A few weeks ago I was looking at my music library and had the sudden idea to make a playlist using only tracks whose names were the names of people. Songs like these:
I ended up with twelve tracks and it turned out to be a pretty decent mix; the tracks all worked together fairly well. But when I was done, it got me thinking about taking other weird, arbitrary criteria and making playlists out of the music I have. Here are a few ideas I’ve come up with:
Songs with atypical or varying time signatures such as:
You could also think of a random theme like “sleep” or “war” and pick a bunch of songs that either focus on that theme or mention it in some way, but that almost seems too easy. Come up with something less general, perhaps “songs that mention swans/bicycles/balloons” or “songs with colours in their titles”. Basically, the idea is to choose some arbitrary rule and then trawl through your music collection and find songs that fit the rule—then listen to the result.
At any rate, if you can think of an odd rule for choosing songs for a mixtape, post a comment and share it.
I recently found out about a neat program called F.lux. F.lux adjusts your monitor’s colour temperature depending on the time of day, reducing it to be less harsh on the eyes during evening hours.
When we view the bright lights emitted from most computer screens, our brains are tricked into thinking it is still daylight. As a result, it can often be difficult to sleep for a little while after you’ve been using a computer. The lower colour temperatures that F.lux provides help remedy this effect. Of course, you can always adjust the colour temperatures of your monitor yourself, but F.lux very handily automates the process.
I was walking through school today on the way to my first class. Directly in front of me, while walking up a flight of stairs, was a guy dressed in paint-spattered coveralls, probably a member of the maintenance staff. Directly in front of him was a girl who I assume was also walking to a class.
As we went up the stairs, I could hear the maintenance guy singing to himself. And it wasn’t real quiet, either. He was singing, probably, just slightly quieter than normal speaking volume. I’ve heard people sing to themselves in public before, of course, but never this loud and never while in such close proximity to other people–literally directly in front of me and directly behind someone else. I guess it unnerved me a little.
“What an odd thing to be doing,” I thought to myself. “People don’t usually sing this loudly to themselves.” I started to think that this guy was a bit of a weirdo.
We got to the top of the stairs and went in seperate directions. But as I walked away, I realized what he had been singing: It was Creep, by Radiohead–and my opinion of the guy changed completely. “What an awesome song,” I thought. And I began to think that he must be a decent guy if he has decent enough taste in music to be singing Radiohead as he goes about his day.
I laughed about it later, how I had been so quick to judge the guy in my head. Creep is a really great song. This post will not go into detail on how it is a creepy (no pun intended) song to sing while walking up stairs behind a young girl. That’s not what it’s about.
Here is a video of a homeless guy performing an amazing cover of Creep. If you are reading this post on facebook, the video might not display.
The reason I’ve been so quiet lately is because I’ve been working on a new website.
ScatteredDrop is a bulletin board intended for people in St. John’s, NL (and abroad) as an alternative to those forums that already exist. It should be opened for registration later today.
Merry Christmas and the happiest of holidays! Here at my parents’ house, with my two siblings home for the holidays, there are no less than five laptop computers in use and scattered around the kitchen table for most of the day. Both my sister and my dad asked that I “make their computers faster” — and I did — but it got me thinking about those numerous little programs that perform everyday functions like unzipping, open certain files, or cleaning your disk. These programs perform essential functions in tandem with your operating system but often go relatively unnoticed.
As a PC user (and a nerd, and a cheapskate), I’ve learned that there is almost always a free program that will perform the same function (often better) than a program you could spend twenty or fifty dollars for. Even programs that seem to be “free” (like Adobe Reader or WinZip) are often crippled or bloated. Here are some of my most favourite free programs that help Windows PCs run smoothly and stay healthy.
Foxit Reader is a replacement for the nearly universal Adobe Acrobat Reader, a program that is used for opening PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Almost all computer users deal with PDF files at some point, so it is important to have a PDF reader — but Adobe’s bigshot Acrobat Reader is a horribly slow and bloated program, often taking up hundreds of megabytes of disk space and prompting for frequent updates, neither of which are necessary for a program that serves one simple (however essential) purpose. Foxit is much smaller, and will even integrate with your browser (even if you use Firefox). You won’t notice the difference, but your computer will. But note that if you choose to install Foxit, pick the “Custom Install” option and pay attention to all the options you are given. Foxit is a free program, but during the installation it will ask you if you want to install a couple of toolbars and promotional shortcuts (you don’t). Leave these options unchecked.
