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Post by tangerinesun on Aug 28, 2015 10:03:39 GMT -5
Not dead as long as school administrators are alive. It's a ban on ALL superheroes and villains, no exceptions. Sorry, Underdog!
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Post by lazybone712 on Aug 31, 2015 7:19:45 GMT -5
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Post by tangerinesun on Aug 31, 2015 23:31:24 GMT -5
Catching up to Japan in the clever/disturbing marketing field. That lid is ♂ so can I request one that's ♀ ? Doesn't this make life just a little bit worse?
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Post by mikado-AKA-Shoknifeman on Sept 1, 2015 1:55:35 GMT -5
That model is MUCH more "kissable" than that cup!
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Post by lazybone712 on Sept 1, 2015 18:08:14 GMT -5
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Post by tangerinesun on Sept 1, 2015 20:25:22 GMT -5
HUGE opportunity for the people that run the Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City.
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Post by mikado-AKA-Shoknifeman on Sept 4, 2015 23:35:20 GMT -5
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Post by mikado-AKA-Shoknifeman on Sept 20, 2015 0:19:01 GMT -5
A morality tale, by our newest member:
Daniel LeBlanc
Went shopping for a newer TV to replace my failing old model, and I ended up talking to a complete stranger for twenty minutes. Upbeat and calm, he told me about his wife, several children, and how he had stage 4 stomach cancer, nearing the end. As he left to pick up his order, the only thing I could think to say was "Please don't lose hope. Keep fighting." Stupid, I guess. Such a lovely person. I hope and pray he beats that horrible disease. Suddenly, the bright, shiny objects blaring sports, politics, and gyrating popstars felt ridiculously unimportant compared to real life.
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Post by thegl0r on Sept 24, 2015 21:36:30 GMT -5
Aaargh! Where to post stuff is often a mystery for me and sometimes I just give up. This article is one of those occasions when I didn't quite give up but just posted it somewhere. Its about filing your music collection. The writer starts off with talk of hard copies of CDs, then a detour into other areas. theafterword.co.uk/file-under-stuff/The article raises a number of concepts that I've battled with for many many years and I still haven't come up with the definitive answer. The writer didn't mention how he arranges the releases of artists who have released two or more discs, would that be by release date or alphabetically? And what about multiple different releases of the "same" CD or record etc. It is such a minefield of decisions. I had my collection nicely arranged sort of alphabetically and yes, the compilations were filed in the space that comes after Zounds. Then I moved house and things have never been the same since. I made a half-hearted effort to regain the alphabetical system, but it never really got off the ground and here I am some five or six years later still living in music collection anarchy. Vinyl lives a random existence in a cabinet and about five boxes. CDs live in a CD cabinet - but they also have the luxury of "The Shelf Of Recent Acquisitions" which also doubles as the "Shelf Of Played Recently", and also "The Shelf Of Played Regularly". But CDs are great escape artists and can turn up pretty much anywhere - if there's a flattish surface then a CD may well find it. I daren't even think about the ugly question of what to do with DVDs. Do you go with alphabetical for all DVDs, or should they be split up into genera? Surely at least into music DVDs and then everything else - but then why stop at only two categories? My brain could go into melt-down over this. Which is why everything is arranged in order of anarchy. But it would be nice if all CDs were together and all vinyl was together. All the 7" singles and EPs could go fairly easily together - but should 12" singles live with 12" albums? And what about 10" albums, and 8" albums? For that matter what about CDs in oddly sized packaging? I don't even want to think about the downloads and other stuff that lives in my computer which gets lost between five different hard-drives, most of which have multiple partitions on them and stuff gets tucked away very randomly throughout them. I've just got another hard drive so I may and try and create some sort of order before I start throwing stuff randomly onto it. Yeh, right. Oh, and I forgot to mention cassettes and minidiscs and computer "backups" on CDRs. I may as well just give up. As I said at the beginning, aaargh.
