MyWishlist - follow up

If any of you are going to try the MyWish list promotion that I posted about yesterday, be sure to turn off your pop-up blocker (or add the site to your allow list).

I successfully got the 25% off at Borders coupon (whoop-dee-doo) at 11AM, but the site presents the order form in a pop up window.



So instead of an order form, all I got was:



When you click on the bar and tell it to allow pop ups, it refreshes the whole page....resetting the flash animation and losing your claim to the item.

Now this isn't a big deal for a Border's coupon that I probably wouldn't have used anyway, but can you imagine if that happened on the Porsche?

Amex Promo

The American Express MyWishlist promotion begins today and runs through 12/14.

The main Wishlist items are up for sale at noon, 3pm, and 7pm ET. There are very limited quanities, so they sell out instantly (for example...on 12/4, they will be selling 1 Porsche Cayman for $5,000 at each of those times. Obviously fat chance of getting one.

There are also Wish Certificates that will be available one hour prior to the main Wishlist items. For example, today's 11am Wish Certificate is a 25% off coupon from Amazon.com. These Wish Certificates are free if you can get one, but they also "sell out" instantly.

Last year the only thing I managed to get was a Best Buy coupon that I didn't even use (I think it was 20% off of $200 or more)

( you must have an AmEx card to claim/pay for any of the prizes )

Watch out Donald Trump

Congrats to real estate moguls Jimmy and Jakki VanMetre. Jakki sent me this link to a front-page article about their latest acquisition.

(copy of article here in case the other one disappears.)

Have people gone absolutely mad?

Can we go back to being civilized again?


Please?

It's a good thing I know a programmer...

Well, after poking around, I didn't find any tools that solved my specific ID3 tag problem.

I found a very useful .NET library built by Hundred Miles Software which provides a very easy to use object library to read & write ID3 tags. Using that library, I put together a simple little program to create or update ID3 tags based on the mp3 filename.

I stuck it up online so that anyone else that is trying to deal w/ missing ID3 tags can avoid the hassle of typing the tags manually.

Here you go: Version .00001 of EM ID3 Tool

Just extract the zipped folder to your hard drive and run EMID3Tool.exe
[insert usual warning about downloading .exe files here]

VZW...they can't hear me

Has anyone tried to call a VZW store lately? It's damn near impossible to get anyone on the phone.

The new LG-VX8600 came out yesterday and so I tried to call around to find out who had them in stock. None of the area VZW stores would answer their phone if you select option #4 - Sales.

I tried calling 4 local VZW stores and got the same thing at every store...probably about 20 times total between all the stores.

"We're sorry, Verizon Wireless [Insert city name here] is unavailable. Please leave a message."...grrrr

iTunes renaming problem

I just found a decent solution to a problem that has been bugging me since I started using iTunes/iPod and figured I'd toss it up here in case any of you have a better solution for me.

When I download music, a lot of time the ID3 tags are not properly set up. This is ok if you're looking at the file list, because the files are typically named "Artist Name - Track Name.mp3". But when you copy the song into iTunes, it uses the entire filename as the Track Name and then truncates it to 31 characters.

For example, a recent download was a list of Rolling Stone's top 500 songs. After importing to iTunes, this is how these songs looked in iTunes and on the iPod:



As you can see, unless the artist and track info was extremely short, the name got truncated by iTunes. For some tracks, this completely renders the song unidentifiable (#39 - Buddy Holly And The Crickets -"...Can you guess what song that is?).

I just stumbled across Wes Barris' website where he wrote a simple renaming tool called NameToTag. You just point this tool at a folder of files named in the standard Artist - Name.mp3 convention and it will automatically populate the Artist and Track Name fields in the ID3 tags.

One major problem with his software is that it isn't configurable for other naming conventions, so my Top 500 download which uses the "Track Number - Artist - Track Name.mp3" would put the Track Number as the Artist and the rest as the Track Name.

Since this tools seems to be quite limited, please let me know if you have found a (FREE*) tool that has better support for batch ID3 tag updates based on filename.

NOTE: I did a quick virus scan of the NameToTag program above. However, as with any random .exe file that you come across, use at your own risk and with EXTREME CAUTION!

*FREE is defined as meeting any number of the following criteria:

• Shareware


• Freeware


• Cracked software


• Commercial software with registration crack or serial # provided


• Commercial software that requires purchase - but someone else purchases it for me


• Corporate editions of software that do not require registration/activation

Since When?

I just did a quick search for a serial number for a piece of computer software that I "acquired from the internet" as I have done many times in the past.

When I clicked on a link to a serial number website, I was presented with the following message compliments of Google.

This is the first I've seen of Google intercepting a click from their search results.



By the way...the software that I was installing was a certain application to extract and create disc images. I just didn't want the actual program name displayed in the URL...just in case...

