Dan Conley

Tiny, you gave me one hell of a run for my money. I was scared that you were actually going to be able to pull off seven posts yesterday, leaving me to find eight today. The sad part is, I probably could have.

This has been a ton of fun, and has forced me to think and write like I haven’t since, most likely, I was majoring in Journalism. The problem is that now I have two to three things I want to write about: you’ve unleashed a monster!

I say that the next Blog War can be declared any time a person makes two posts in a day, or if both parties agree to the escalation of hostility. The problem, of course, is that I’m about to make a post after this, but please have mercy.

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I’ve gathered a fairly decent collection of sites that offer a discount on something for one day only. In the interest of posting something actually useful, I thought I could pass them on. Some are fairly well known, but one man’s trash is another’s ‘wow I’ve never seen this Rick Astley video before.’ I’m not saying these are the only ones there are, but they’re the ones I check daily.

• Woot: If you don’t know about it, GTFO the internet (did you know they Twitter?)
• Sellout.Woot: Not actually them, but it’s where I got my bluetooth headset (and an FM transmitter is on its way)
• Amazon Goldbox (no RSS, but they do Twitter)
• Amazon Video Game Deal of the Day (generally sub-par, but eh; also, I couldn’t find a decent url)
• Amazon mp3: A daily deal on DRM-free mp3s as well as the ‘Friday 5,’ five albums for $5 each (Twitter!)
• Morebeer: They give a limited number of promotional codes on an item, and once it’s sold out you can’t see what it was

Also, even though I don’t check them, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Shirt.Woot and Wine.Woot. Have I missed anything, or any of the above’s Twitter accounts?

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Yesterday, while doing some yardwork I managed to take the hedge trimmers to my headphones cord. This allowed me to become reacquainted with the crappy ipod buds at the gym. I realized that they were a slightly different design from the ones I have left over from the other two ipods we’ve bought over the years. They actually seem to fall out of my ears easier, though I didn’t think a thing was possible.

This morning I plugged them into my Macbook to listen to music while I worked… and found that they didn’t reach. I had an old pair on hand for some reason (‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’ is all I can come up with), so I compared the two. The new model is inexplicably about six inches shorter. I guess that’s nice when you’re jogging, but I like a little extra cord. Except for when it gets sucked into the blades of lawn equipment, I suppose.

I checked Target for new headphones tonight, though I didn’t get anything because I didn’t really trust any of them. While I was there I decided I would also like ten free dollars. It’s a good thing I’m an honest person, because the case containing a ton of 3 and 12 month Live subscriptions and 1600 point cards was sitting wide open. I took two for myself, but there was nothing stopping me from taking a handful, going somewhere isolated and writing down the codes.

I also was looking to pick up Wii Fit, because Elizabeth asked if we were going to get it and there has to be some law somewhere prohibiting a guy from passing up on buying a video game when he has spousal approval. I didn’t see any in the case that would contain their Wiis if they ever had any, so I asked an employee.

‘No, but we’ll have them tomorrow morning. They’re in the back, but we can’t sell them yet.’

‘Oh, did it not come out yet?’ (I really haven’t been paying attention)

‘No, it did, but Target has some weird policies. We open at 8 tomorrow, though. We only have 13, so plan accordingly.’

Apparently their policy is ‘We aren’t a fan of money.’ I have planned accordingly; by the time they open I’ll have left the country.

(That would sound so much cooler if it weren’t just a half hour drive to Canada from my house)

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I have tried to play Second Life twice. The second time was only because I thought maybe I did it wrong the first time. It wasn’t boring so much as horibly laggy, but being forced to pick a silly last name really didn’t help.

And yet, for some reason, librarians are fasciated with the damn game. It can be described as ‘a MMO but free,’ the last word of which acting as a can opener to my hypothetically feline ears, but the appeal breaks down once I remember that I don’t have the patience to sit down at a computer for that long anymore if I’m not being paid for it. I hear there are flying penises, though, which does sound interesting (they’ve even escaped into reality).

I understand the appeal in that it makes our profession, generally thought of as antiquated and deprecated, seem more cutting edge. We add ’2.0′ to the end of everything… people do that these days, right? But — and it hurts me to say this, as a geek — just because you can doesn’t mean you should. In library school I once said that we don’t need to be familiar with every new technology when it’s released, just before it hits the mainstream. Second Life is approaching that point now; it may be there, but I’m too apathetic to keep track. I also read Joystiq and Kotaku, so I’m not exactly qualified to judge popular awareness.

