The End is the Beginning is the End

Well, it's rare these days, but I'm posting here again!

Hello? Is anybody out there?

I'll give you $100 if you read this blog and post a comment!*







*Offer void in the United States, Canada, Mexico, or anywhere else in this or any other planet or universe—known, unknown, or theoretical— for that matter.

Yeah. I know I haven't posted in almost a month. So what?

So anyways, during that time, I got a new cell phone. It's kinda neat. On Friday 27th October, I went out and used its camera to take a nice pic of a 2 train stopped at West Farms Square station.
The pic you see is a version of what I took with the cell phone's camera, taken with my regular camera. I had double-barreled action going on with both my cell phone and my camera going at the same time.

Firefox 2.0 came out. I downloaded it. I'm still waiting for the portable version, though.

Portable apps rock!

Oh, about my old phone. Well, I'll talk about it later.

I went to the temple yesterday. While I was in the Celestial Room, I found myself reading Doctrine & Covenants 76:70.

These are they whose bodies are celestial, whose glory is that of the sun, even the glory of God, the highest of all, whose glory the sun of the firmament is written of as being typical.

Then I got the impression that I, and the others I saw in that room, were included among them.

Random thought #2186307

I wonder if anyone else reads this blog…

Live from Compy 786...

I did something that I haven't done in a long time. I went to a brick-and-mortar store, and bought a CD. For the last 2 years or so, I've been downloading music, but I haven't bought a CD in so many years. But today, that all changed. Today, I went to J&R and bought a CD. The title? "Weird Al" Yankovic's new album, Straight Outta Lynwood. (iTunes | Amazon) I even brought a CD player with me for the occasion. I listened to it while riding on the subway from J&R.

I enjoyed it. Of course, my faves were White & Nerdy and Don't Download This Song (which, ironically, is legally available for free download at one of Weird Al's web sites, http://www.dontdownloadthissong.com/. Track 11, Trapped In The Drive Thru, which is quite funny. In fact, all of them were at least kinda funny, even though Drive Thru made me laugh a bit, since I was listening to it at Wendy's while eating burgers.

Another thing I bought was a phone extension cord, so that I can use the DSL modem with Compy 786.

I really don't have much else to say, so I'll publish this post while listening to You're Pitiful (which, of course, isn't on the CD, but is legally available for free download at several web sites.)

iTunes 7 Headaches!

Last week, Apple released iTunes 7, in conjunction with other changes in the iTunes Music Store. So far, it's given me many problems. I've read about what other users are saying about iTunes 7, most of it being negative. I've read everything from "iTunes 7 is the biggest memory hog in history" to "iTunes 7 made a paperweight out of my brand-new iPod." Pardon me while I vent.

I installed iTunes 7 on the two computers at home, both Windows XP machines. On my computer (which I call Compy 786. I'll admit now that I'm a HomestarRunner.com fan), it wasn't as big a memory hog as some people have said, I did experience one MAJOR problem: iTunes wouldn't recognize my iPod. I searched Apple's knowledge base and found this. I tried it, and it worked…once. Subsequent attempts to get iTunes 7 to recognize my iPod failed. That's when I gave up. Good thing that the iTunes 7 installer made a backup copy of my iTunes library.itl file, even though I made my own backup copy of that and the corresponding .xml file. I downgraded back to iTunes 5.0.1 and restored my iPod to factory settings and re-synced it.

I installed iTunes 7 on another computer at home, this one being the one with a connection to the Internet (Compy 786 currently has no Internet connection). Before doing so, I added a song to my shopping cart using 5.0.1, and I was basically forced to upgrade, so I did. After upgrading, I commenced downloading. I ran into another problem. To basically describe what happened next, I'll express it in terms that appear in Mac OS X.

The application "iTunes" has unexpectedly quit.

So I reported the problem using the prescribed method, and I received an e-mail from iTunes Customer Service.

Dear Robert,

I'm sorry to hear that your purchase didn't download successfully. It looks like the content is still available in your account and awaiting download, so you should be able to restart the download by following these steps:

1. Make sure you're using the latest version of iTunes, then choose "Check for Purchases" from the Advanced menu.

2. Enter your account name and password when prompted, then click the Check button. Your purchase should begin downloading. If you receive an error message while downloading, try again after turning off any firewall or web-accelerator software that you may have installed...

