I was having problems getting streaming media to play on my old messed up laptop.

So now that I am finally on my new machine, I can again listen to launchcast (music.yahoo.com).

Launchcast was doing what Pandora Radio is doing, way before Pandora became popular.

Launchcast learns from your ratings and plays music it thinks you would like.  In addition, you can setup other users as “Influencers,” which I have done with my brother who also users Launchcast.

So for example, when my brother ranks a song up, eventurally it will play on my station.

See this image for example:

Pretty sweet.

I love this service.  I have found so much music this way. 

Here are some site statistics for the last 12 months. Over a quater million visitors and almost 750,000 page views. Not bad.

It looks like my previous pagerank of 4 has been dropped to 3.

This kinda stinks. I would rather be going up than down, but it isn’t that big of a deal.

Ironically, one of my other websites that was getting a lot less traffic than this one just jumped from a 3 up to a 4.  Go figure.

Google frequently tinkers with their settings, so I’m sure these numbers will not be static.

Ok so the other night I was working late, and thought to myself… hey, I have some new music on my iphone, why don’t I make use of my Klipsch iGroove speakers (as I had heard that most ipod accessories work with the iphone).

So I walked over to the speakers and dropped in my iphone. It fit perfect, as expected. I hit the power button… nothing. Ok, maybe I need to turn on the iphone. Nothing. Ok, maybe I need to hit the menu button… nothing.

I take the iphone out and try to power it up… nothing. I hold down each button for 10 seconds, and then try holding down both for 30 seconds. Nothing.

The iphone starts to get really really hot (almost too hot to hold) and I realize I am screwed.

So that is the bad part. The good part is that I was able to make an appt with the local Apple store within an hour, and they replaced my iphone with a new one.

So as stupid as it is that you could plug in an iphone into some ipod speakers and it would destroy the unit, it was nice that I was able to get a new phone as quickly as I did.

I will not be using any more ipod accessories with my iphone.

I am about 90% happy with my iPhone, but in order to sync it I have to use iTunes, so I have moved my podcasts and a small subset of my 450GB of mp3s into iTunes to sync it with the iPhone, and I just have to say…. what an awful piece of software.

I mean, it DOES a few things that are nice, like trying to find album art for you, but the usability of this piece of junk is about as bad as any piece of software I have ever used.

I won’t go into it, but it really ticks me off when I am trying to do something sooooo simple and it takes me 15 minutes of screwing around and a few trips to google in order to find a way to do it.

So, in conclusion, iTunes sucks.  Oh, and I hate pretty much all the software on my wife’s new Mac. 

That is all. 

Here is a little dos script I wrote to rename all files in the current and subdirectories to have a different extension.

for /f "tokens=1 delims=" %a in ('dir /s /b /ad') do if exist "%a*.old" ren "%a*.old" *.new

If you run this from a bat file you will need to replace % with %%.

Now that I am using an iPhone, I am kinda forced to use iTunes, which I happen to think is a total piece of junk.

The only redeeming quality of iTunes is that it downloads your album art.  I’m sure it does other stuff nice too, but it does so many things poorly that I try to avoid it at all costs.

But now that I am forced to use it, it was really really really ticking me off that it was not grouping songs from the same album into same album group.

These are not some random collection of MP3s, these are all songs from the same single RIP of a single CD, with all the same information in the ID3, and still iTunes can’t figure it out.

See this picture for a good example of this.  Feel Good Hit of the Summer should be grouped with all the other ones.  Click the image to see a larger view:

Edit: It turns out that the areas listed below are the 77 official “Community Areas” of Chicago.  Each of these areas can be made up of multiple neighborhoods.

For example, the “Near West Side” is made up of the West Loop, and Greektown, among others.

http://www.answers.com/topic/community-areas-of-chicago

———-

This is not really a definitive map, as I see some places that appear to go by different names than are listed on this map, but this is the best one I could find.

Everytime a program on my computer hangs or crashes, dumpprep.exe spins for a long time getting a dump report ready for microsoft.  Only problem is, I never send the report, because I need to get back to work.  So all that time is wasted.

Thankfully, you can turn off this time wasting “feature”:

1. System Properties (Either via System in Control Panel, or Getting Properties on My Computer)
2. Advanced Tab, and choose “Error Reporting”. Set to “Disable Error Reporting”
3. You could also Select “Startup and Recovery” – Settings button, and change “Write Debugging information” from complete to none.

Credit goes to Peter Collinson www.clieuk.co.uk.