Tag: tech

It’s Bloody Cold Out!

I did it. I got up early and showered and got dressed and was all ready to grab my lappytop and jump into the car and do some effin’ car music!

“Hey Siri, how’s the weather?” he asked.

“The current temperature is seven degrees. The high today will be 19 degrees and the low will be seven degrees,” Siri replied.

Well screw that! It’s bloody cold out there! I wonder how the forecast for tomorrow morning is looking. I just looked… it’s pretty much the same as today. Crap.

On a not quite related note, the RPM Challenge website used to have a blog section and a forum and it was all replaced by a Discord channel. Discord makes me feel old. You know the stereotype about the old people who are unable or unwilling to embrace new technology? It’s not that I don’t get it, it’s just that I don’t want to. I used to use those ICR boards back in the stone age, and I used the AOL chatrooms before that. Discord feels exactly like them. So it’s not a matter of failing to embrace a new technology, it’s more a matter of not having any interest in re-embracing an ancient one. I guess. I’m trying though.

On a totally unrelated note, Rest in Peace Meat Loaf. My sister had Bat Out of Hell when it was actually current, if you can imagine a world that far in the past. I would occasionally take it for a spin when she wasn’t around.

48 Days (I think)

I often start my lunch break with a visit to Google News where I just pick a handful of articles to read. I saw one today that talked about Tumblr and how, while it seems to be a dead platform, lots of younger people are starting to use it. The implication was that many of the younger people who are ignoring Facebook and Twitter are ending up there. That’s nice. I always like Tumblr, but they made the same fatal mistake that Flickr made when they let Yahoo buy them out. That mistake was, of course, letting Yahoo buy them out.

I think I had two Tumblr accounts and I am pretty sure they are both active… pretty sure. One is just a copy of this blog. Anything I post here gets cross posted there. I would tell you what the address is, but I can’t remember. I just know that when I look at this account’s dashboard there is a reference to it. The second account sometimes gets used when I work on a music project like RPM. I post daily (mostly) progress that are pretty much meaningless to anyone who isn’t me, and after a few days they all look exactly the same.

This post, however, is not about Tumblr. It’s about Facebook.

Reading that article made me ask myself how long it had been since I logged in to Facebook. Turns out it’s been 48 days. December 2, 2021. That’s nice, huh? I’ve only received one notifications email from them over that time and I just trashed it. I don’t think I ever considered my boycott to be permanent, but it’s pretty nice the way I haven’t felt any need to check in for as long as it’s been. I imagine that there is a magic number of days that the boycott will last that will fully satisfy my need to stay away and once I hit that number I won’t get pissed off at myself if I go back.

Something like that.

Edits to the To-Do List

I didn’t go out for car music today. Nope. I was going to. I woke up at 6:45am (on a Saturday, you savage!) and my watch told me it was 2 degrees out. Yikes. Well… we’ll see how things look after my shower and stuff. When I was all dressed and ready to go my watch told me it was 1 degree out. Welp, maybe next time.

That’s one thing dropped from the to-do list. We are hoping to add one thing too. There will, hopefully, be a FaceTime call with Bellana today! All the way from The Netherlands where she is quarantining and probably super bored. I still haven’t decided if I want to share their YouTube video or not. I’m hoping they post things regularly so we can feel like we’re a distant part of their adventure. Fingers crossed. I probably won’t post the videos here. I don’t know. Maybe, but probably not.

In closing, yesterday I listened to a podcast that broke down the Grace Under Pressure Tour video that Rush released in 1984 or so. It brought this little masterpiece back to the front of my brain and it doesn’t show any signs of leaving any time soon.

Fear. A sort of suite. Sort of. In 1984 when Rush released the Grace Under Pressure album, the song The Enemy Within was subtitled Part One of Fear. Well what the hell did that mean? They eventually explained it to us. One of my friends in Junior High said he had figured it out, but I don’t believe him.

Fear is a three song suite-ish that includes one song each from three albums… in reverse.

Part One is The Enemy Within from Grace Under Pressure, released in 1984.
Part Two is The Weapon from Signals, released in 1982.
Part Three is Witch Hunt from Moving Pictures, released in 1981.

Simple, right? If I remember correctly, Neil said he numbered them in order of the hardest to write to the easiest… or was it the other way around. Damn it. I don’t remember for sure. It doesn’t matter, they were numbered based on the writing process, that’s all you need to know. I don’t recall if The Weapon and Witch Hunt were ever officially given a Fear subtitle on any subsequent release, but they might have. There was also a fourth song, Freeze from Vapor Trails, released in 2002, but they never played all four of them together. In fact, they never played Freeze live at all. They were never supposed to play Witch Hunt either. That was written and recorded as a studio only thing as there were little things that couldn’t be pulled off live with just three people at the time. As a result, this arrangement is a little different than the Moving Pictures album and that was something that Rush just didn’t do, making this version extra special. Years later, as sampling and triggering technology caught up with the band, they did do Witch Hunt as it was originally arranged. I really like this one though. It lacks the cowbell in the beginning, well most of it at least, but it adds that killer guitar solo at the end. Awesome.

