So, some of our neighbours’ kids were running around on the street yesterday afternoon … with their shirts off! Sure it’s 4C, but that ain’t quite spring yet in my book. Also, today someone offered to buy our house. Nothing doing, we’ve only been in it 3-and-a-half months!

Stunning. The Casshern trailer is a must see. The movie is a continuation of the 1973 Japanese animated series “Shinzo Ningen Casshern” (Casshern - Robot Hunter). From what I can gather (here and here) the story looks to be your basic man vs. machines (controlled by bad guy?) action epic, but seemingly more coherent than Matrix R&R.

I hope the movie will prove to be as good as the trailer’s sexy photogoraphy promises. It opens in Japan in April; I really hope english sub-titles will follow shortly after.

Anyone know about buying tickets online for Formula 1 GPs? I’m considering going to the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal in June. So far I’ve come across 3 or 4 ticket vendors, none of whom seem all that organized so as to inspire confidence in me to buy from them. Give me a shout if you’ve done this before.

A quick and cheesy list of the countries I’ve been to, and the ones that I’d still like to visit. Of course, I haven’t exhausted the sights & sounds in the countries I’ve already travelled to, or lived in, and I do plan on returning to many of them when the opportunity arises. Click on the image below for a larger version; past visits in red, future visits in cyan.

Already visited: Austria, Belgium, Botswana, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lesotho, Mauritius, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Switzerland, UK, USA.

Want to visit: Argentina, Australia, China, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Maldives, Mexico, Monaco, Mongolia, Namibia, Nepal, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, San Marino, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Vatican City, Vietnam.

* credit where credit is due

** oops! left out Sweden in the list — not sure how that slipped by me — sorry Tomas!

My mp3 collection is in better shape after the weekend. Following Justin’s recommendation, my files are separated into albums and singles directories — a system I previously ignored, but am now finding very practical. Example: I’ve given up being able to see all an artist’s songs in the same place, but I’m saved the trouble of having to rename different versions of the same song.

All told, I’ve amassed 7,765 tracks: totalling 602 hours 23 minutes 50 seconds of playing time; swallowing 38.9GB of disk space. (note that there are still some duplicates I haven’t weeded out yet, but for the most part repeated tracks are either different versions or from different albums) That’s 99 minutes of music per day for one year. Still, Ryan has double that.

I’ve made the “playlist” heading on the sidebar clickable, it will take you to a frequently updated listing of all the songs in my collection. If you’re interested in that sort of thing.

Now, tell me what holes you see in my listening experience. Which artists do you recommend I discover next?

update: Not to be left out of the all-important stats action, Justin has given me the green light to share his dirty little secret with you: his mp3 stash is 270GB, very near to 45,000 songs!! One isn’t quite sure whether to offer congratulations, or condolences.

• The British government is reported to be considering levying a ‘Fat Tax’ on fatty foods. Sounds good, but needs to be coupled with educational and lifestyle programs; given the government’s track record on tackling the NHS, I’d say they don’t have a chance of putting that act together (producing results anyway). Moreover, any such tax would need to make ‘junk foods’ per se more pricey than healthier alternative to stand any chance of getting people to ‘switch’, and wouldn’t that simply raise the cost of living? Obesity is an issue that sorely needs to be dealt with, but is slapping on a tax the answer?
• Garret has the catch of the day: CNN’s mp3shits.com. On a sidenote, itsn’t it sad how Garret’s picture shows just how crappy the resolution on our televisions is?
• Fredericksburg, VA: In an argument over a bottle of medicine, a man ripped off his neighbour’s prosthetic leg and beat him with it. I attended Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, this just doesn’t surprise me at all. (via Obscure Store)
• A woman in Oregon, WA has been stealing garden furniture, gnomes and all sorts of decorations from residences in her county and a couple of others, since 2002! “I [Detective Onchi] kept saying to various officers, one day, we’re going to come up on this whole yard full of ornaments,” Onchi said. “And that’s just what happened.” (via Obscure Store)
• Mind over matter? ” Under a new policy at the Lawrence Middle School [New Jersey], the seventh- and eighth-graders are allowed to leave class for the bathroom a maximum of 15 times a month.” (via Obscure Store)
• A college professor got more than he bargained for when trying to illustrate cultural differences of what is unacceptable by daring students to strip for an ‘A’ grade. One student did strip down in class, and for that the professor has since activated his retirement. (via Obscure Store)

First point. When I find new, and potentially interesting sites, I have a habit of leaving them in a tab and going about my business as usual — the idea being that I can later go back and evaluate whether they are worthy of bookmarking. The session saver extension for FireFox helps, because I can close FireFox, fire it up again later and all the tabs I left open will still be there. Great.

Except, I also have a habit of asking WinXP to do more than it can cope with (too many simultaneous operations, and commands in rapid succession) when it’s already strained under the load of something or the other. Thus, lockups and program shutdowns are rife at times. Sadly, FireFox is a frequent victim; when this occurs current sessions aren’t saved and relaunching after such an event only brings up the tabs from the previous normal exit. Solution? Troll through the inhumanely lengthy history? NOooooo!

Second point. I accidentally clicked the ‘clear cookies’ button this morning, effectively turning the day’s browsing experience into a game of something akin to minesweeper. Deny. Deny. Deny. Accept. Deny. Deny. (I avoid cookies when I can, as should you.) Inevitably, some sites — straight from hell — blow up in your face when you ‘deny’. “You must have for the site to be able to work”, it’s absolutely impossible for a site to functino without those all-important cookies. Hold still while I rip you a new one won’t ya?

