My sister put up this picture as her main MySpace photo recently. It’s almost a year old.

The part that is new is that I was immediately reminded of something else when I saw it in that context.

Wired, July 2007 originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

It’s too bad that I’m the only one that received this issue of the magazine. It’s pretty glorious. Although, I still think that the personalized June 2004 issue of Reason magazine was better. No one knew that was coming. Reason just used our address information to get satellite photos of subscribers’ houses. I had to submit this photo to Wired in order for them to use it.

Jesus! originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

I had to pose with it.

Experienced webmasters start email marketing campaigns for the promotion of their websites. It helps them in getting good traffic which causes an increase in ppc. It also boosts the process of search engine optimization to some extent. Other factors also matter a lot such as reliable web hosting and keyword based domain names.

I read The Dilbert Blog because Scott Adams amuses me. More so in his blog posts than his comic even. Usually he is cynical and sarcastic in the topics covered everyday, but yesterday as a follow-up to a previous post about how to be happy he made a great point:

Priority-wise, it simply makes sense to take care of yourself before you start searching for a higher meaning. You aren’t much good to anyone else if you’re unhealthy, a financial burden, or an emotional basket case. Fix yourself before you turn outward. It’s best for everyone.

I have many friends and relatives that I try to express this to. They are wonderful caring people who put other people’s priorities and comfort above their own. Then they become stressed out and worried about not being able to help everyone they want to help. Oftentimes they can’t see that being in this state doesn’t allow them to help all the people they want to help very effectively at all.

It may sound selfish at first – that you should put taking care of yourself ahead of taking care of others – but it makes sense. It’s worth taking the time to make things right for you before trying to work on making things right for other people. Everyone will be better off.

I had to call the 24-hour trouble call center tonight from work because a woman got trapped in the elevator. It was up near the 3rd floor and we’re all down on the 1st. All four of us left in the building anyway. We just barely heard her sounding the alarm button. She apparently was stuck in there for 50 minutes. What a nightmare.

I am writing from work.  It is dead right now.  There are two people in the Lab.  I was alone for quite a while earlier even.

Today was Introduction to Information Technology.  I think it will be a straightforward class.  I’ll be interested to see what kinds of issues come up.  The main work in the class will be writing a “business intelligence report” about any information technology that we want.  We’ll have to cover Design, Architecture, Standards, Regulatory Issues, and the Future Evolution of the technology.  I’ve got another couple weeks to come up with my subject.  Choosing is difficult because there are so many things out there that I am interested in.  I’ve thought about doing things with online identity verification, mobile computing, or DRM, but that doesn’t even come close to what all my options are.

Friday’s class was cancelled.  I’ll get to start driving to Tahoe earlier.

I hadn’t read up much on the newish DualDisc format before I decided to buy one.  That might have been a mistake.

I wanted to check out the new Fiona Apple album because I only read positive reviews.  Shawn’s praise was the first I saw that gave me the idea.

The first thing I notice when I get the disc in the mail is that there is a sticker on the wrapper and a warning on the actual album art:

* The audio side of this disc does not conform to CD specifications and therefore will not play on some CD and DVD players.

That worried me a little bit, but I figured, how could they make a product that doesn’t work for most people.  When I put it in my computer drive to go through my normal routine of ripping and encoding to FLAC I got an unexpected, yet foreshadowed, message from EAC that no audio CD was found in the drive.

While I didn’t want to completely buy into conspiracy theories, I tried to figure out my options.  First, I flipped the disc over and ripped the DVD side hoping to extract the LPCM audio and break it into tracks and make my FLAC files from that.  I fired up my old computer at the same time thinking maybe that drive would have more luck with the disc too.

It turns out that both of my alternate solutions worked out.  Although it took a while fiddling with various methods and eventually some locating of new software to get the audio extracted from the DVD portion, I was successful on that front.  Now I have higher resolution 48kHz FLAC files to listen to.  My older drive was also able to read the audio portion of the disc and so I ripped it normally on the other computer resulting in 44.1kHz audio files.

I think it might almost be too much run-around to make it worth it to get my music how I want to listen to it when starting with the DualDisc format.  I’ll definitely think twice before buying another one.

Technorati Tags: audio, DualDisc, FionaApple, exactaudiocopy, FLAC

Tommy’s spent, originally uploaded by courtneyp.

I’m really glad I went to Teh Langpad Postmas party on Christmas night. It was quite eventful. Good people, good cheese, crazy Andy. He’s moving to Amsterdam and will be missed. For those that do not know all else that transpired, maybe that’s best…

technorati tags: tehlangpadpostmas, party