K-Squared Ramblings

Starting the Week with Weird Al

My iPod ran down its charge over the weekend, and I had to plug in the car charger this morning and start over at the beginning of a playlist. I usually leave it on shuffle on a reaaaaaally long list so I get lots of different songs.

It started up with “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Bohemian Polka,” which was a fun, off-kilter start to the week. When it followed up with “Jurassic Park,” I didn’t think much of it. Twofers by artist, and even by album, aren’t that uncommon.

When “Living in the Fridge” started up, I got a little suspicious.

Sure enough, when I stopped the car and checked, shuffle was set to “off.” I figure the playlist must have been sorted by album the last time I synced, with Alapalooza the first on the list.

I’m still not sure whether it switched off shuffle when the battery ran down, or I just had it off before and didn’t notice because the last playlist I was listening to was pre-shuffled. Still, it was — appropriately — weird.

Hear me!

A few minutes ago I was trying to fix sound on my Linux box. Nothing would play, until Katie heard it beep to notify me of a new Twitter message. I closed Twhirl and suddenly my music player worked. The song lined up? Vertical Horizon’s “All is Said and Done.” The first line of the song? “I need you to hear me.” That gave us both a good laugh.

I thought a major point of PulseAudio was to let applications share the sound card cleanly. *grumble* Sound worked fine before Fedora switched. I can’t even blame it on a bleeding-edge distribution, since from what I hear, Ubuntu has similar problems.

At least now I know (sort of) why it stopped again after applying the Complete guide to fix PulseAudio and video/audio VLC Media Player issues.

Download? Don’t Download?

• How appropriate! You can download @alyankovic’s “Don’t Download This Song” for free: http://j.mp/4zf5Rd (via @amazonmp3) #
• Whoa…the spamtraps are *full* of bogus Facebook password reset notices! #

Audio, Social Worker Spam, & Prius Hatch

• Fedora 12 claims PulseAudio improvements. Here’s hoping sound will actually work after suspend+resume again. #Linux #
• Also: iPod train wreck of the morning was the Cardcaptor Sakura theme followed by Garbage’s Supervixen. #
• What’s with all the “Be a social worker!” spam lately? It’s a change from the usual porn, pills, watches & software, but out of left field. #
• Future reference: Though there’s no lever to pop the hatch on the Prius, unlocking the doors allows someone else to open it from outside #

Frustrations (And a Few Bright Spots)

• Hard disks should not sound like buzz saws. #
• Slashdot article “FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire & Denial”…gets met with ire & denial. *headdesk* #
• Listening to lightsaber sounds from across the office. I think my coworker w/ the new Android phone found an app for that. #
• Vertical Horizon’s Burning the Days is growing on me, but I think Vienna Teng’s Inland Territory is my favorite new album this year #MusicMonday #
• TNT, its nice that your video streams are Mac-compatible, but when your ads require Windows, don’t prevent me from finishing the episode! # (I’ve gone into this in more detail.)

Line Items for 2009-10-02

• Why do people get take-out fast food, then sit and eat it in their car in the parking lot, idling with the AC on? #
• Cool! Butterfly Boucher’s “For The Love Of Love” is today’s Free Song of the Day on Amazon MP3! #
• Problem: Twitter trending topics are quickly flooded with in-jokes & spam. There’s no context if you don’t already know what they’re about #

Driving up the Vertical Horizon

• Listening to new Vertical Horizon. Hope their tour makes it out to SoCal – the last concert we saw was really good. #MusicMonday #
• Got honked at because I actually stopped before turning right at a red light & paused half a second to see if the pedestrian at the corner would step in front of me. #
  

New Paper Raincoat Album (and free song!)

The Paper Raincoat opened for Vienna Teng when we saw her at the Roxy back in April. I liked them enough to not only buy their EP, Safe in the Sound, at the concert, but sign up for their mailing list. “Brooklyn Blues” kind of reminds me of Fountains of Wayne in their quieter moments, like “Valley Winter Song,” and “Sympathetic Vibrations” gets stuck in my head on a regular basis. I’m not sure how to classify the style (modern folk rock?), but Katie compares them to Guster.

Now the band has a full album coming out.

Better yet, the preorder page is offering a free song, “Right Angles,” in MP3 format. I’ve only listened to it once (I’ve been playing the new Vertical Horizon album), but I like the sound and there’s some nice wordplay in there. (There’s some nice wordplay in Burning the Days, too, actually.)

And hey, it’s free!

Fragile, Mondays, Eyes & Saturn

• Great indie rock: Butterfly Boucher’s Scary Fragile for #musicmonday #
• Speaking of Butterfly Boucher, here’s our writeup of the concert we went to back in June. #
• Via @lol_spam: “TPA Report.” It should be a TPS Report, but the keys are, like, right next to each other. I guess even spammers can get a case of the Mondays. #
• Yes! Realized eyestrain was a problem & finally got PC set up on my original monitor. Bigger is nice, but more importantly, it’s NOT BLURRY! #
• Still not sure how I went 1.5 months w/o fixing the refresh rate on the temporary monitor. Usually the flicker drives me *consciously* crazy. #
• Via @ThisIsTrue: GORGEOUS new high-rez image of Saturn released. #

A‘a or Pahoehoe?

Probably the influence of the Hawai‘i sign across the street, but I could swear the song on the radio was “My Kind of Lava” #

Phoenix Rhyme

I still think this Aimee Mann lyric should be:

Got out of Phoenix
Just in time
A box of Kleenex
For the rhyme

…instead of the real words, which finish with “for the ride.” #

Scary Fragile on CD

When Butterfly Boucher’s new album, Scary Fragile, came out in June, I didn’t really pay attention to format. I just bought it as an MP3 album for convenience. I didn’t even notice that it was digital-only at the time, but I just got an email for the “physical release” of the album on September 15 and a new concert tour.

The newsletter was a bit confusing, though, because we bought a CD at her concert in June so that we’d have something for her to sign! I guess she must have had a small run printed just for the summer concert tour.

Twidroid Update & Skipper Dan

Woo Hoo! Twidroid’s tweet button is back! #

“Weird Al” Yankovic’s song “Skipper Dan” has been stuck in my head on-and-off all weekend. Living near Disneyland makes it that much more funny. # And did I mention there’s a video?

Open Video, Watch Spam, Weird Al & Twidroid

• RT @openvideo: Help open video spread at SXSW— check out our proposals, vote for them, and tell your open video amigos #
• RT @lol_spam: Spam subject: “With our watches precious minutes will go slower.” So it’s a selling point that they don’t keep time correctly? #
• Aha! My $6 of Amazon MP3 Store credit lines up perfectly w/ Weird Al Yankovic’s $5.99 “Internet Leaks” EP! #

Twitter Apps

• Ugh. New Twidroid hides tweet button behind menu. I hated that in other Twitter apps. It’s like they took away the Easy Button. #
• What I like about Twidroid: streamlines common tasks (less so in 2.5), custom notifications per type. #
• Also: Just realized the “busy” animation in the ada titlebar is actually a miniature game of Pong. #

Hero, Twidroid, Headlines & Spam

• Just learned “Holding Out for a Hero” is cowritten by Jim Steinman. Explains why it keeps turning into “Good Girls Go to Heaven” in my head #
• Yeah, I’d be willing to spend $5 for the additional features in @Twidroid Pro. #
• Writing for Twitter via @NNgroup #
• Spam vs SPAM. I suspect it’s way too late to close the barn door on this one. Kinda like “hacker.” #