Which brings us to the Law of the Game post I saw this morning. It’s about the legal aspects of machinima, which I really don’t care about. I have friends who make it, and I watch their work when they make it, but at this point they’re all captures of character models standing around with voiceovers and jokes. Or if there aren’t jokes, there will be attempts at drama that will probably fail.

The screenshot caught my attention, though. Does that guy’s shirt say somethingabout Librarians? Wait, they cite their reference for the definition of machinima. Oh, look, it’s library machinima.

The sad thing is, I’ve watched some of this before.

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I didn’t want to have to make this post. It’s the sort of thing that your close friends know, but that you really don’t feel like telling the internet. But this is a Blog War, and it was such an interesting phenomenon that my hand has been forced.

I saw the Sex and the City movie tonight. And I was excited for it.

It all started when we had HBO on demand. Elizabeth would watch it while I played my Gameboy (it was a while ago). First I would laugh at Samantha while playing. Then I’d look up every once in a while. Next thing you know I’m scouring eBay and we own every season. So, when Elizabeth insisted on seeing the movie on opening night I couldn’t exactly complain.

As for the movie itself, I’ll say that I liked it. If you didn’t like the show you can skip it, but if you did… it’s Sex and the City. What really surprised me was the ambiance. [...]

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I finished up Basic Brewing Radio‘s Green Brewing podcast this morning (I’d like to link you directly to it, but there doesn’t appear to be a permalink option). Most of the tips were things I already did, — reuse Starsan, use your immersion chiller water for ____, etc. — or couldn’t do — compost the spent grains (well, I donate them to my mom’s bin) and use pool water for the chiller (which sounds damn cool). I would, however, be interested in knowing how people harvest the carbon dioxide from their fermentation for force carbonation and purging their secondaries. That’s just some voodoo stuff right there.

One of the people wrote in about using spent grains to make dog biscuits. I imagine they’re a regular at Homebrew talk, because that’s where I got the recipe from and they used ‘LHBS’ for ‘local homebrew store.’ There really isn’t an easily linkable thread for it, and they don’t give it out or link to it on BBR, so here it is for posterity:

4 cups spent grains
4 cups flour
1 cup peanut butter
1 egg

Mix it all together, form into cookie shapes and bake at 300-350 for half an hour. I flipped halfway and then let them dry our more with the oven door cracked open.

(I got the recipe from fratermus on the forums, and I think he got it from somewhere else, so as much as my librarian citation chip is going off right now I’ll have to attribute it to [Anonymous]. No, not 4chan.)

Elizabeth seemed offended that I didn’t make them into bone shapes. It’s gotten rave reviews from Suzie, Belle and Isabelle so far, and my next batch will also find its way to Taylor and Boomer, so it seems to be pretty popular. You can eat them too, by the way, but they don’t have much flavor.

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The bastard managed to pull it off. Granted, one post was about why my blog sucks, but he churned out five good posts last night. Prick.

So, that means I have until tonight to think of six distinct things to say. If nothing else, this is a great exercise in writing and inspiration for me.

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I suppose I should elaborate on Coheed and Cambria a bit, as Saturday I’ll be heading over the border with Elizabeth, Dave and Patricia to see them in concert. Get it, their latest album is No World For Tomorrow, and there’s no concert for tomorrow because it’s actually Saturday, and… ah, forget it.

I think that, if anything, I’m more ambivalent than I was before. They make some pretty good music, but it’s pretty good music that’s self important to the point of silliness (something I know a little about: this is my fourth blog post today, after all). I was able to read the first issue of The Amory Wars, and I thought both the writing and the art was fairly horrible. ‘Coheed was feeling upset.’ Well, really? How about you show that and let us figure it out for ourselves? The writing reinforced my feeling that Claudio Sanchez never got past the ‘man I have this idea for a story and it is so deep’ phase we all go through in high school (to anyone I ever forced to read Platinum, I’m sorry).

It also doesn’t help that the song Feathers seems to be about all women being dirty lying whores. That’s not exactly a message I can get behind.

Though it seems sort of cliche, I wonder how much pressure they’re under to make more radio-friendly songs. They have songs like Wake Up and Feathers, but then end their albums with four or five track series that are much more orchestral. Whether intentional or not, they’re increasingly adding in more generic crap that I’ll be forced to two-star in iTunes.