PeaZip is a small, simple program used for handling archive files (like .zip). It supports nearly all major compression formats and integrates nicely with Windows, allowing you to package and unzip files from Explorer without actually launching the program. However, when it comes to archive files in Windows, there is no limit to the number of programs available. PeaZip not your flavour? Try TUGZip or 7-Zip.
For opening images, often a third-party app is not needed, but I have found that both XnView and IrfanView are good choices. Both programs integrate with Windows and can open images very quickly (which is, in my opinion, reason enough to install them). They also offer some basic editing features such as copying, resizing, and converting. I have never been able to permanently choose one over the other, but I am partial to XnView because IrfanView’s icon is really ugly.
CCleaner is a great program (and my secret weapon) for keeping computers running smoothly and freeing up hard drive space. It offers a powerful scanner that checks your hard drive for unused or temporary files and deletes them (and lets you customize this cleanup with a series of check boxes). It also sports a registry cleaner (that you can safely stay away from if you’re not obsessive about this sort of thing) and allows you to easily uninstall programs and control what launches when your PC starts up.
Still with me? Okay, here’s a big step: uninstall your computer’s security software, especially (yes, especially) if you use a big paid program like McAfee or Norton. If you paid for it, I’m sorry. All done? Okay, install Microsoft Security Essentials. This is a lightweight and simple virus and spyware protection suite that was recently launched by Microsoft. Unlike many other free security suites like AVG, Avast, or Antivir, Microsoft’s security suite is not a cut-down version that tries to persuade you to buy “full protection” — it works on its own. It offers real-time protection as well as download scanning and full hard drive scans, and it runs quietly in the background with a nice icon in your system tray that lets you know when you’re protected.
That’s all for now, but if you are on a roll and want to install a bunch of new stuff, pay a visit to ninite.com. Ninite offers a checklist of the most popular free programs and lets you batch-install a bunch of them at once. It’s a great site to visit with a new PC or when you want to explore free software a little.
This goes without saying, but if you are not comfortable installing programs or changing things on your PC, don’t do it! Find a nerd in your life and ask for their help. I can almost guarantee that their eyes will light up.
On the subject of Google Docs, gPDF is a snappy little Firefox extension that sets any PDF that you open in your browser to be viewed with Google Docs — freeing your browser from a dependency on a PDF viewer application. This is great for speed and reliability and also works brilliantly with portable Firefox installations.
A few months ago, as summer drew to a close, I decided to stop relying on Google so much for everything — at the time, I used google.ca as my search engine and Gmail as my main e-mail address. So I stopped using those services, changed my browser homepage to yahoo.ca, and set up an @ymail.com Yahoo e-mail address.
My rebellion didn’t last long. Yahoo’s homepage has some relevant (and sometimes entertaining) news, but a lot of the page that was loaded every time I clicked the Home button was useless, junk information. Their native e-mail interface is modern and functional, but clunky and a little bit slow. It also didn’t work on my netbook, so I was forced to revert to their old, primitive layout while I computed on-the-go.
So after about two months of my Google hiatus, I gave up. I created a new Gmail account (part of the reason I had left was because my original account, created in 2005, recieved a lot of spam on a regular basis), and restored my browser home page to google.ca. These days I’m almost a complete Google convert, and for good reason: their technologies are top-notch, even the less-popular ones that people may not use as frequently as, say, Gmail or web search.
Google Calendar comes in handy for managing schedules and planning events. Even if you have nobody to plan events with, it’s a good way to create a visual map of the things you will be doing in a given week or month. Plus, you can export your calendar events so that they can be viewed in a different program like Sunbird or Rainlendar if you so choose.
Google Docs is an app I’m still getting used to myself. From what I can tell so far, it is pretty incredible. If you have a Google Account (any Gmail user does automatically), you can log in and create documents — text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. And the individual apps themselves are quite impressive. they load quickly, run within your browser window, and boast a surprising number of features. Any time you save a document it is stored online and can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection. I have been using the word processor in Google Docs lately while at school, and to save brief notes for myself while at home.