Mapping battles are fun!

vs.

Remember the good old days of Mapquest and Microsft's TerraServer when you had to click a cardinal direction and load one square of a map at a time? Gee, wasn't that fun?

No...I agree. It wasn't. Which is why the current "Mapping Wars" are so great.

This whole thing seems to have started when Google created one of it's killer apps by acquiring Keyhole.

Now we are fortunate enough to have two excellent products that are constantly one-upping each other.

Between Google Earth and Microsoft's new Virtual Earth 3D we have access to a wealth of cartographic information with an interface that is light years ahead of the old school click and re-load interfaces of just 3 or 4 years ago.

Microsoft's new tool actually bests Google Earth, in my opinion, by packaging almost all of the rich user experience that Google Earth is popular for into a simple web interface.

The one downside to Google Earth was that it required a stand-alone application that must be downloaded and installed.

While Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D still requires a helper application to be downloaded and installed, the actual interface is completely inside of IE.

While it would be nice if they could completely avoid the client-side download and installation requirement, the fact that these applications are so graphics intensive means that a client-side helper app will still be required for some time.

Enjoy the new 3D views of the world.

Oh...and don't forget to go VOTE!

No more Pi/2

Looks like Amazon has stopped their A9 Pi/2 discount (3.14/2 %).

It was fun while it lasted.

I feel old

Nothing makes you feel old like having one of your favorite band start to release "Best Of" albums.

On a related note...next month (12/6) will be the 10-year anniversary of my first DMB show.

Friends and Family Discounts

Here's a couple Friends & Family discounts if you're interested:

PDF Links:

KMart 11/5/06

Sears 11/12/06

Can I get a definition of "anybody"?

On my morning commute, I regularly listen to NPR to hear all about the latest Republican scandals and/or mud-slinging. This morning, I heard the clip of evangelist Ted Haggard denying that he had sex with a male prostitute.

While this would usually just be another November news-bite, what caught my attention was the specific words that Haggard used in his denial:

"I've never said I'm perfect, but I haven't had sex with a man in Denver, and I've been faithful to my wife,"

In the audio clip (which I can't seem to find online), you can clearly hear him qualify his denial that he hasn't had sex with a man IN DENVER. However, if you look at this article at any of the mainstream media outlets, this denial has, apparently, been modified:

According to Yahoo News: "I've never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I'm steady with my wife, I'm faithful to my wife."

According to CNN: "I've never had a gay relationship with anybody. I'm steady with my wife. I'm faithful to my wife,"

Only a few media reports actually contain the quote verbatim.
The Syndey Morning Herald:
"I've never said I'm perfect, but I haven't had sex with a man in Denver, and I've been faithful to my wife,"

Media cover-up? Or simply poor choice of words on Haggard's part? hmmmm....

By popular demand...the Duck Butt

You asked for it, so here it is...


During a weekend trip to Gander Mountain with the southern portion of the Margelefsky family tree, Lauren and I found plenty of items to mock.

Most notable of these items was the "Duck Butt"

For those of you who have never experienced the "Duck Butt" in all of its half-assed glory, it is (just as the name implies) a plastic replica of a duck's posterior.




Here you can see Vanna Lauren posing with a Duck Butt.

And in case you were thinking, "You know, those duck butts sure are nice but do I have to sell my El Camino so I can afford one?" You're in luck. You can have your very own Duck Butt for only $4.99! That'll leave you plenty of money left to go get your mullet trimmed!





When we were done mocking the Duck Butt...and the just-as-amusing 4-foot hunting blind that looks like a giant duck that you can hide inside...we stumbled across this gem of a food product:




You know you're a redneck your career stinks when your product endorsements include your own brand of beef jerky.

Could be the end of the music goldmine

One of the last bastions of unlimited free music could be coming to an end. According to this article at Ars Technica, eMusic will soon be raising their prices per song.

This, in and of itself, does not threaten the free music, but it could be an indicator that eMusic will tighten down their policy of giving away free tracks.

For those of you who haven't gotten in on the free music gravy train, here is how it's done:

1) Go to this website to get 100 free downloads from eMusic

2) Sign up for the trial using a free disposable email address (I use an address @MyTrashMail.com so that I don't need to actually set up an account each time I need a new address

3) Generate a temporary credit card number using your credit card providers website. This temporary credit card number can be for as little as $1 as it will never actually be charged

4) When completing the eMusic registration process, use a fake name. The name does not need to match your credit card. The only actual information that eMusic will require is your zip code, since it is checked against the billing zip code of your credit card.

That's it. You now have 100 free downloads at eMusic. Go nuts, get a lot of DRM-free music, and then simply cancel your eMusic account. Rinse & repeat as necessary.

See? I'm not the only one

My "REBOOT" definately should have been included in this list

Blame game

What to do if a member of your political party turns out to be a homosexual child molestor?


