Phlegmatics (and an iPod question)

I found a large cache of CDs I apparently skipped over when I went all rip everything some time ago. I feel like ripping them now, and lo I do so.

Sadly, it's not hard to see why I overlooked this stuff in my first pass-through. I am listening to Mr. Bungle's Disco Volante album now and keep muttering "ugh this is bullshit" to myself, but soldier on regardless because of the undeniable nostalgic kick.

Did I actually like this a decade ago? I must have listened to at least the first half of the album many times, because I am singing (or anyway making noises) along in my head as it plays back now. It's got some moments, but they're literally just moments. It's just audio slapstick, and not really enlightening.

Man, those were lonely years.

(I like the first Mr. Bungle album from 1991 but Ricky's second wife's son ran off with it a long time ago and I only have a few tracks from iTunes now. Baw.)

(Ha ha ha I wonder how many people I just confused by that statement. Apparently my writing about Ricky carries an implication that he's younger than me, to some people. Not so.)

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Is there a way to quickly get back to the Now Playing screen when navigating around iPod menus? It goes back by itself if you leave it untouched for several seconds, but too many's the time I'm bopping around in the menus and happenstance demands that I adjust the volume ASAP.

Different art seen

An interesting morning outing to the new (f)art museum with cthulhia, as I predicted would happen in an earlier post. It was mobbed to such a degree that we didn't actually manage to get in, and we missed the animation show that was our goal - we woulda hadta practically camp by the doors in order to have a chance, it turned out. But we still had a fine time.

First of all, I got to ride the Silver Line for the first time, whee, and saw the Government Center station, which is actually very pretty now. Then we hung out in a giant woo-woo party-tent thing that Target had set up to house people waiting to get into the museum; they were admitting people in packs of 100 via a numbered-ticket system that was clearly going too slowly to give us much hope for timely admittance. However, it was kinda fun to mill around there anyway. Free snacks, and we ran into one of Cth's old neighbors and I got to talk about Jmac's Arcade and feel stupid that I didn't have any of my personal bizcards on me. (I wrote my URL on the back of a Volity card.)

We also participated in Halsey Burgund's project, where he's collecting sound samples of people answering questions from a sheet of printed questions while standing in a little wooden sound booth. Apparently he's going to mix it into music or something. He was wearing a Creative Commons T-shirt and looked like the sort of person who wears a Creative Commons T-shirt. Good time. Cth said that it was something you'd find at Burning Man, and talked to him about Todd Rundgren.

When it became clear that we wouldn't get into the museum unless we waited another hour or two, Cth got a case of the wackies and started making faces at people in the restaurant and bludgeoning passers-by with her Santa hat, so I guided her into the calming safety of Boston's financial district. I discovered that it is creepily quiet at noon on a Sunday, all looming skyscrapers and (almost) no people or noise. Her context shifted, she showed me a really neat brick alleyway where there's hidden surprise art embedded into the ground. If you're ever downtown with me, ask me about it, and I shall endeavor to take you there. But I will get lost and we'll end up wandering around until we give up and then we'll have ice cream or something, OK?

I note that we did get to see the fart mural through the lobby's plate-glass windows, so: mission accomplished.

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Now it's sunset and I haven't really done any code today, and I doubt I will, as my motivation fueler dips under the horizon for the evening. As fun as this was, I think I am going to have to set a policy of declining morning events in the future, at least during the shorter days.

Grunt, I really do have a lot of work to do, too. Let's see what I can manage.

The Brain (no TV)

I'm thinking about ditching my cable TV again.

I'm not sure it's worth ~$60 for the convenience of a massive amount of programming firehosed at me when I watch far less than one percent of it. This becomes even more true when you consider that that I which I do watch I can get over the Internet, dump on my iPod, and then watch on my TV set.

In some cases, I can even get the shows through whiter-than-gray channels like iTunes, negating any guilt about dropping out of the Nielsen game. (They'd cost two bucks a pop then, but I don't watch 30 episodes of anything in any month.)

Any counter-arguments?

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I also have a consumer-political agenda here, since I'd like to become more active in agitating for the death of schedule-based broadcast television as the dominant medium for quality video content, be it fiction or anything else. (Though I'll be the first to admit that it's the surge in damn good SF shows over the last couple years that's driving me here. And the heartbreak and stress at knowing that they're trapped and suffering in a delivery/business model which they can and should outgrow.)

(And yes the entrepreneur in me is adding his voice to this. Just as a hobby, mind you.)

Blood and guts and RCA cables in my teeth

Resolve to kill my (cable) television is rising, between several of you egging me on and my just now succeeding in getting my new iPod to output to my TV using a cable I already owned. (This took a little research. It tuns out that iPods switch around the three RCA plugs' duties, so if you plug them into the TV in the usual way, it doesn't work. I hadta read this article to learn the translation, which is basically: Insert the red RCA plug into the yellow TV input socket, the white into the red, and the yellow into the white. Doy.)

I actually called RCN but oddly their salesbots don't work on Sunday evenings. So, tomorrow. If I'm reading the website right I might be able to save more than $60/month, too. We'll see.