I just got my first MP3 player. The original promise was a free iPod mini from my sister as a birthday gift, but the package that was supposed to contain said iPod turned out to contain a note about why there was no iPod and a guilt cheque to make up for it.

This turned out to be fine because with that cheque I was able to go buy my own MP3 player which was decidedly not an iPod, although it might be described as iPod nano-ish—a sexy little Samsung K3, in red of course. Almost by virtue of being not an iPod it is better than an iPod—its cheaper, has an FM radio, and is not a symbol of conformity.

I’m disappointed, however, in its navigation. In the same manner as the iPod, you can browse through songs based on their ID3 tag, selecting artists, albums, or genres. What I don’t like is that this browsing to find a single song is the same as setting the playlist, whereas I think the two things should be separate.

If I want to listen to Jay Brannan’s Soda Shop, as I sometimes do, I can do it by finding Jay’s name in the artists list. However, Soda Shop is the only song by him that I have, so my playlist is that one song over and over. If I want to listen to the whole album (being the soundtrack from Shortbus) I have to have to foresight to navigate to it from Albums > Shortbus > Soda Shop instead of Artists > Jay Brannan > Soda Shop.

Similarly, if I’m playing all tracks on shuffle, hit upon Soda Shop, and decide I’d like to listen to the rest of the soundtrack, I have to backtrack to the main list, choose Albums, find Shortbus, and start the song again. There should be an option, while listening to a song, to change the playlist to other songs only by the same artist or from the same album, or even just to other playlists with that song on it, without having to stop the song.

The difficult part is putting in all the navigational tools you have at hand with a desktop music player like iTunes or Amarok while only using six or seven buttons. Amarok has a very nice way of queueing tracks (better than iTunes’s method) that I would love to see in a portable player. It would be nice as well to be able to add songs to playlists on the fly without necessarily playing them.

Most of these, if not all, are things that could be implemented on MP3 players today (and for all I know they might already be) rather simply. Just put an option to apply filters to the playlist according to album, artist, etc, another to queue the track, and another to add the track to some existing playlist. None of this qualifies as “future” features for navigation because there’s nothing that new and innovative about them.

The feature I would really like to see is one that requires a little more innovation and will be nice to see sometime down the road.

Have you ever been listening to a song and have it remind you of another one? That Jay Brannan song often brings to mind other songs from Shortbus just because they’re all from that same soundtrack. Sometimes, though, there’s a specific song that I want to listen to next, and it might not have anything to do with what I’m listening to. James Blunt’s Goodbye My Lover might conclude only to have me wanting to hear Boston and St. John’s by Great Big Sea, or Rip Slyme’s Joint might bring to mind something by HY. In these cases—even if my feature wishlist above is implemented—it’s a pain to go navigate through various menus or walk through the tracks to find it. What’s the solution?

The MP3 player should just know what I want to listen to.

Oh baby yeah.

If I start mentally humming the intro to A Moth is not a Butterfly after that Julie Delpy waltz from Before Sunset, the player should pick up on that and queue it up for me. Or maybe I’ll just keeping singing Butterfly to myself, in which case the player should realise I’d probably like to listen to it again. And, of course, if there wasn’t anything specific I wanted it would just default back to the standard playlist.

It wouldn’t even have to be that specific at first. There might be some way of just picking up on my mood, and the player could gauge what sorts of songs I might enjoy based on that. The software that came with my K3 already makes an attempt at classifying my music based on its style. Maybe if I’m feeling upbeat it would play an upbeat song for me, or if it saw I was drifting to sleep something more mellow. Hell, that’s 90% of the point right there anyway.

Does anybody have an old EEG machine we could modify and jury-rig onto some headphones? (For maximum brain proximity, of course.) If only I were an engineer/neuropsychologist I could whip something together, apply for a patent, and be making millions in no time.

The Clocky is a newly evolved and poorly understood creature. It is well known that they like to play with their owners in the mornings, and mine in particular likes to hide under the bed. However, it is exceedingly rare for them to reproduce in captivity. It seems, though, that given the right circumstances they can reach maturity just after a few months, and when left alone for a few weeks in a dark place (especially nestled between some towels inside a suitcase) will produce asexually. Sadly, the mother Clocky dies in childbirth.