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Post by tangerinesun on Sept 24, 2015 23:37:10 GMT -5
Aaargh! Where to post stuff is often a mystery for me and sometimes I just give up... about filing your music collection... aaargh! Congratulations on your escape from a career in what is now usually called Information Science. But you didn't get away completely. I feel your pain, because once it was my lot to help devise a global store/search/deliver digital asset management system for every kind of media object under the sun. I was the only actual tech on the internal team. Altogether it took a ton of money and just over a year to accomplish, though half that time was wasted in talk and looking into dead ends. That's why I can say with confidence that you can organize absolutely anything, if you want to. It's a big "IF" though, because the discipline and boring work involved push well into most people's pain zones. The author of that blog post sounds like a completely ineffectual person, I would just disregard him completely. His hand-wringing might be contagious. Bare bones, if you own any consumable assets, you've got information on physical media. It is ALWAYS on physical media, because the real world is made of real things. Some of the media you manage, and some of it is managed by Other People, such as Apple, Amazon, or name your poison. So your problem is two-fold. Wrangle the physical stuff, and create a useful logical representation of it that you can use. For the physical stuff that you manage, you have only a few goals, which you already know about. As long as it's all safe, out of your way, and accessible on demand you're all set. By being rigidly consistent, you'll get by with any plausible shelving scheme you might pick. Radio and TV stations, not to mention media repositories like stock photo and video house, not to mention actual libraries, have solved problems a thousand times worse than yours with no loss of life, and not much loss of material. Whether or not you manage the asset store, there's the matter of the cataloging and search, which is the logic of it, which is what makes strong men weak. But it's trivial, really. You need to get friendly with the concept of metadata — data about your data. The so-called metadata is the entire logical basis of your asset catalog. Metadata is far from magic or obscure. MP3 tags are asset metadata, all the ancillary track info in iTunes is asset metadata... it's just relevant information like "released in 2002" or "composer: Karlheinz Stockhausen" or "rating: 4 stars" or "album title: The Curse of the Mekons". You cannot possibly have too much metadata on file, but we all run out of time and energy for it eventually. Figuring out what metadata you actually want and then creating it is a life's work, so start right away. Sometimes metadata is organized hierarchically, like a naturalist's taxonomy, and a respectable metadata structure is known as a taxonomy, but good news — you do not need to care about stuff like that. You only need a functional minimum of tags you can search. The more elaborate your tagging system, the more fun things you can do with your information in an instant. Also, the less time you will have remaining to do anything but catalog your collection. Until, ultimately, you become a media asset Gollum, poring over your Preciouses all day alone in the dark. Ick. I have an Excel spreadsheet which I use to discover which object holds the info that I'm trying to get at, and where I put it. Way easier than a box of file cards or a list in a text document. Although, not importantly superior to a simple text list, day to day. I have so few LPs, they are not cataloged at all. They're boxed alphabetically by artist, and the asset collection is its own catalog. Just like the entire world is its own map, at 1:1 scale. I used to use a bunch of different disc cataloging software apps. It's a long time since I bothered about that, because brute-force file search is so easy since personal computers became powerful, disc storage became cheap, and file pre-indexing became the norm for Mac OS X and Windoes. If you have a lot of external disc media that Gracenote knows nothing about, still a huge time-saver. Everything I possibly can, I feed to iTunes. This obviously only works for digital media, but there's a double benefit. The original media becomes the sacred archival backup copy, and I have instant access to copies of everything, in a little database that's a lazy person's dream of heaven. Getting a lot of information back *out* of iTunes takes some work, but getting it in there to begin with is as easy as it gets. I'll stop writing, because everybody already stopped reading. But, things are really no worse than this. The absolute worst-case scenario: you get to do a lot of keyboard text entry while reading the faded labels of your brittle old 78 RPM 10-inch platters. Don't drop those things!
