Even though I’ve been ripping and burning MP3’s for years, it’s only been since I got my iPhone that I’ve been using my MP3’s for regular playback. Up until now, my MP3’s were simply an easier way to organize and store my music collection. I’ve mostly only used MP3’s as a platform to more easily burn songs to CD or minidisc for enjoyment in the truck, home, or at work. Of course for backyard barbecues and holidays like Halloween, I’d setup a playlist on the computer, and I once burned an MP3 DVD just to test out the feature on a new DVD player. But still, for regular listening I listened to music recorded on hard medium until the iPhone, so I’ve been playing a little catch up on the technology.

Excepting only a few recent album purchases, I’ve kept up with ripping all my CD’s and have every song encoded as an MP3 with artist, album, track, title information. Now recently, since using iTunes, I’ve been adding album art to all my MP3s. The album art displays on the iPhone when a song is played and appears in the album view display on both the phone and the desktop version of iTunes.  I think sliding through the album covers and selecting one to play is the most impressive example of the advantage of the touch navigation and the iPhone’s beautifully rendered graphics.  The Mac makes it easy to add the art because you can simply use a search engine’s, like AllTheWeb, image search function and drag the source image right to the album. It’s also great that if the source image has since been removed and is no longer available, you can just drag the thumnail representation right off the search engine’s results page.  Oddly enough, sometimes these thumbnails even look better than the source image for rare songs where few alternatives available.

I’ve always manually defined the artist’s name on compilation albums because I want the songs to appear when I sort by artist and not just when I search for an artist’s name. For example, I would want Sweet Jane to appear if I were browsing through the Cowboy Junkies, and not have it be sorted with the V’s under “Various Artists” just because it happens to be from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. Storing the albums this way never seems to occur to programmers who write MP3 software and result in somewhat of a mess. For example, in any album view or sort, iTunes treats each song like its own album and separates it from the rest of the tracks. For these, I click select each of the songs on the album, use the Mac’s command-I function, and assign the album art to all the songs at once through the properties window that pops up.  You can also assign multiple art files to your songs, but I haven’t seen a need for that yet and have only assigned one per.

I found a nice widget that automatically looks up whatever song is playing if it doesn’t already have art and finds an image from one of several defined sites (e.g. Amazon).  It’s a good tool because it’s very simple and does exactly what it sets out to do, but I found that I could usually find much better, clearer images on my own.  I also found that it doesn’t like the way I name tracks from compilation albums any better than iTunes, and results in locating the art for the album on which the artist originally released the song and assigns it to the whole album, which is a nuisance.  Another album art tool I’m using is a screen saver that wallpapers the screen with rows and rows of artwork, then randomly flips each one and replaces it with a different album.  I don’t know if it’s new with OS X Leopard or had existed in Tiger too, but I’ve only just noticed it recently.

I also experimented with the iTunes’ store’s custom ringtones, but wasn’t satisfied with the results. To create a ringtone, you need to have purchased the song through the store, so I had to buy a single I already owned, then buy the ringtone made from the track.  I got to pick and adjust the sample of the song that I wanted to rip to a ringtone, but that was more of a curse than a blessing. What I thought sounded great on the Mac is a muted, delayed mess on the iPhone.  I left so much of a pause at the beginning that I might as well have selected dead air.  Now, whenever Maggie calls, the iPhone stops playing music and I hear absolutely nothing and realize it’s her before a note has played, which is not what I was looking for in a ringtone, at least not for $5. I’m going to start checking out some make-your-own ringtone tools and some of the free sites out there and report back what I find. Once I get some that I like, I’ll write how to load them on the iPhone.

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.”
Frank Zappa

I did a lot of reading over the summer and burned through a lot of money on new books. At one point, I read three novels in about a week and a half and then had to force myself to slow down the pace with a couple non-fiction books. Not that reading a a novel every three days is a particularly fantastical feat. I remember reading Shane in one sitting for a school assignment when I was in about the fifth grade.

I have a friend whose wife is a competetive speed reader. These aren’t body-sanctioned contests, mind you, but a competitve habit of finding out what book a person is reading, getting it, and having it finished for the next time she sees them. I don’t think she’d be impressed by three books in ten days, either. But, for me it was pretty above average. I usually don’t make time to read and never read before sleep.