I followed his instructions, even though the menu commands were different. It turns out the "Check for Purchases" item was in the Store menu, not the Advanced menu. but I found what he was talking about, and the song downloaded as it should.

I also found out another workaround, using the following commands.

net stop "iPod Service"
pause

This basically stops the iTunes service. I don't remember the exact process, but I got iTunes 7 not only to recognize my iPod, but to sync with it. Then it started to analyze the songs on my iPod for iT7's gapless playback feature. It's a nice theory, but I've yet to experience it for myself. There was an error generated in the process, and after I had ejected the iPod from the computer, and went to Settings > About, I got the following:

ROBERT M
Songs	0
Capacity	18.5 GB
Available	11.8 GB
Version	3.1.1
etc.

Yup. iTunes 7 turned my iPod into a paperweight. So, I reverted back to 5.0.1, and tried to get iPod Updater 2006-06-28 to work with it. The hard disk would spin and then it would click. And this click was an abnormal click, not the usual clicks. Anyways, after working with many Macs at both Queens College (where I have a major issue regarding the number of Macs on campus computer labs) and the Apple Store, using the Disk Utility app, I was able to get iPod Updater to recognize my iPod on Compy 786. I restored and began re-syncing.

While doing so, I discovered a way to get it to sync. It's a line from a G Love & Special Sauce song. The line is "Stick it in the fridge." The name of the song it comes from is Cold Beverage, but what I needed was a cold iPod. I put the iPod in the fridge, and lo and behold, it worked! I was able to sync and load my songs onto my iPod! Worst case scenario averted…for now.

Bookstore Blues… or Lack Thereof

Classes started last week, and today I went to pick up my textbooks. I always go a few days after the first day of classes, as the rush to buy books dies down a bit. Anyways, I had a psychology book I was looking to get rid of also. I looked online at the college bookstore's web site to see if there were any psychology classes using the book. As far as I saw, there weren't any. So I went to the bookstore to see for myself. They always have an external bag check in the cafeteria during the first couple of weeks of classes due to the obviously high demand. I went to take out the book I was looking to sell and put away some more stuff into my bag. I did this at a table near the end of the queue, in the 90 seconds it took for me to have everything ready, the queue had doubled in size. So I get on and check my bag in. Then I go downstairs to the bookstore, and I discover another queue. This one was to get into the bookstore itself. And this was a LONG one. It was moving as if it were a ride at an amusement park, letting 10 to 18 people in every 3 or 4 minutes. A person could take 3 round trips on the Franklin Avenue Shuttle in the time it would take to stand on that queue. Then I noticed that the bookstore's "back door," the entrance to the buyback and online order office, was empty. Since I intended to sell the book I was holding, I jumped in there. Another lady in front of me had two books she was looking to sell. Two books, purchased for classes presumably in the spring, and both returned no value. My one book returned $34, about 39% of the price I originally paid for it, but at least I got something for it. To complete the buyback process, i.e. get the cash, a person needs to give the receipt issued at the buyback desk to the cashier, who dispenses the money. Once I did that, I went back to the books. I grabbed the book I needed for my computer science class and paid for it. I left the bookstore with my book while the folks were still on the queue. My psychology book was the "extra passenger" I needed to use the book store's "car pool lane."

At least I now have that book.

I have stuff to say now!

I've finally cured my writer's block. Who knew that going out and having some food from McDonald's would do that. I tried Wendy's, but the queue was too long, and I was hungry. Anyways, I'm pleased to report that my iPod is slowly but surely coming back to its old self. Let me fill you in on why I say that.