And finally (though this list is certainly not exhaustive), there is Google Chrome, an alarmingly fast and functional web browser that you may install and use in place of Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera. Chrome is one of the newest browsers on the scene, and is built to be fast, responsive, and uncluttered. It is also highly standards-compliant and is updated quite frequently with new features. It is not as customizable as Mozilla Firefox (installable extensions are only available if you use a possibly unstable bleeding-edge development build), but its feature set is quickly expanding, and its interface is refreshingly simple and minimalistic. I like it because it launches almost instantaneously and is easy on system resources.
I will be keeping an eye out for (and writing on) up-and-coming web apps in the future.
Tonight I purchased a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s newest novel, The Original of Laura. Vladimir Nabokov has been dead for 32 years.
Before he died, in 1977, Nabokov had requested that the manuscript he was working on be destroyed if he were to pass away before its completion. The inevitable happened, and the manuscript passed into the hands of Nabokov’s wife, Vera. She was unable to bring herself to destroy her husband’s final work.
Vera Nabokov died in 1991. The manuscript, at the time, remained intact, and fell to Dmitri Nabokov, the famed author’s only son, a bachelor. For 18 years he debated whether to honour his father’s wishes and destroy the manuscript, or to publish it, preserving the final work of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
The manuscript was published on November 17, 2009, as The Original of Laura or Dying is Fun. The book itself (which I stare at presently on my desk) is a thing of beauty — the jacket is simple and black, featuring a thin red rectangle containing the author’s name and the title of the book. Near the bottom are the words “A novel in fragments”. The text, and the red rectangle, gradually fade and disappear as the eyes pass from left to right. The fading text evokes, as it should, both the incompleteness of the book itself and the death of its author. Underneath the jacket, the book is styled like an index card, containing the title and first “page”, and a slew of words in Nabokov’s hand: efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate.
There is a short introduction by Dmitri Nabokov, and then the text itself, presented in a unique fashion: the pages feature scans of the original index cards that Nabokov wrote on, and underneath each, a transcription (and tidying) of the text on that card. One can read the text in Nabokov’s own handwriting, including scribbles, errors, and edits. The index cards, the book states, “are perforated and can be removed or rearranged, as the author likely did when he was writing the novel”.
Reading the introduction, I see hints of Nabokov emerging in his son’s writing — a matter-of-fact, almost stubborn descriptiveness that inflates the mundane into sweeping, beautiful prose (if I may be so adoring). It sometimes saddens me that Nabokov’s only son has never married and has no children. He is now 75.
The question that will inevitably haunt any reader of this book is whether or not Dmitri should have published it. If Nabokov had asked that it be destroyed, should it not have been destroyed? We should be reminded, Dmitri says, of an instance many years ago when Nabokov, on his way to destroy an incomplete draft of Lolita, was stopped by his wife.
And so it was published, and appeared to me, plastic-wrapped, on the shelf of a book store I often wander through, large, firm, black, and imposing next to a single small soft-cover copy of Lolita. I had resolved not to make any purchases that night, but my resolve crumbled as this new, untouched fragment of an author I have an undying respect for presented itself to me. I lifted a copy from the shelf and brought it to the counter. The cashier’s name tag read Laura. I grinned and headed home.
We had been dead-set on opening locker #3008, to the point where we had been convinced that it was the right one. We convinced ourselves that our rival claiming he had opened it was a trick, that he was no closer to the goal than we were.
But sure enough, he had gotten in, and evidently someone else had too. Someone had left that taunting note in there. He seemed as surprised by it as we did.
Our rival often had a friend with him, another guy who kept him company while he deciphered clues. Unlike our cocky rival, his friend was friendly and noncommittal — he seemed more to enjoy the experience of the treasure hunt than the idea of a prize. He introduced himself as Joey, and Matt and I had a few conversations with him out of earshot of our rival.
Joey told us that he and the other guy weren’t really working together, but to watch out for the other one, because he was clever, and determined — something we already knew.
A day later we ran into our rival again. We asked him how it was going, and he gave us the usual response, some canned phrase to make us think he was more informed than we were. In truth, we were all in the same boat. The letdown of locker #3008 had left us all bewildered and without any leads.
