Sunday, April 27, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
And it's so true.
Just ran across this on that there innanet-thing. Yes, I'm fully aware it's an internet legend, and no, it can't be attributed to Bill Gates, Kurt Vonnegut or Brooks Coleman.
(according to Snopes it's actually the work of Charles J. Sykes - the author of a book entitled "Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add.")
Who cares who wrote it though, as far as I'm concerned it's true.
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Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase "It's not fair" 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.
Rule No. 2: The real world won't care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It'll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it's not fair. (See Rule No. 1.)
Rule No. 3: Sorry, you won't make $60,000 a year right out of high school. And you won't be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn't have a Gap label.
Rule No. 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he's not going to ask you how you feel about it, or if you found it a valuable learning experience.
Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren't embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.
Rule No. 6: It's not your parents' fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of "It's my life," and "You're not the boss of me," and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it's on your dime. Don't whine about it, or you'll sound like a baby boomer.
Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.
Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn't. In some schools, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone's feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.)
Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don't get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don't get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we're at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realization. (See Rule No. 1 and Rule No. 2.)
Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.
Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.
Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you're out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple/emo hair and/or pierced body parts.
Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.
Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you'll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You're welcome.
(according to Snopes it's actually the work of Charles J. Sykes - the author of a book entitled "Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add.")
Who cares who wrote it though, as far as I'm concerned it's true.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase "It's not fair" 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.
Rule No. 2: The real world won't care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It'll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it's not fair. (See Rule No. 1.)
Rule No. 3: Sorry, you won't make $60,000 a year right out of high school. And you won't be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn't have a Gap label.
Rule No. 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he's not going to ask you how you feel about it, or if you found it a valuable learning experience.
Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren't embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.
Rule No. 6: It's not your parents' fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of "It's my life," and "You're not the boss of me," and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it's on your dime. Don't whine about it, or you'll sound like a baby boomer.
Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.
Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn't. In some schools, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone's feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.)
Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don't get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don't get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we're at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realization. (See Rule No. 1 and Rule No. 2.)
Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.
Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.
Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you're out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple/emo hair and/or pierced body parts.
Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.
Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you'll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You're welcome.
Monday, April 14, 2008
The definition of annoying
Extract DVR-R rip from ISO and unpack.
Feed through transcoder/burner while fails due to insufficent target size. WTF? The point of the transcoder is to compress the thing!
Try different mode on transcoder which fails with same error. Getting annoyed.
Swear, dig out offboard transcoder. Mount original DVR-R ISO and rip from there to HDD. Target size is 4.35GB as expected.
Fire up burner and run.... same failure again. Getting really annoyed now, what the fuck did they do to the rip when they made it? Is there some sort of false-sized file I can't see, and if so how the hell does it get through two separate transcoders without an error?
Get out Nero, point at transcoded files as a source and set up a manual burn. About 50MB inside disk capacity, great. I'll fix you, you bastard.
2 seconds later Nero ejects the disk, which is its way of saying unsuitable media for some reason.
()#*&^#(*&#&#^%#*&#%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So I'm about to rip out Mediacheck for a look at the disk to see if I've got an out of the spindle coaster or something, when I look at the disk again.... it's a printable, but the surface is smoother than I'm used to to. I flip the disk over.
I've had a fucking printable CD in the drive. ~~>X-|
Sharepod
Just noticed that Sharepod is up to v3.8, and now included a feature I have been dying for - video last-place-resume.
I use my Classic primarily for watching video on the train to work, but when the train (or tram) is crush-full that's not a possbility, so I drop it into normal video mode. The problem is that when I toggle back to video later, I have to start from the beginning and fast-forward to where I want. This is annoying as it's slow and chews battery very quickly.
SP v3.8 fixes this by allowing tagging of the video files with an auto-resume function, so that if you select a previously played file it jumps back to the last known position. Thanks to Apple for enabling this, and bigger thanks to the Sharepod author for making it possible to access. You can even enable multiple files at once by shift-clicking all your video, then right-click, Edit, and tick the option in the Other Tags tab.
The downside is that the Eject button is broken when the app is run from the iPod itself (doesn't happen with v3.7) and the new artwork support function (which personally I don't give a toss about) is causing issues with deleting files; I get an "iPod ArtworkDB not found" error. Looks like I'm not the only person with this issue.
My workaround for the meantime is to run v3.7 on the iPod itself (I keep the app in a folder with a shortcut on the root set to auto-run when the device runs in Windows) and run v3.8 from Windows itself. This allows tagging of video files as they're loaded (which I only ever do from home anyway) and v3.7 is still onboard for deleting stuff and file manipulation if I am out and about.
Personally I think I'll just install Rockbox on the thing if they ever get it ported out to the Classic, but as I have next to zero programming skillz I won't be too harsh about this deficiency. :)
I use my Classic primarily for watching video on the train to work, but when the train (or tram) is crush-full that's not a possbility, so I drop it into normal video mode. The problem is that when I toggle back to video later, I have to start from the beginning and fast-forward to where I want. This is annoying as it's slow and chews battery very quickly.
SP v3.8 fixes this by allowing tagging of the video files with an auto-resume function, so that if you select a previously played file it jumps back to the last known position. Thanks to Apple for enabling this, and bigger thanks to the Sharepod author for making it possible to access. You can even enable multiple files at once by shift-clicking all your video, then right-click, Edit, and tick the option in the Other Tags tab.
The downside is that the Eject button is broken when the app is run from the iPod itself (doesn't happen with v3.7) and the new artwork support function (which personally I don't give a toss about) is causing issues with deleting files; I get an "iPod ArtworkDB not found" error. Looks like I'm not the only person with this issue.
My workaround for the meantime is to run v3.7 on the iPod itself (I keep the app in a folder with a shortcut on the root set to auto-run when the device runs in Windows) and run v3.8 from Windows itself. This allows tagging of video files as they're loaded (which I only ever do from home anyway) and v3.7 is still onboard for deleting stuff and file manipulation if I am out and about.
Personally I think I'll just install Rockbox on the thing if they ever get it ported out to the Classic, but as I have next to zero programming skillz I won't be too harsh about this deficiency. :)
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
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