Question. Say you are subpoenaed for music downloading by the RIAA or the CRIA. What’s to stop you from going out, buying a stack of music (more or less what you had downloaded), and then make like you had bought the music as a result of ‘sampling’ it, or were just a kooky guy who owned the music already and like spending time on p2p networks for fun (ostensibly prior to learning of any sort of action against you)? How would it look if they took you to court and branded you a dirty scoundrel, only to have you direct the judge’s attention to the cache of CDs in the trunk of your car.

How can they prove you didn’t actually have that music at the time you downloaded it? Or is it just illegal to download regardless of whether you already have it in a paid-for version?

So I finally snapped. Couldn’t handle it anymore. Not having all my music readily accessible on my PC was irking me — more than I should have allowed it to anyway. Solution? Storage!

On Tuesday I headed down to Alberta Computer (their website needs work — who knows, maybe I can wrangle a deal on that at a later stage; prices aren’t up to date i.e. cheaper quotes by phone). These guys seem to have the best prices in Calgary. I picked up a 160GB JB Western Digital (7200rpm — 8MB cache) for $150 CDN, which is equivalent of the NewEgg price and almost half the Futureshop price (local). I opted for the 160GB rather than the 200GB or 250GB because that was the pricing sweet spot at around $1/GB vs. $1.25/GB; I didn’t have the $250 for the 200GB anyway.

I’ve now spent the better part of the last day-and-a-half copying my mp3’s to the new drive. They were spread out over 50+ CDs and the hard drives in my new laptop, old laptop, and headless network box. The tally so far stands at 29.8GB in 5,981 files (listing). No record breaking going on here. There are still some additions to be made, duplicates to delete, and quality checking (file and/or artist) of course.

The problem now is how to organize this mess. In the past used genre-based folders, but that can always be a bit iffy. What method do you use? Suggestions?

DJ Tiesto’s remix of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit” is among the best club tracks of 2003. Unfortunately it’s only on the white label — Radiohead have not agreed for Tiesto to officially release the track. That said, I’m looking for the mp3. If you, or anyone you know that knows someone that knows, spot it: please let me know too.

[1] If you’ve been to a movie theatre in the past few months you’ve more than likely been subjected to one of those annoying MPAA ‘piracy is bad’ spiels. I’ve only had the displeasure of seeing the one with stunt guy saying that it’s not right someone can ‘push a few buttons’ and get the benefit of all his hard work without paying for it, and then the idea that downloading movies is a threat to his job security.

Real effective. Yeah, it didn’t cross my mind for a second that maybe he wouldn’t be in such a pickle if the studios would stop donating $20 million a pop to the Ben-Affleck-Can’t-Act-Foundation. The MPAA is doing itself no favors by insulting our common sense — when you insult us with bullshit this ridiculous no choice but continue to disobey.

[2] I take issue when people say things like:

“He estimated that piracy cost the studios $3.5 billion in 2003, and he predicted that price tag will skyrocket as broadband and cheap storage and recording devices become readily available.”

As far as my own situation goes: downloading is not a substitute for going to the cinema, or renting/buying the DVD. I had no intention of doing so in the first place. I go to the movie theatre only when there’s something I want to experience on the big screen or with friends. You’re not losing any money there because there was no money earmarked for you in the first place. The number of people who download something in place of buying it is minimal. The numbers you sucked out of your thumb were exaggerated even before you blew them up.

Change your business model, that’s final.

Canon just remined the Nikon and Sony who’s daddy! Announced today, the Pro1 Powershot again demonstrates Canon’s leadership in the field of digital cameras.

Like the Nikon Coolpix 8700 and Sony F828, the Pro1 Powershot sports a 2/3” 8MP sensor, but is likely to best the other two given Canon’s track record for producing lower noise images. The Canon might only offer up to 200mm zoom where the Nikon does 280mm, but it goes as wide as 28mm whereas the Nikon is a mere 35mm; on top of which, the Canon lens is faster, uses as USM motor, and is L-series glass! The F828 does offer a mechanically linked zoom ring (the Pro1 is zoom by wire), but it doesn’t have the flip out LCD of the Canon.

Canon really does seem to be setting the pace in the marketplace, don’t they?

The 0.8 milestone for Mozilla Firebird is out today, only it’s no longer known as ‘Firebird’, but as ‘Firefox’. Why the new name? Seems the Firebird database crowd thinks we can’t tell the difference between a database and a web browser. I prefer the Firebird name really, but there’s no going back to it now is there.

Get Thunderbird 0.5 while you’re at it.

Uh-oh … Firefox seems to be missing scrollbars inside the application window: for the whole page and for text fields. A bug? Well we certainly won’t be getting into that at 2:30am.

update: no scroll bar? It’s a theme issue.

Sorry if my posts of late are turning into little more than link repositories, but classes and family are getting the better of me at the moment. Hope you enjoy these photo sites:

Yikes, I meant to link to this weeks ago. Apple seems to be upsetting UK consumers with pricing on the iPod mini — charging them a full £38 more than US buyers.

” … a senior Apple executive has said the company will review its pricing outside the US, and blamed the high pricing on the continuing weakness of the dollar against other currencies.”

Ooh, we never learnt that one in economics, quite the opposite in fact. Oh, but I see they’re not really talking economics, they’re reading from the PPPR textbook.

Not having taken a photo in months is killing me. I’ll blame the weather, studies, and family. Anyhow, first sign of withdrawal: a mad scurry to locate and gobble up what beauty others are kind enough to share.

Lost the last entry — or was it two(?) I really can’t recall — courtesy of a server move. Hmmmph! I’ll try to recompose it now.