Our rival thrust out his hand. “I’m Nick, by the way. I figure I should introduce myself, I see you guys down here enough,” he said.
Matt and I introduced ourselves. “Always good to know your enemies,” I remarked.
But from that point forward, the enmity between us seemed to lessen. No longer did we try to deceive Nick and Joey into thinking we had a lead or some great idea. Instead, we shared our thoughts on the current clues and seemed to work in tandem — not together, but not against each other either.
The clues, at this point in time, seemed to be of little use. We (both pairs of us) had already deciphered that the card was in the tunnels below campus. Each day, when the clue was released, we would find ourselves in the same place, helplessly staring at an array of lockers, any of which could contain the prize. We would mill about, talk about the clues a little, and ultimately decide to return the next day with another clue. This went of for several days, and we were now in the third week of the contest.
The clues released at the end of each week, on Fridays, were video clues, and each seemed simply to contain a number. The first week’s number was 10, the next, 00. If the numbers formed a combination, then on the third Friday it was likely that someone was going to find the card. On Thursday, in the third week, Nick stated, “Someone’s going to find it tomorrow.”
But which locker was it in? Even knowing the combination, it would take hours to search every one.
That Friday, at noon, almost three weeks since the contest started, another number was given as a clue: 18. Another clue surfaced as well: “Ironic there is an X-Men sticker close not to St. FX but Wolverine. To get closer think Gretzky’s number — he could put it top shelf.” This clue, unlike the ones before it, proved extremely useful. I knew to look for both an X-Men sticker and the number 99 (which was too high to be part of a combination, so I figured it had to be printed somewhere on the locker).
Matthew was in class that day and couldn’t come down until later, so I bounded to the tunnels myself. I immediately spotted Joey and Nick, and a range of other people, all on the same track. As the contest had progressed, more and more people had caught on to the card’s probable location, and the tunnels became busier around clue-time each day.
A gathering had formed at one point in the tunnel. A number of people seemed to be clustered at a group of lockers. Some were attempting combinations, others simply watched in anticipation. Between two people, on the door of a locker, I spied a small X-Men sticker. I checked the lockers nearby but could not find the number 99 anywhere.
Down the hall a ways I saw Nick and Joey. Nick was apart from the crowd, attempting combinations on a locker he had pinpointed the day before. He seemed determined to get in, but as I approached him, he looked up. “It’s not in this one,” he stated plainly. “Someone over there is going to find it.” I glanced over my shoulder at the crowd of people just behind us.
“Good clues today,” I offered.
I turned back to the crowd, deciding to investigate the X-Men sticker a little further. There were too many people, however, and I couldn’t get close enough to really accomplish anything. I stopped, a few feet from the crowd, and set out searching for any sign of the number 99.
I looked up just in time to see a guy in a bright orange shirt tug hopefully on a lock. It opened.
His jaw dropped, and he turned to look at someone next to him in disbelief. Pulling the lock off, he tugged the door open and grabbed something inside. It was a white envelope. He quickly closed the locker and, in the company of two others who had been with him, disappeared down the tunnel, talking excitedly. They high-fived one another.
It was over, and we hadn’t won.
I turned around, still slightly dumbfounded, and approached Nick and Joey, who hadn’t seen what had happened.
“Someone just found the card,” I said plainly.
“Really? Where was it?” they asked.
We went back to where the card has been found. The crowd had dispersed, and just above the X-Men sticker, I showed them locker #2855, where the guy had found the envelope. I took the lock in my hand and dialed 10-0-18. The shackle opened easily.
I still haven’t figured out what the reference to “Gretzky’s number” meant. There was no 99 involved in the location or combination. The “top shelf” had referred to the section of the locker the envelope was found in. I had focused on the wrong part of the clue.
Almost directly across the hall from locker #2855 was #3008. It had been right behind us the whole time, perhaps 6 feet from where we had stubbornly tried to break into #3008. So we didn’t win. For three weeks we had chased a prize, certain that our determination would put us well ahead of the competition, certain that we would find the card well before anyone else came close. In the end it came down to taking the clues for what they were worth and using the information available to narrow things down.
