yipee!

Unlike Zannah, I like toast. I especially like cinnamon toast. YUM. But I’ve never really thought about pushing things through toast. Fortunately, someone else taken care of this for me.

I saw a post over on jenett.radio about Blogshares this morning.

huh?
I bought 1000 shares in a weblog this morning at $1.90 each and the price immediately went down to $1.70.  After thinking about it a while, I decided to purchase 250 shares more, hoping it would bring the price back up a bit.  It immediately went down to $1.50 per share.  &lt;singin’>I’m a loser baby, so why don’t ya kill me</singin’>… ;~) [jenett.radio]

So, on a hunch, I decided to check out the page for my blog over there. Sure enough my blog has been losing value while he’s have been buying shares. WTF???

One of these is probably classifiable as a bug, one is just a gripe of mine. Both are to do with shared playlists.

• When playing a song from a remote playlist programs that query iTunes for what song is playing don’t get any information back. As far as I can tell this is just an outright bug. You can still see in the status window what song is playing, so iTunes has that information. You can even Get Info on a remote track. This one is a higher priority for me because it kind of breaks Kung-Tunes working for me.

• When playing songs off a remote machine it doesn’t grab album artwork. Why not? If it’s available it should grab it. It’s not huge. I can’t think of any reason not to.

While I like iTunes 4 overall and think the music store is pretty swanky, there are a number of places where iTunes 4 is missing some of the typical polish I’ve come to expect from Apple software. Did they just think people weren’t going to be using some of these features that much? They don’t seem to really have a good feel for what their customers are doing then.

Now as far as a wish list item. I want a remote control mode. I want to be able to pop up an iTunes window that links directly to an instance of iTunes running on a remote machine. I’ve got a G3 which is used as a file server, and now with iTunes 4 a music server. But one thing I’m thinking of doing is plugging my G3 into my stereo. This would let me play songs over my stereo (I’ve got the Audiotron too, but it won’t play AAC and doesn’t support smart playlists). And while I could use some applescript to write a remote control app it would be most cool to be able to control iTunes remotely with a full featured interface. Let me sign on, let me create new playlists on that machine, choose which one to play, the whole ball of wax.

Gizmodo has a post about the Radio YourWay from PoGo! Products and calls it TiVo for radio. It’s closer to a VCR for radio than a TiVo. It’s missing a lot of the things that make the TiVo special. The biggest of which are things like pause and rewind back a few minutes in while listening to ‘live radio’. Still, it is a step in the right direction. Oh yeah, and it doesn’t support seem to have Mac support.

What else would I put into this product if I was selling it. I’d bluetooth or WiFi enable it so that I could configure it from my computer easily without having to plug it in. I’d work on developing some kind of standard for radio stations to publish their schedules in so that I could browse what shows were on when and select ones to record (or does some kind of TV listing type thing exist for radio already?).

Hesketh Pearson: “Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.” [Quotes of the Day]

Ever walk by those vending machines as a kid and beg your mom for a quarter so you can get something? John Tynes points to Direct from Source. Everything from gumballs to superballs with aliens in them. I feel like a kid again.

I hope there aren’t any duplicates in here from when I was ripping stuff before. Even though I am planning on re-ripping everything into AAC I’ll start with what I haven’t ripped at all.

• The Dave Brubeck Quartet – Time Further Out
• Kate Bush – The Whole Story
• Kate Bush – The Kick Inside
• bel canto – magic box
• Adam Ant – Antics in the Forbidden Zone
• China Crisis – Acoustically Yours
• Classic Acid
• Toni Childs – Union
• The Cardigans – first band on the moon
• The Cardigans – Life
• Edie Carey – Call me Home
• Camoflage – Voices & Images
• the Breeders – Last Splash
• Richard Blade’s Flashback Favorites

I’m pretty sure I listed one or two here before, but I wasn’t sure. Lots of nice stuff in this batch. The Cardigan’s Life is one of my favorite drive home from a rave CDs. It had just enough energy to keep me driving and not falling asleep. Also, Camoflage, I remember it taking me forever to find out they were the ones who did The Great Commandment years and years ago. And Richard Blade’s Flashback Favorites is one of my favorite 80s collections, this one has Heaven 17’s Let me Go (and I’m having a hard enough time any Heaven 17 on CD these days).

So I posted a bit about how my ISP had been filtering spam right? I keep finding more and more messages that I think it was filtering. Like the ones from various mailing lists I’m on that go out monthly. I hadn’t seen any of those in months, but I do now. Thanks again AT&T, you’re doing a wonderful job. Let’s see if Comcast gets it any better.

Galileo Galilei: “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” [Quotes of the Day]