I had a fantastic idea for a post that was clever and humorous and would get all sorts of comments, but my digital camera is broken in at least three ways and the whole thing really depended on this particular photo, so that idea’s dead.

And then I was going to write about chocolate bars, but I’ve been meaning to do that for at least a year so I might as well put it off a few more days.

I’ve noticed lately something interesting on facebook, and I’m going to try to turn it into an insightful blog entry. No promises, though.

Some time ago there was a little controversy about facebook privacy, in that there was an often overlooked thing that said all your information could be made available to third part applications. What exactly these were nobody knew. For a while this was enabled by default, though that changed after a fashion, likely due to complaints.

Now, these “applications” have been enabled on facebook, and people have been jumping all over them. Third parties can put together these programs that add extra functionality to facebook, often in a form analogous to widgets on your profile, but also in interactions with other users.

In a way this is great—just about any feature you could want can be programmed and implemented outside of facebook. Luckily not all bets are off, so as far as I’ve seen facebook profiles haven’t gone the way of myspace, where every website design faux-paux is committed a dozen times over on every other page. I’m also glad that though there exists an application to play music on your profile, few of my friends have adopted it.

It seems that people’s privacy concerns have gone out the window. Who cares who’s getting your information when you’re getting a little graphic to display your political leanings on your profile? Who cares whose servers it is that you’re storing this information about every vacation and business trip you’re taking in the next few years?

Actually, if you are concerned about that sort of thing, you probably shouldn’t be on facebook in the first place. People tend to forget, because its a social networking site and your profile is there for your friends, that the internet is still a public place. When you post on someone’s wall that you’re going to meet them tomorrow night at 11:00 at that bar downtown, that’s now public knowledge. With few restrictions on joining networks and so many people adding friends without ever meeting them, even if you have your privacy settings on the most stringent level information you put out there is still accessible.

Am I one to advocate privacy? Not at all—in fact I’m usually against it. But if I were, I would not have this website, but I still keep in mind that this is completely public. I don’t put anything on here that I don’t want someone to see. If you don’t want your mom or your boss seeing those pictures of you drunk off your ass, or smoking weed with your buds, don’t post them on facebook.

But I digress. The thing I’ve been noticing that I alluded too originally was that people seem to be dropping these applications just as soon as they’re picking them up. I’ve resisted adding any applications myself though just because they seem redundant (the “Top Friends” and “X Me” apps, for example), pointless (”Political Compass” comes to mind again), or like the very first fax machine.

A few that I find interesting or cute fall into the last category. I suspect in time things will begin to settle down as the truly useful and innovative applications come to the foreground like the few good television shows that everybody is watching despite the multitude of other options around. Half of what makes shows like that interesting is talking about them with other people the next day, in the same way that what makes the features of facebook fun to use is interactions with others.

So some time down the line I might find an application I want to try. Signing my profile away to those who run it probably isn’t much different from signing it away to facebook anyway. For now, though, I’m keeping it simple until all this superfluous stuff dies down.

I have a problem.

I know that’s the first step to fixing it. In fact I was going to write this post paralelling AA’s Twelve Steps, but then I went and read what the twelve steps actually said and decided against it. I definitely have to agree with James Frey on that one. But I digress.

My problem is much less serious, anyway. It’s a two parter.

I am a Linux snob. It’s hard to really articulate why but there are plenty of websites out there to tell you why it’s better than Windows. It might have a comparatively steep learning curve, but there are fancy graphical versions that look like Windows (KDE) or Mac OS (Gnome). One thing I have noticed is that everything is free. If you want to do some arbitrary thing on Windows, from word processing to manipulating audio files, you almost always have to pay for a program to do it. On Linux, if you have a job to do, chances are somebody has written a program to do it for free. (Example: OpenOffice.org can do everything Microsoft Office can do, and some things it can’t, like making PDF files.)

But compounding my general linux snobbery (and this is the second part of my problem) is the face that I don’t use those fancy versions that look like Windows or a Mac. I use a little windows manager called dwm, from the aptly named suckless.org project. I suspect anybody who hasn’t used it, or at least seen it, understands it.

