songbird

I hate Windows Media Player and iTunes with a passion, never found much benefit in Foobar2000, and only really use Winamp because I haven’t found the same skin in another player. But I wouldn’t say I’ve found the perfect audio player in my searches, but why not give another one a try.

Songbird is the newest creation of Mozilla Labs, the same company famous for gifting Firefox to the world. It’s still in a beta state, but I can see a lot of potential in its future – mainly the same potential Firefox had at the start. Allowing users to create add-ons improving the original functionality, and offering all of these to the public for free. Add-ons are limited right now, and they’re still working out some bugs, but I have optimism that a free open-source audio player will eventually surpass the ram-hogging giants and proprietary players offered up in the past. If you have some free time, give it a try. Most people I know use Firefox regularly now, so maybe it’ll be a year or two from now and Songbird will have made some inroads. Either way, props to Mozilla for branching out.

year 2: the sophomoring

So, as I finally have time to stop running around, sit down and relax, and stop driving all over the state.

Just as class starts tomorrow, 7:30 AM.

We’re almost finished with the decorations for our room, so I’ll get some pictures up when that happens.

my yellow robot shirt

I had an odd encounter with a new freshman girl moving into the dorms today (we helped people move their stuff into the rooms):

“Hey, you went to my school!”

“Oh, hi.”

“Yeah, you had that yellow robot shirt. That’s the only thing I remember, though.”

There’s probably a lesson in this, but I guess what it boils down to is that regardless of what accomplishments you have, people will remember you for your t-shirts. And that’s why I have so many of them.

T-shirts, not accomplishments.

I have quite a few.

let’s play a game

Okay, here are the rules:

1) Think of a major motion picture that has come out within the last year and a half (preferably an action movie)

2) Go to the Asylum Films Homepage (here)

3) If they haven’t yet made a blatant ripoff of it, you win. If there is a “Transmorphers” to your “Transformers,” however, you have to watch the trailer for it and start over. By the time you finally come up with a franchise they haven’t defiled yet, you’ll probably think of “Disaster Movie” as sophisticated cinematography.

Bonus points if you manage to find the movie starring none other than Insane Clown Posse. Yes, there is one.

Mission Accomplished 2: The Homefront

Well, John McCain said the US needs an ‘economic surge‘ to get our country rolling again, essentially saying that the way to tackle our financial problems is basically the same as quelling an insurgency overseas. I await his details on just how many additional troops we will need to deploy to the American economy before we see positive results.

Mojave vs MobileMe

Two points of interest -

1) Microsoft’s Mojave project. Basically, someone at the MSFT pr firm saw those commercials where Pizza Hut tricked people into thinking their bargain bulk pasta was real Italian food and had quite the epiphany – let people use Vista without knowing it under the guise of ‘the next MS OS: Mojave’. Their results were overwhelmingly successful – even more than they anticipated. Surveyed beforehand, most people were adverse to using Vista – the average score was 4.4 / 10. Afterwards, ‘Mojave’ received about an 8/10 – in fact, not a single person rated it lower than their initial score for what they thought about Vista (many of whom had never used it, of course). Why is this important? All too often, we let perception and public opinion direct our own thoughts, rather than taking the time to actually research and decide for ourselves. People walk into Best Buy and demand that they would never use Vista without the smallest amount of understanding of what the pros and cons to it are. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but in most areas (security, stability, speed) it’s superior to XP – so long as you aren’t buying a $300 bargain-basement PC.

2) Steve Jobs admitting that the release of MobileMe didn’t go smoothly – which is an understatement, but more than I was expecting. Once again, public perception has been that Apple is above the possibility of mistakes – hopefully this will get at least some devotees to realize that at the end of the day, they are just another software & hardware giant capable of the same bugs and problems as everyone else. Will this happen? Of course not – Not when I see comments on gadget forums saying “Oh give them a break, it takes a lot of time and work to roll out a project this big, of course there will be a few hiccups” – I’m sure they were just as understanding during the Vista rollout.

In other news, I now have 4 more computers. I’m thinking either openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.1 or Linux Mint, and I might try to make at least one into a Hackintosh. We’ll see how it goes. And as gaudy as it looks, I’d really like the ASUS Vento 3600 case. Looks like a Gundam Motorcycle Spaceship or something.