Pretend you don't know him.

iPod (cont'd)

After my pseudo anti-Apple post the other day, I thought I'd update you on my experiences after a couple days of usage.

I finally have my music collection fully imported into iTunes and everything seems to be smooth sailing

If any of you do happen to get an iPod in the future, just remember to:

1) Convert your non-compatible music using something like EZ CD-DA Extractor instead of iTunes
2) Make sure you remove all playlist files from your library before importing
3) Import in small-ish batches to make sure that all folders get imported
4) If you have your music in folders, you can drag a folder into the iTunes playlist section and it will automatically create a playlist from that folder

and you'll have a much smoother transition than I did.

A few things that I've found really quite nice about the iPod
1) If you pull out the headphones, the iPod automatically pauses. So simple but yet a nice touch
2) The ability to rate the song on the iPod (never could do that w/ Archos)
3) You can flag a song to be excluded from Shuffling. That way all of those audio books and comedy tracks won't pop up when you decide to shuffle your music collection. That used to drive me nuts on the Archos.
4) Automatically downloading podcasts to the player. I never used podcasts before because it wasn't a big deal to have them automatically transferred to my computer. But now that they automatically get transferred to the player, I have something to listen to in the car in the morning when the current news is too depressing and makes me want to move to Canada.

This is especially nice now that I don't need to use an FM transmitter or casette tape adapter.
5) Great battery life. I used to listen to the Archos for about 5-6 hours at work and it'd be dead. Now I can listen to the iPod at work all day and the battery is still not even halfway depleted.
6) iTunes is pretty good at grabbing your music's album art from the web. I tried to use that feature in Windows Media player when it came out and it was AWFUL. I'd say iTunes can find about 75% of the album art (assuming that the ID3 tags are properly populated). I've been slowly populating the rest of the album art using Amazon.com or Google Images to find the artwork.

That's about all of the random thoughts that I have at the moment...

EvilApple

I recently upgraded my mp3 player to one of the brand new 80Gb Apple iPods. I'm still very anti-iPod, however, I'm getting mp3 integration installed in my car next week and it was designed to work with...you guessed it...the iPod.

Up until this point, I've always just hated the iPod / iTunes out of principle, without ever really using either product.

Now that I've had my iPod for a couple days now, I'm starting to find lots of reasons to despise the Apple products. Unfortunately, due to the integration with my car, I'll probably keep the iPod instead of going w/ a better player from Creative or Archos, but I thought I'd post the annyances that I've come across with my new gadget.

1) When told to synch up Outlook's contact list and calendar, iTunes completely locks up. This happened each time I tried to synch for the first day. Finally I reset all of the synch settings, instructing the iPod to only synch music & movies. Sure enough...solved the freezing problem.

2) When you have a large library of files in .wma, iTunes gladly asks if you'd like it to convert your files over to iTunes compatible (AAC) files. I had a couple thousand songs that were in .wma format, so I told iTunes to go ahead and convert them. iTunes took between 1-5 minutes for EACH song that it converted. In other words, it would have taken a week to convert all of those songs.

I cancelled that conversion, and just used EZ CD-DA Extractor to convert into AACPlus V2 files and all 2000+ files were converted in just a couple hours. (NOTE: These AACPlusV2 files are great...very small files compared to .wma and even smaller compared to .mp3)

3) If you have any .wpl or .m3u playlist files in your music library, iTunes will create duplicate copies of any songs on the playlist when importing into your library. After clearing out the iPod and starting my library import from scratch, I found that a ton of my songs had been imported twice. A quick Google search on the problem revealed this gem. Instead of importing the playlist files as a playlist, it simply imports all of the songs on the playlist...even if it already imported those files. So I again deleted everything out of my iTunes library and removed all .m3u and .wpl files from my mp3 directories.

4) Even though I have appx 10,000 songs in my "Full Albums" directory on my computer and I told iTunes to add this entire directory to my iTunes library, I only ended up with about 8,000 songs in my iTunes library. After I realized the a good chunk of these were duplicates, iTunes really only imported about half of the folder that I wanted to import.

I have now blanked out my library and the iPod again. I'm going to have to go through and import chunks of albums at a time instead of importing the entire directory. Hopefully I can figure out why it selectively imports some but not others (iTunes didn't import my VH - Live Stages cd...hmmmm)

Stay tuned for more rants as I complete my conversion over to the iPod dark side...

Been a while

It's been a while since I've been on here, but wanted to post a couple pictures from the Pi Kappa Phi 10-year reunion from a couple weeks ago. The Miami chapter was formed in 1996 so alumni from the founding through the present all converged on Oxford for a very nice banquet celebrating the occasion.

PiKapp 10-year

Sep 16, 2006 - 4 Photos

Thanks to Lugi and Bally for the pix.