Oh crap, I’m being ellitist again. This is the problem! They even warned me on the dwm website that this would happen.

I think I’m just in a bragging kind of mood since I lately discovered how to display my computer’s battery life in the status bar (it turns out everything you need to know is in /proc/acpi/battery/). Yes, Windows will automatically put a little battery thing in the taskbar. The point is that I programmed it myself, and I can tweak it to display however I want. (As a sidenote, I discovered that when not doing anything, my computer uses about 800 mA. If I put my monitor brightness up all the way, it consumes an additional 300mA, dropping my battery life by about an hour.)

I guess this is a major part of the appeal of dwm—you can tweak it in lots of ways, so everytime you compile it it or even just pipe something new into the status bar, it feels like a program you’ve written yourself. Anybody who’s ever written a computer program or script to do something knows what I’m talking about. You get a much greater sense of accomplishment from spending three hours debugging a shell script that does a job in three seconds than if you just took five minutes to do the same job by hand. It’s like hunting a deer for supper with your bare hands when you could have just bought a steak at the grocery store.

Oh, and I also hate using a mouse. Mice are for suckers.

Now I’ve not only admitted my problem but gone on a nice diatribe proving it was true. Damn. Well, my battery is only at 15% (according to the little script I wrote!) so I might as well go find something else to do.

Saturday nights are for drinking and partying and all sorts of debauchery, right? Or else they’re for sitting in Tim Horton’s reading paper after paper on the cosmic microwave background. It may be kind of sad but at least I wasn’t the only one. It is exam season afterall. Although I think that one couple in the corner did more making out than reading their books. The annual challenge between mating season and exam season, I suppose.

Of course I could have been reading all these papers and making notes earlier in the afternoon, but for me exam season means procrastination season. Anybody surfing around this site earlier in the evening might have noticed things spontaneously moving around and new things temporarily popping into existence as I played around with positioning nested divs instead of studying. CSS may in principle make layouts easier but it’s awfully finicky. I spent no less than a couple hours trying to get the sidebar and footer to play well together and only ended up making the main column jealous.

And going onto yet another tanget, I lately realised a nice advantage to blogging regularly. I’ve heard it said that they should print out the entire internet so it wouldn’t be only on computers anymore. I find writting every day (which, in theory, I would do) like printing out my brain so that I don’t have to depend on the unreliable wetware of my own memory.

More often than not my blog has a better memory than I do—I only have to search for what I want. It’s like googling my own brain. Weird. I was walking home a few days ago and had a thought about something that I know I had written about before and wanted to look up on this site when I got home. I had intended to say what it was here and link to the post, but as if to drive the point home, I didn’t write this post soon enough and now I’ve forgotten what it was. Damn this non-digitized long term memory of mine.

I shall call him Clocky, and he shall be mine, and he shall be my Clocky. He may have been created as a Masters degree project at MIT, but he’s my baby now.

He certainly was an expensive little guy, and many people would equate it with a useless gadget you’d only buy if you had nothing better to spend your money on, like a device to butter your toast or turn the pages of a book, but for me—a guy who will sleep through fire alarms, who regularly sets both an alarm and a very loud radio to go off in the morning, and who will hit the snooze button for three hours straight until the alarm clock gives up and then sleeps for another four hours—an alarm clock that runs away from you and hides while going off is a gift from God. The necessity of it is especially apparent now, having arrived the day after I slept through two classes this past Friday where attendance was required.

I find it particularly entertaining that, despite there being lots of open space in my room to run around in, Clocky immediately runs under the bed almost every time. I don’t think he could possibly find a more awkward place for me to find him. He’s got a chipper personality all his own which is quite cute now but will probably be very very annoying in the early morning. Which is exactly the point! It’s fantastic!

Google can do more than you realise, as these hacks show. I particularly like the Google Talk one, which when given a few starting words will finish the sentence in an oracle-like fashion. Since Google is all about webpages, I asked it what it thought of Booberfish.com by starting it off with “Booberfish is…”

Booberfish is a piece of my Heart
Will Go On the web.
The Web
The Semantic Web
is a pesticide?
Is a decentralized organization
an international Journal.