Back in June, one of my computer's hard drives failed. The boot drive failed to boot. I was trying to figure out what to do to get my compy back in working order. Fortunately, I had a spare hard drive hanging out, so I made that be the boot drive, and all was mostly well. Until one day, another hard disk decided to crap out on me, this time wiping the file allocation tables on that drive clean. This drive was the one where all my documents were stored (I call this event The Catastrophic Data Failure of 2006). Fortunately, because of a heat-related problem with the drive earlier in the spring, I had bought a heatsink, and I had moved my entire iTunes library to another drive, which was proving to be more reliable at this point, and I had backed up my music library onto two DVD's. Unfortunately, that backup was rather old, dating back to the 13th of March. So I made a smart playlist on my iPod to list all the songs I had added since that last backup. Then I came to the problem I had seen on other blogs: restoring the metadata from the iPod. After months of fruitless searching, the hard disk on my iPod started to show signs of deterioration. The ultimate sign was this:

The dreaded folder icon. So I made every last-ditch attempt to get the metadata out of the iPod. Fortunately, it only appeared once, and that heat wave during which it appeared cooled off. I was able to make a PDF of my iPod's library, which would fit on 7 pages of A0 sized paper (841 × 1189 mm, 33.2 × 46.8 inches). The final blow came a couple of weeks ago, when I plugged the iPod into a Mac, and iTunes came up, and it basically deleted all of the song files on the iPod! Fortunately, it didn't touch the database, but seeing those gray (!) icons next to my songs was not a good sign. I copied the data into an Excel spreadsheet and went home, unhappy that my iPod was rendered a paperweight. Then, while searching on Google for scripts to solve my problem, I finally found a VBScript here (Despite what it says on the page, the script works outside of the QuicKeys application. QuicKeys only allows you to assign a hotkey to run this script, which I really didn't need. I used a command prompt. Run it any place you wish.) which would allow me to do what I wanted: adjust the play counts to what they were currently, not what they were according to the backed-up iTunes library. Of course, with over 1,800 songs in my library, this would surely be a daunting task. However, using the Excel spreadsheet, I was able to discover that only a few hundred needed to be changed. I spent a good part of a day fixing the problem, but I managed to correct them all. Then came the easier of the steps: restoring the iPod to factory settings and updating the iPod from the music library. It took a few attempts for me to do so, but I was able to complete it on Saturday night.

So anyway, back to today's adventure, or rather, the reason why I say my iPod is back to its "old self" is this: It was playing some songs on a playlist of my top rated songs in shuffle songs mode. It played an Eminem song called "Without Me," a clean version, but nonetheless Eminem being Eminem. There's a line in that song that mentions Moby. Anyways, after the song finishes, the next song the iPod plays is Porcelain, which was also used in Party Ben's mix of the Eminem song. It does that sometimes; playing one song, then playing another song that has some relation to the first.

Next thing. I saw this yesterday. I was arriving at Penn Station on the Long Island Rail Road. We came in on Track 16. Looking out a window, I could see that there were no trains on Tracks 17 or 18, but there was a train on Track 19. As I was going up the escalator up the concourse level, the announcer made an announcement. "The time is now 1:14, please stand clear of the closing train doors on Track 19. You have the All Aboard, Track 19. All Aboard!" (The signs adjacent to the stairways, which show the train's information, had already cleared by the time this announcement was made). Meanwhile, Track 17, where I saw no train, had a listing for a 7:00 AM train to West Side Yard (an employees only train; they never show a proper departure time for these trains, as trains to the yard come and go as trains from points east arrive at the station). As I'm walking onto the concourse, I see two people running across the concourse and down the stairs to Track 17. They were followed by a small family. A moment later, they all reappear at the top of the stairs, and I direct them to the stairs for Track 19. I doubt that they were able to catch their train, but who knows?

That's all for now. I think this post is long enough.

Hi, Everybody!

As I was creating this blog on Friday night (while eating chickem parm and watching Men In Black 2 on TV), I was thinking about what I should put on this thing. I know what the description says. I wrote it! Anyways, Don't mind me while I'm still settling down here.

I've suddenly developed a case of writer's block, so I'll close up this, the first official post of The B24 Blog.

Why did I chose this name?
1. It's somewhat alliterative, though the description is more so.
2. The B24 is a bus route I use often, as the bus stop sign in the header suggests.
3. I thought that robertsrantsravesandrandomthoughts.blogspot.com was way too long.

*wonders if anyone will actually read this...