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Post by thegl0r on Sept 26, 2015 22:58:54 GMT -5
Congratulations on your escape from a career..., ...metadata..., ... iTunes...for digital media... The original media becomes the sacred archival backup copy... Where to start? First dig out my vinyl copy of "The Curse of the Mekons" Perhaps sometimes my world isn't quite as random as it seems/feels. Mates have told me that I live in organised chaos as they're surprised at how often I can find things. But perhaps my memory is getting a bit full and I need another head-drive. But to be honest it is that my memory is just getting more and more bad sectors. It only took a few minutes to dig out that album because I remembered that it was with my other Mekons albums and some of the spines on those are easier to scan for. Or is it just that I don't have enough records? You can never have too many records. A mate of mine has a much more extensive music collection and I always look at it in awe. Partly 'cos there is so much, but mostly 'cos he has a room dedicated to his collection. All carefully arranged on shelves in alphabetical order. But he has the advantage of living in London and is able to trawl lots of music holes for new and second-hand records/CDs etc. The music I have hard copies of, I have a harder time keeping track of my CDs, they're slippery little devils. They're not as good as they pretend be and they are really good escape artists and love playing hide-and-seek. Metadata, hmm. I dipped my toes into that side of things for stuff on my computer. As you mentioned, that takes time. Working out what sort of stuff I wanted/needed was bad enough and evolved over time. And boy did it take lots of time and effort. It also took away some of the fun. So I bit the bullet and deleted it all. Occasionally I wish I hadn't deleted that metastuff and had gone through everything. But not often. Now I tend to include some metatype stuff in the titles. Luckily with Linux type operating systems, file names can be much longer than allowed with Windows. Occasionally there is need to do things properly-ish. i-tunes. i-tunes! i-b****y-tunes!!! You may have guessed what I think of that. Tried it, didn't like it, got annoyed with it, vowed never to go there again - or at least as seldom as possible. i-tunes has caused me all sorts of trouble and I hate the way it insists it is right even when it isn't and then changed stuff in my computer even when told not to. Artwork, track-lists, its evil turning stuff into "Unknown Artist/Track" even when told to leave well alone. I've not been there for a few years, things may have changed but I'm not holding my breath about that and have no confidence in it. Does it still insist on the Roman Alphabet and capital letters in what it insists are the "right" places? Other music databases aren't quite so annoying, but tend to have more gaps in them, and, like i-tunes they often insist that they're right even when I tell them they're wrong. Pah! I ineffectively tap my keyboard in their general direction. As for keeping the original media for the sacred archival backup, pah! Different media have different sound qualities and I like playing my records and CDs. For me, digital music hiding in the computer is a poor substitute - like sweetener instead of sugar. It may be convenient, but it is not the same. For instance, the "Cress" cassette by NO CARS that Haruna gave to me is great. It may only be the CD version of the song that has been transferred to tape, but because it is on tape it sounds subtly different. I really like it. Or is it just because Haruna gave it to me? Perhaps I should just do a bit of reorganising of the stuff loitering inside my various computer things. Try and drag everything together into more usable lumps. A bit more care and consistency in naming files to make them more search friendly. Yeh, as if... I'll just have to put up with losing stuff and thinking about getting organised.
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Post by mikado-AKA-Shoknifeman on Sept 27, 2015 21:27:48 GMT -5
I have 2 CD shelves, that I made myself, from lovely pine, naturally aged to a light tea brown. At first, I only had one shelf and for the first few years, it was only half full, THEN, I discovered bargain CDs AND Shonen Knife.... The second shelf soon followed, with about half of the original shelf holding my SKs; any day now, the first shelf will be taken over completely by SK, and I will have to find room,to put an as yet unbuilt 3rd shelf!
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Post by thegl0r on Sept 28, 2015 11:24:09 GMT -5
...and I will have to find room,to put an as yet unbuilt 3rd shelf! We all eagerly await the coming of the as yet unbuilt 3rd shelf, and venerate the wall to which it will will be fitted. For verily, soothsayers have foretold that the 3rd shelf will be as long as a piece of string and will, for all eternity, have enough space to be able to hold just one more disc - no matter how many more CDs you get. So long as your missus doesn't decide to put an ornament on it.
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Post by mikado-AKA-Shoknifeman on Sept 28, 2015 21:10:34 GMT -5
Actually, they are tower shelves, and, I've never been married screenshot
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Post by tangerinesun on Sept 29, 2015 0:27:01 GMT -5
ITunes will do just about whatever you make it do. I have it copy the digital files to it's own folder and manage them there, it's pretty flawless. Everything else about its behavior is preference settings and what you enter into a track's data fields.
Some things it won't do: — Catalog your tapes, vinyl, and unmountable digital things — Figure out what you did, if you start fooling with the files it owns directly, instead of through the iTunes front end — Stop trying to get you to sign up for Apple Music, which is the death knell for iTunes as you knew it
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