I added the line breaks for poetic effect, but the words are just as they came out. After that it started turning into gibberish, but this much was pretty good. But alas, the fickle nature of the web means that the results aren’t reproducible.

I also wanted to try Word Color, which is a program that will search Google Images for a particular term and average together the colours in the top results. You can find out that sky is blue, money is green, blood is red, etc. I wanted to see if it agreed at all with some my own notions of colour (such as momentum being green and electricity bright blue) but it’s a Windows program, and I didn’t feel like figuring out how to compile Delphi code at the moment. Well, I know what colour words are anyway without having to google it.

Mother nature’s favourite number:

2 . 7 1 8 2 8 1 8 2 8 4 5 9 0 4 5 2 3 5 3 6 0 2 8 7 4 7 1 3 5 2 6 6 2 4 9 7 7 5 7 2 4 7 0 9 3 6 9 9 9 5 9 5 7 4 9 6 6 9 6 7 6 2 7 7 2 4 0 7 6 6 3 0 3 5 3 5 4 7 5 9 4 5 7 1 3 8 2 1 7 8 5 2 5 1 6 6 4 2 7 4 2 7 4 6 6 3 9 1 9 3 2 0 0 3 0 5 9 9 2 1 8 1 7 4 1 3 5 9 6 6 2 9 0 4 3 5 7 2 9 0 0 3 3 4 2 9 5 2 6 0 5 9 5 6 3 0 7 3 8 1 3 2 3 2 8 6 2 7 9 4 3 4 9 0 7 6 3 2 3 3 8 2 9 8 8 0 7 5 3 1 9 5 2 5 1 0 1 9 0 1 1 5 7 3 8 3 4 1 8 7 9 3 0 7 0 2 1 5 4 0 8 9 1 4 9 9 3 4 8 8 4 1 6 7 5 0 9 2 4 4 7 6 1 4 6 0 6 6 8 0 8 2 2 6 4 8 0 0 1 6 8 4 7 7 4 1 1 8 5 3 7 4 2 3 4 5 4 4 2 4 3 7 1 0 7 5 3 9 0 7 7 7 4 4 9 9 2 0 6 9 5 5 1 7 0 2 7 6 1 8 3 8 6 0 6 2 6 1 3 3 1 3 8 4 5 8 3 0 0 0 7 5 2 0 4 4 9 3 3 8 2 6 5 6 0 2 9 7 6 0 6 7 3 7 1 1 3 2 0 0 7 0 9 3 2 8 7 0 9 1 2 7 4 4 3 7 4 7 0 4 7 2 3 0 6 9 6 9 7 7 2 0 9 3 1 0 1 4 1 6 9 2 8 3 6 8 1 9 0 2 5 5 1 5 1 0 8 6 5 7 4 6 3 7 7 2 1 1 1 2 5 2 3 8 9 7 8 4 4 2 5 0 5 6 9 5 3 6 9 6 7 7 0 7 8 5 4 4 9 9 6 9 9 6 7 9 4 6 8 6 4 4 5 4 9 0 5 9 8 7 9 3 1 6 3 6 8 8 9 2 3 0 0 9 8 7 9 3 1 2 7 7 3 6 1 7 8 2 1 5 4 2 4 9 9 9 2 2 9 5 7 6 3 5 1 4 8 2 2 0 8 2 6 9 8 9 5 1 9 3 6 6 8 0 3 3 1 8 2 5 2 8 8 6 9 3 9 8 4 9 6 4 6 5 1 0 5 8 2 0 9 3 9 2 3 9 8 2 9 4 8 8 7 9 3 3 2 0 3 6 2 5 0 9 4 4 3 1 1 7 3 0 1 2 3 8 1 9 7 0 6 8 4 1 6 1 4 0 3 9 7 0 1 9 8 3 7 6 7 9 3 2 0 6 8 3 2 8 2 3 7 6 4 6 4 8 0 4 2 9 5 3 1 1 8 0 2 3 2 8 7 8 2 5 0 9 8 1 9 4 5 5 8 1 5 3 