And yet I paid $40 to be able to see them perform live (I’d like to be able to make a joke about that being like five American dollars, but sadly the denizens of America’s Hat are chortling to themselves in between bites of poutine). It’s because, hard as I am on them, the thought of hearing In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 and Welcome Home is exciting. I enjoy listening to their studio stuff, and they seem to be the type of band whose awesomeness increases tenfold live.

As much as I know it’s not a good thing, I’m a very reactionary person. A whole lot of stupid kids like Coheed and Cambria, which makes me disinclined to give them a chance. It’s the same way with Tool: they’re talented as all get out, but people think that Maynard is a god and he’s too busy thinking of himself as an arteest.

And how does that work? You’re a bicycle.

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So maybe you heard, yesterday I bought an iPod Shuffle. From now on I’ll be using ‘ipod’ over ‘iPod’ because the librarian in me says ‘use the authority file’ but the cynical part of me says ‘the capital P looks really lame.’ Elizabeth’s ipod, which I stole — er, have been sharing — a while back, is having hardware problems and I don’t think we ever bought her AppleCare for it. It hasn’t been an issue, because it plays well as long as it’s using the line in jack of our car and I have it plugged into the cigarette lighter that doesn’t actually have a cigarette lighter in it. But she just accepted a position that’s not four blocks from where I work, meaning that I’m going to be biking again. This is good, but means I need a new fancy music playing device.

I’ll save you the train of thought leading up to my choice and suffice it to say that I walked into Best Buy and bought myself a shuffle. The clerk asked me what color and I was caught off guard, so after realizing Apple runs their plastic through a Fluffy Bunny Pastelization Filter before applying it I just chose silver. I opened the package while waiting for Elizabeth to get done with a meeting, so I’ll throw out the warning for future shuffle buyers: have some damn scissors handy. After 5-10 minutes of prying and sawing with my keys I was finally able to yank the box out of the wrapping. Can we get rid of clamshell packaging yet?

The main concern I had about the shuffle was that I still needed to listen to podcasts. I only listen to a handful (some people just ramble on and on), but I look forward to a Wednesday morning Giant Bombcast and a Friday morning Basic Brewing Radio (not to mention Lying Media Bastards, which seems to be semi-annual at this point). With no screen, there can be no ‘Podcast’ tab, and the nature of a shuffle means that my 90 minutes of video game talk will be sandwiched somewhere between The Card Cheat and Nice Weather For Ducks. There’s no room for documentation in that tiny case, though I did find some on their site in PDF form, but this is how you do it:

1. Autofill the shuffle (or not, if you’d like)
2. Take off a few Marilyn Manson songs to make some room
3. Wonder why you still have Marilyn Manson songs in your library
4. Add the podcast(s) manually (drag them from the Podcast tab in iTunes onto the Shuffle)
5. Drag the podcast(s) to the top of the list

The shuffle won’t play anything tagged Skip when Shuffling (which all podcasts are by default), so when I’m at the gym I’ll only get music. When I want to listen to mah stories, I switch it to Play in Order and press play three times to restart. Since it remembers the playback position of the podcast, it will pick up where I left off. Last night I had an hour of random songs on the elliptical, got into the car and resumed hearing exactly how much I did wrong on the mead I started on Monday.

Now, then, does anyone know if the songs will repeat before all of them are played? That would be an interesting feature.

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I’ve had a fairly long and storied unrequited love affair with Apple. Here’s a brief chronology:

• Fall 2003: iTunes comes out for Windows, I download
• Fall 2003: Man I want an iPod
• New Year’s 2003: Acquire an eMac, ditch Windows
• Summer 2005: Finally get my damn iPod
• Fall 2005: After never getting a printer to work (and wanting a Media Center), buy new PC
• Christmas 2005: Buy Elizabeth an iPod for the hell of it
• Winter 2006: Disconnect my iPod when the screen said ‘Do not disconnect’ in flashing red letters. Apparently they meant it. (AppleCare replaces it)
• Fall 2006: iPod mysteriously breaks again, Apple doesn’t repair because I closed a car door on it and they think that’s the problem
• Fall 2006: Get a crappy 512 mb player, hate it, eventually steal Elizabeth’s iPod
• Spring 2007: Buy a Macbook, increasingly use it more than the PC
• Spring 2008: Elizabeth’s iPod develops an issue with the headphone jack, plays with skips or static
• Yesterday: Buy a 1 gig iPod Shuffle
• Next year: Buy an iPhone, experience Nirvana

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