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“Yes is this [PUBLISHING COMPANY EXECUTIVE]?”
“Uh, yes. How did you get this number?”
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Monthly Archives: January 2007
Pitch sessions gone wrong
Tagged Personal Blather
Which dot are you?
It’s a neat trick, and I think I know (in general terms) how it works.
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Saving time through scripting
I’ve got a heck of a project percolating at work. Basically, we’re going to be taking a ton of old surgical education videos that have been digitized and saved in a fairly proprietary WMV format and posting them in a much nicer, Video iPod compatible M4V format.
Fortunately, queueing them up for compression is something that can be done in big batches and left to render overnight. Unfortunately, re-compressing the video means that all of the tags and comment fields indicating which doctor it is and what surgery they’re performing are lost and need to be re-entered. We have it in a database, but copying and pasting back and forth between it and a couple hundred movie files is going to be a huge hassle.
Then I found this post from a guy who had a similar problem and solved it using PERL script and a well formatted XML file. I showed it to one of our programmers this morning and he thinks he can cobble together a script that will fix the tags on a couple hundred videos in a few seconds. I’ll post it here if it all works out.
Tagged Technical Notes
At least it doesn’t go to 11
At work today, I ran across the stupidest chart I’ve ever seen. It’s a “Quality of Life” measurement, ranking people from 1 to 7 based on their symptoms. Down at #1 is “No Symptoms”. At the top, #7 says, “Dead”.
Personally, if they’re measuring quality of life, I think they could have stopped at #6.
Tagged Personal Blather
Iced Comic
Here’s a little behind-the-scenes special features for those of you who get to the comic from the blog: in real life, the tree hit the car, not vice-versa…
Playing with layouts
Hey! Tuesday night I sharpened up some sticks, broke out some new flint knives and bearskins and poked at the webserver until it cried for mercy and agreed to update the Booniverse with a shiny new WordPress installation.
So go check it out. Leave a comment or two. They may not show up instantly – there were a couple of hundred spam comments left over from the original Movable Type install that had to get flushed out of the queue – but comments are officially re-enabled!
Tagged Personal Blather
The Very Quick Play-Count Meme
Borrowed from Websnark, who borrowed it from Howard Taylor… It’s The Very Quick Play-Count Meme. I pared down my iTunes library recently, and some of the mid-to-low-playcount stuff got ditched, so this should be interesting.
- For this little three-question game you’ll need some sort of play-count record on your mp3 library. No guessing!
- What’s the most-played track in your mp3 collection, and how many times has it been played?
A cover of “I Feel Love” by the Blue Man Group: 46
- Divide that play count in half and round up. What’s the nearest song?
Oddly, there’s nothing that’s been played exactly 23 times. Bumping it up to 24 plays, it’s a tie between “I put a Spell On You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and “Bob” by “Wierd Al” Yankovic. Dropping down to 22 is a tie between two Oingo Boingo tunes, “Where Do All My Friends Go?” and their cover of “I am the Walrus” from the albums “Boi-ngo” and “Boingo”, and in that order.
- Divide that play count in half, and round up again.
Down at 12, there’s quite a crowd. The top rated ones are the English National Opera’s rendition of “The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring” from the Mikado, “Poor Tom” by Led Zeppelin, and the six-second thrash metal opus “Anti-procrastination Song” by the Stormtroopers Of Death.
- Care to explain yourself?
No, not really.
Ok, ok… “I Feel Love” is in my Songs that Get Stuck in My Head playlist. Other than that, my musical tastes are a storm of ecclecticism. A random dart-throw could hit anything from Techno to Punk to Classical to an MP3 of a 78 RPM novelty record from the 1930’s.
Friday Comic
Today’s comic is either like tiny insects in the palm of history or was written by an iron fist in a glove full of vaseline.
Oh wait… That’s not the comic. That’s a Thomas Dolby song…
Tagged Personal Blather
Goo Goo Ka Choo!
I am the Eggnog!
|
You Are Eggnog |
 Rich, sweet, and probably a little drunk. Everyone who knows you tends to get a little fatter. |
Tagged Quizzes
Good ways – Bad ways
I’ve been working on losing weight. I don’t want to get on the crash diet bandwagon, since I know it’ll just lead to a subsequent ballooning, so it’s been a slow, gradual process. This can be discouraging sometimes. You see yourself every day, so you don’t notice any progress. Over the weekend we had dinner with my in-laws, and my sis-in-law commented that I’d lost weight since last she’d seen me.
I’ve noticed some other things myself, some good, some bad. On the good side are the generic “physical health” benefits. I don’t get as winded on stairs. At work, I can toss around rolls of 42″ gloss paper with ease. And I can comfortably wear some of the previously too-tight pants which have been hanging out in my closet.
And that’s led into one of the not so good things. After a weekend of knocking around in scruffy old pants, I forgot that when I wear my newer, nicer pants, it’s vital that I also wear a belt.
I didn’t notice it first thing this morning, oh no. Freshly washed jeans tend to be a little snug, at least until the fabric warms up and relaxes. For me, this happened as I was walking down one of the longest hallways in my whole workplace. And it’s really tough figure out a casual way to keep your pants from heading south. I wound up casually hooking my thumb in the top of my pocket and sauntering in the direction of the nearest men’s room to undertake a quick program of waistline hefting and shirt tucking.
All day long, it’s been the battle of the beltless. Standing up and sitting down have become little contests between me and the force of gravity. It’s really kind of embarrassing. Because you know your first reaction on seeing someone in my kind of situation isn’t going to be, “Hey, he’s lost weight!” It’ll be something along the lines of “Huh. Burgundy underwear. Is that Fruit of the Loom or Haynes?”
Tagged Personal Blather