0 1 7 5 6 7 1 7 3 6 1 3 3 2 0 6 9 8 1 1 2 5 0 9 9 6 1 8 1 8 8 1 5 9 3 0 4 1 6 9 0 3 5 1 5 9 8 8 8 8 5 1 9 3 4 5 8 0 7 2 7 3 8 6 6 7 3 8 5 8 9 4 2 2 8 7 9 2 2 8 4 9 9 8 9 2 0 8 6 8 0 5 8 2 5 7 4 9 2 7 9 6 1 0 4 8 4 1 9 8 4 4 4 3 6 3 4 6 3 2 4 4 9 6 8 4 8 7 5 6 0 2 3 3 6 2 4 8 2 7 0 4 1 9 7 8 6 2 3 2 0 9 0 0 2 1 6 0 9 9 0 2 3 5 3 0 4 3 6 9 9 4 1 8 4 9 1 4 6 3 1 4 0 9 3 4 3 1 7 3 8 1 4 3 6 4 0 5 4 6 2 5 3 1 5 2 0 9 6 1 8 3 6 9 0 8 8 8 7 0 7 0 1 6 7 6 8 3 9 6 4 2 4 3 7 8 1 4 0 5 9 2 7 1 4 5 6 3 5 4 9 0 6 1 3 0 3 1 0 7 2 0 8 5 1 0 3 8 3 7 5 0 5 1 0 1 1 5 7 4 7 7 0 4 1 7 1 8 9 8 6 1 0 6 8 7 3 9 6 9 6 5 5 2 1 2 6 7 1 5 4 6 8 8 9 5 7 0 3 5 0 3 5 4 0 2 1 2 3 4 0 7 8 4 9 8 1 9 3 3 4 3 2 1 0 6 8 1 7 0 1 2 1 0 0 5 6 2 7 8 8 0 2 3 5 1 9 3 0 3 3 2 2 4 7 4 5 0 1 5 8 5 3 9 0 4 7 3 0 4 1 9 9 5 7 7 7 7 0 9 3 5 0 3 6 6 0 4 1 6 9 9 7 3 2 9 7 2 5 0 8 8 6 8 7 6 9 6 6 4 0 3 5 5 5 7 0 7 1 6 2 2 6 8 4 4 7 1 6 2 5 6 0 7 9 8 8 2 6 5 1 7 8 7 1 3 4 1 9 5 1 2 4 6 6 5 2 0 1 0 3 0 5 9 2 1 2 3 6 6 7 7 1 9 4 3 2 5 2 7 8 6 7 5 3 9 8 5 5 8 9 4 4 8 9 6 9 7 0 9 6 4 0 9 7 5 4 5 9 1 8 5 6 9 5 6 3 8 0 2 3 6 3 7 0 1 6 2 1 1 2 0 4 7 7 4 2 7 2 2 8 3 6 4 8 9 6 1 3 4 2 2 5 1 6 4 4 5 0 7 8 1 8 2 4 4 2 3 5 2 9 4 8 6 3 6 3 7 2 1 4 1 7 4 0 2 3 8 8 9 3 4 4 1 2 4 7 9 6 3 5 7 4 3 7 0 2 6 3 7 5 5 2 9 4 4 4 8 3 3 7 9 9 8 0 1 6 1 2 5 4 9 2 2 7 8 5 0 9 2 5 7 7 8 2 5 6 2 0 9 2 6 2 2 6 4 8 3 2 6 2 7 7 9 3 3 3 8 6 5 6 6 4 8 1 6 2 7 7 2 5 1 6 4 0 1 9 1 0 5 9 0 0 4 9 1 6 4 4 9 9 8 2 8 9 3 1 5 0 5 6 6 0 4 7 2 5 8 0 2 7 7 8 6 3 1 8 6 4 1 5 5 1 9 5 6 5 3 2 4 4 2 5 8 6 9 8 2 9 4 6 9 5 9 3 0 8 0 1 9 1 5 2 9 8 7 2 1 1 7 2 5 5 6 3 4 7 5 4 6 3 9 6 4 4 7 9 1 0 1 4 5 9 0 4 0 9 0 5 8 6 2 9 8 4 9 6 7 9 1 2 8 7 4 0 6 8 7 0 5 0 4 8 9 5 8 5 8 6 7 1 7 4 7 9 8 5 4 6 6 7 7 5 7 5 7 3 2 0 5 6 8 1 2 8 8 4 5 9 2 0 5 4 1 3 3 4 0 5 3 9 2 2 0 0 0 1 1 3 7 8 6 3 0 0 9 4 5 5 6 0 6 8 8 1 6 6 7 4 0 0 1 6 9 8 4 2 0 5 5 8 0 4 0 3 3 6 3 7 9 5 3 7 6 4 5 2 0 3 0 4 0 2 4 3 2 2 5 6 6 1 3 5 2 7 8 3 6 9 5 1 1 7 7 8 8 3 8 6 3 8 7 4 4 3 9 6 6 2 5 3 2 2 4 9 8 5 0 6 5 4 9 9 5 8 8 6 2 3 4 2 8 1 8 9 9 7 0 7 7 3 3 2 7 6 1 7 1 7 8 3 9 2 8 0 3 4 9 4 6 5 0 1 4 3 4 5 5 8 8 9 7 0 7 1 9 4 2 5 8 6 3 9 8 7 7 2 7 5 4 7 1 0 9 6 2 9 5 3 7 4 1 5 2 1 1 