -plain | tail +3 | tr '01' ' #'
###  ###       ## ##
 #    #         #  #
 #    #         #  #
 #    #    ##   #  #   ##
 ######   #  #  #  #  #  #
 #    #   ####  #  #  #  #
 #    #   #     #  #  #  #
 #    #   ##  # #  #  #  #
###  ###   ### ######  ##

song counts

1332 Artists / 774 Albums / 12074 Tracks / 27.1 Days / 47.34 GB
— and the sad thing is, this would barely half fill a current iPod.