I also hold on to books. When I finish a hard-cover, I remove the dust jacket and toss it before retiring the book to a shelf. Sometimes I debate whether I shouldn’t have held on to the dust covers because they protect the book and help it retain its value. Or so I’ve heard. I just liked the way a natural hard-cover looked, so I started doing it one day and habits can be hard to break. Whenever I think of breaking this one, I remember all the covers of great books I tossed and talk myself out of dishonoring that sacrifice by saving the cover of something I read in half a week during lunch and bathroom breaks.

For me, books add up pretty quickly and take up a lot of space in an already cluttered living room. If I had a library, made of mahogany and with a fireplace, leather chairs and a wet bar with scotch in a crystal decanter no less, I’d happily tuck my past reads into it for future McMahon generations. But, I don’t. Instead, my books are stacked, stuffed, and piled onto a book case in our livingroom. Fortunately, there’s a solution that satisfies my problem of having too many books and also quenches my thirst for the written word.

Bookmooch.com is a book sharing community where members accrue credits from sharing books with other members. The credits are then used to get other books. Each book you give earns you a credit and every book you receive costs you a credit. It’s basically a book-for-book system, although you can earn additional credits for shipping to a foreign country and adding books to your list. When I ran a BBS, we used the same concept for sharing software: a game was a game, it didn’t matter if it was a 3-level version of Tank, it was still worth the same as the latest release. Sometimes to promote uploads, I’d give some people 2-for-1 credits on the latest releases. Bookmooch.com handles their credits well and keeps a user from stacking the deck by capping the send-to-receive ratio at 1:5 which is fair and still encourages good use.

The list of available titles is exhaustive and there are lots of quality books that would still retail very high. I’m going to go through my bookshelf tonight and post all the books I wouldn’t mind going. Not that I didn’t enjoy reading them, but there aren’t a lot of books that I read multiple times and only certain collections that I want to preserve and hand down. I’ll have to check with Maggie and see which James Patterson books can go and which she hasn’t read yet. Some of them Patterson just gave up naming and just started numbering. I think Maggie made it up to 4. She also has a bunch of Sue Grafton’s; Grafton lettered hers. If you see me on Bookmooch.com, pick out a book. Just don’t expect a dust jacket.

http://bookmooch.com/

I checked out Playwithyourmind.com tonight, a neat site with flash games, puzzles, and IQ tests. They boast over 100 mind games including intelligence tests like color or pattern recognition, numbers, multitasking, logic puzzles, and even card games. The site is arranged cleanly and simply and doesn’t bog down with advertisements. It’s really well organized.

Whenever I come across one of these kinds of sites, I always have to test my typing skills. My typing method is kind of a hybrid style between touch typing and mashing the keyboard. My fingers tend to hover in the traditional home position, but after years of coding, I’ve become accustomed to various home positions depending on the task at hand: over the numeric keypad, over the numeric keys, over the arrows, or over the WASDX keys. Sometimes, I preoccupy my left hand with handling Control, Shift, and Alt while the right has to do the work of two. Plus, I strike keys with the heel of the palm, side of the thumb, and the side of the hand in ways that I don’t think you’ll learn in the Mavis Beacon typing course. I use whatever is most convenient to the key. I also get into grooves when coding, especially if I’m doing a lot of code cleanup, where I sort of roll the keys and listen to the clicks to tell if I’ve made a typo.

I fly when I’m coding. It’s not the same as secretarial skills in typing because the vocabulary is significantly curtailed and you’re typing your own thoughts and not transcribing the thoughts of others. Even still, I’m also pretty quick typing letters.  So, I like to test myself every once in a while and see how I do in these tests.  PlayWithYourMind.com has a couple typing games so I went directly to the most obvious of them, The Typing Test.  In the practice game I scored 136,781 with 0 typos and 18 seconds left. I thought that was pretty good, so I went on to the next game, the first being only a practice. Unfortunately the game then reports an error and only after digging around the typing section could I manually select the other games and find that it requires me to register and compete for the real games to load fully. It’s a bit disappointing and not obvious from the outset, but the registration requirement isn’t really out of line. Although I didn’t register myself, I can still recommend the site as something worth checking out. If you find something you like here and register, post a comment and let me know your experience. At least it didn’t just close out my browser window like another typing site did.