1 5 1 3 6 8 3 5 0 6 2 7 5 2 6 0 2 3 2 6 4 8 4 7 2 8 7 0 3 9 2 0 7 6 4 3 1 0 0 5 9 5 8 4 1 1 6 6 1 2 0 5 4 5 2 9 7 0 3 0 2 3 6 4 7 2 5 4 9 2 9 6 6 6 9 3 8 1 1 5 1 3 7 3 2 2 7 5 3 6 4 5 0 9 8 8 8 9 0 3 1 3 6 0 2 0 5 7 2 4 8 1 7 6 5 8 5 1 1 8 0 6 3 0 3 6 4 4 2 8 1 2 3 1 4 9 6 5 5 0 7 0 4 7 5 1 0 2 5 4 4 6 5 0 1 1 7 2 7 2 1 1 5 5 5 1 9 4 8 6 6 8 5 0 8 0 0 3 6 8 5 3 2 2 8 1 8 3 1 5 2 1 9 6 0 0 3 7 3 5 6 2 5 2 7 9 4 4 9 5 1 5 8 2 8 4 1 8 8 2 9 4 7 8 7 6 1 0 8 5 2 6 3 9 8 1 3 9 5 5 9 9 0 0 6 7 3 7 6 4 8 2 9 2 2 4 4 3 7 5 2 8 7 1 8 4 6 2 4 5 7 8 0 3 6 1 9 2 9 8 1 9 7 1 3 9 9 1 4 7 5 6 4 4 8 8 2 6 2 6 0 3 9 0 3 3 8 1 4 4 1 8 2 3 2 6 2 5 1 5 0 9 7 4 8 2 7 9 8 7 7 7 9 9 6 4 3 7 3 0 8 9 9 7 0 3 8 8 8 6 7 7 8 2 2 7 1 3 8 3 6 0 5 7 7 2 9 7 8 8 2 4 1 2 5 6 1 1 9 0 7 1 …

She does everything with exponentials.

More fun holidays:
March 14th - Pi day
October 23rd - Mole day (we even got a cake once)

I’m happy to say that this site now supports OpenID for logging in to make comments (thanks to this plugin). That means, for example, livejournal users can just type in their LJ address (http://yourname.livejournal.com) and, assuming you’re already logged into LJ on that computer, the comment will go through under your name. Technorati, Moveable Type, and soon Wikipedia, also support OpenID.

If you do log in with OpenID, I recommend you edit your profile by clicking “Admin” at the top of the page. Otherwise your nickname on this site will just be an ugly URL. Let me remind you, though, that there’s absolutely no reason in doing any of that, since you can also just type in your name and address without logging into anything at all. It’s just a geeky bit of fun.

A year and three months later I’m starting to put a little artistic effort into decorating my apartment. Ten points to anybody who can figure out what this is supposed to be! That’s right, my art means something. In fact it even looks like what it’s supposed to look like in two ways, which I think is pretty cool, but I’m a big geek like that.

Hint: You biology or biochem types are definitely familiar with it, and quite possibly even in the way it’s displayed, in an abstract kind of way of course.