(no subject)

Today was (and continues to be, actually) a fine info-absorption day. A major task that lay ahead at work is migrating HTS Manager from MySQL to Oracle, and indeed learning my way around Oracle in the first place. Jeremy sez this'll take a week; @whee. Do I want to start this on a Friday? No, I do not. So! I stay home and read chem-informatix journals with no real goal in mind, la da, and nibble on this Dover reprint copy of Linus Pauling's 1970 phonebook General Chemistry and am actually finding it quite rewarding.

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At some point I'll have to clean up the place a little, because M comes tomorrow to haul out stuff, and I don't want her rolling her eyes and/or yelling at me too much about how gross everything is. She would say this because there are, aye, gross things afoot. Underfoot, mostly. Hrm. And in the sink. Sinks. So, yes. A straightforward fix.

N has been hauling out stuff as well. I have been trying to diplomatically deejay things so that they both get all the out-hauling time they need without accidentally bumping into one another.

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I have poured several tens of dollars into the iTunes music store, mostly in the form of whole-album purchases, mostly to get happy AAC versions of music that currently exist in my universe solely as half-melted tapes in my half-melted car. My single-track purchases are evenly split between songs I knew I liked, and tracks I stumbled across for the first time via the iTunes interface. For example, I just bought a song called Chup, Chup, I Got Away because I did a search for "chup" for absurd reasons, and there it was. Why not? And it's a silly samba song from 1968, so that's fine.

Also bought the entirety of Firesign Theatre's Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers for $1.98, because it exists only as two tracks. Neat.

Unsurprisingly, artists that are sub-superpopular are scattershottedly represented in the iTunes store, so that even though it's pretty neat that I now have an outlet to go to when I simply must own some particular music right this minute (which happens to me more often to me than you might imagine) I usually end up disappointed after entering their name in the search field. Example: I am now ravenously curious to hear what The White Stripes are. I hadn't heard of them until their most recent (third?) album release, which resulted in a memetic explosion of such magnitude that I've been running into trickle-down references to them all over the place for at least the past month. Leah reckons I'd like them. But I cannot buy them via OneClick™-enabled immediate download and therefore THEY ARE DEAD TO ME. Clearly.