I've made some much needed updates to my Music Collection Browser, and thought I'd mention it. It now does a case-insensitive sort of artist names, while ignoring leading special characters ( "'",":","(", etc), as well as throwing away leading "The"s for sorting. This was a big deal to me since it annoyed me every time I had to scroll through 50 The Whoevers to get the band I want.

I also fixed the compilations piece, so linked that back in. I just settled for big ugly links for soundtracks/compilations and individual artists at the top of whichever page is loaded. It sucks but there's really not much of a better way to go.

Now I just have to re-tag a few albums and artists to make things consistent, since some artists have both a "The" and "non-The" variant in the list, but at least now they're right next to each other.

Also, I want to vent about Gracenote. Fucking Gracenote. That is all. ... For many artists who have lots of featured guests, it appends all the "feat. whoever"s to the Artist tag. That is wrong. It should be appended, preferably in parentheses, to the song title itself. It's the only way to maintain a reasonable collection.

Of course, iTunes is stupid enough to create different artist folders based on this idiocy, so now I have 15 Bootsy Collins directories on the FS.

The goal list for this project, after 24 hours, now stands at:

Here's where I justify not crossing the rest of the items off my list:

(1) I've barely bothered to look at iTunes XML files because every time I open one and try to make sense of it, I end up weeping to myself. I think what it's going to end up being is me taking my iTunes DB and munging into either sqlite3 (probably) or MySQL (unlikely), in a stripped down version of the same form that Amarok built its sqlite3 databases. I can't help but think that all the searches I run against the DB would be slow as hell if I was searching an unindexed XML file every time I do anything. So now I just need to write a perl script to parse the iTunes XML database file and puke out SQLite3 in a schema my site already handles.

(2) I don't personally care much about searching. The point of this tool is so that when I'm in a record store or otherwise away from my computers I have quick access to an accurate copy of my CD collection, so I don't purchase dupe CDs or whatever. Or if someone asks me if I've heard of some band I can pull it up. Also, helpful links to YouTube, Wikipedia and Amazon searches for each artist. That's pretty useful really. Searching is irrelevant. The only place it would really be handy is if I send the page to someone else and they want to quickly find an artist or song, to which I say "Suck it up and scroll".

(3) I was thinking of porting it to PHP just because I've written like, 6 lines of PHP and figured I should know it. This thing could stay Perl until Unix time rolls over and I wouldn't care at all.

I'm pretty much unqualified to give anyone advice on any topic, but this is the best parental advice I can give:

Don't let people insult your kids and drive you insane with crappy childrens music.

A friend posted that she felt bad because she may have waited too long to buy tickets to The Wiggles. As a non-child-owner, I of course had to interject with my option:

It's OK, you can get these instead, with the benefit of it being Real Music: http://www.danzanes.com/tour

csFlickr

Today one of our ISPs, Expedient(Warning: Opens annoying talking flash-based woman talking over your music), sent me a potato clock. I think it was to mark the 10 month anniversary of a new circuit we haven't quite been able to turn live yet (fault of another 3rd party vendor, long story) :-)

You'll notice the sticker on top is not centered, and that made it rest on this like 1/32" lip around the right "potato cup". That was going to drive me mental, so I was able to re-center it, now my inner Monk is happy.

Aside from that, it works great. It took me 10x as long to set the clock as it did to get it powered by potato, but it's pretty much staying right on time after 30 minutes anyway.

This is not the first such strange vendor swag they've sent me. The last thing I can remember was an Expedient branded USB hub, that had a keyboard controller in it. The Keyboard controller was so that whenever you plugged it in, it could send "http://www.expedient.com" to your default browser and open their homepage when you attach it. It also had a button on the top that would send you to their site, which is why it needed to be a "keyboard". I can't put my hand on that thing at the moment, but if I ever do, I'll definitely update this entry. It may not have survived my move from my last cubicle.

Photos:

(excuses for the rambling. It's not even stream of consciousness, it's subconscious, I'm nowhere near awake enough to do a good job, we'll get through it)

csFlickr 11 years ago ago by xrayspx.

H2o opened, and I have to admit that they were a litte "after my time" for hardcore bands (1996), but I was peripherally aware of them at the time. You know, since I'm 37 and therefore I'm from back in Historical Times, when burgers cost 15 cents and I could get into a movie for a quarter. They were great, pretty much sounded like "Epitaph Band", which it turned out they were. I did recognize a couple songs and they did some good Ian MacKaye birthday tributes in covers and dropping Minor Threat phrases here and there. They had lots of local support and we were all really into it.

It did depress me when Toby Morse did a song from the pit, and said "I'm 42, so you know, don't hurt me", and I was like "shit, you're the 'noob' from 1996, and now you're 42, I wanna hang myself". For the record, Ian MacKaye is now 50. The photos of them largely sucked, but I've got a couple for posterity.

They've managed to compare Burger King to Heston Blumenthal in one breath. Favorably.

I can't say I'm likely to order either a bacon sundae or a Burger King pulled pork sandwich. I mean, thank you guys for making your fries suck less, but knock this off.

Via The Daily Mail