Gee, I hope these videos actually play though… seems like a lot of people have posted this with the sharing options off. Yikes.

Whatever.

We’re going to hear from Bellana today. Happy.

Like a Great Ball of Anti-Fire

Jen came up with a project today, and like all times when Jen comes up with a project she kicked it’s ass back to the stone age like the Boss Queen that she is.

She decided her office and the living room had too many power strips and extension chords. They don’t any more. She rearranged all of the wiring everywhere and when she was done we have the same number of things plugged in but with one power strip and two big extension chords left over. It was pretty amazing to watch. She’s pretty amazing in general, but this was really cool.

You should be in awe of my wife, just like I am.

Changing the subject, did the Flickr iOS app go screwy for anyone else today? The auto upload stopped working. I think it was because I took a slow mo video this morning. The same video file made YouTube act weird too. I cleared out my phone’s photo album (everything is backed up), logged out of Flickr, took a new picture, logged back in, and everything was okay again. Weird.

Vivaldi Notepad

I have been using the Vivaldi browser* on my Mac for quite a while now. No complaints. I like it. I feel better about the state of the world when I am not using Chrome. I said the same thing about Firefox when I stopped using that browser and started using Chrome. Now here we are again. It’s probably just a matter of time before I say it about Vivaldi too.

That’s not what we’re here to talk about though. What we’re here to talk about is the notepad app built into Vivaldi’s sidebar. I don’t use it often, but when I do it feels like it is a literal lifesaver.

How cool is that? I just thought you all should know. You’re welcome.

*Browser might be the one word that I typo the most. I usually type it browswer, but there are hundreds of other errors that work for me too.

Messing with Tidal

After reading a little about how much artists make per stream from the various streaming services I started messing with Tidal. Jen and I had an account when they first launched but, despite the focus on audio quality, it wasn’t quite up to speed enough to make us want to switch away from Apple Music.

They have a free account now, and I don’t think they did before. What the hell, let’s play with the free account. Spotify’s free account is obnoxiously add heavy, might this be a little better? I know artists get a bigger cut (though it’s still insultingly small) so let’s try it.

I created a new account through the iPhone app. I played around with UI mostly, not really getting into the music at first. That was two days ago. Yesterday near the end of the work day I started listening through the web app. I picked one artist, Robert Cray, and shuffled the catalog. I got three plays before an add. I guess all of their adds are actually adds for Tidal’s paid services rather than paid commercials, but whatever. It’s still an add. After the first 30 second add I heard two songs before the next add. Then I heard one song before the next add. Oh for crying out loud.

Today I tried changing my password. I used something generic to start with but I wanted to change it to something more random. I opened up my account settings and changed the password to something my password manager generated for me. It seemed to work. I then went into the iPhone app to re-log in and it told me my password was incorrect. Sigh. It then took me about four tries to get my password reset. The web app kept acting like I was actually signed in. It wasn’t kicking me out even though I had changed my password, had the password change fail, and was clearly logged out. The iPhone app kept me logged out fine.

Finally I got through the password reset process and tried to log in and the log in failed. Not because of the password, it just failed and said to try again later. I tried a private browser window and it told me I was blocked. Come on, guys. What the hell. I went back to a normal browser window and it finally worked. What an ordeal.

I picked one of their auto-generated user-specific playlist things and the first song it gave me was Pekin Spring by Mission of Burma, so I guess that was Tidal’s way of appologizing.

So far I have gone three plays, a 29 second add, now another three plays. This time though, the second of the three songs was an artist I don’t like so I clicked the little block icon and it skipped to the third song. Does Tidal have a limit on the number of songs you can skip like some of the others do? I don’t know. Does blocking an artist from an auto-generated playlist count as a skip? Did I just break the internet?

We’ll see.

After the third song I got another 29 second add. I have to go do something else soon, so I’m going to have to stop this dumb experiment, but the next song is Mission of Burma again, That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate. Arguably the best 2:05 in rock history.

Another thing to mention for the web app. Coming out of commercials it has a REALLY hard time getting into the next song. It plays the first fraction of a second a few times before righting the ship and fixing itself. When I skipped a track it was even worse. It did the same thing when I was listening yesterday. I think we need to submit a bug for that one, kids.

Okay. Burma’s ending. Time to go find the elusive glass punch bowl that is somewhere in the cellar. Talk to you later, New Years kids.