rhymes with milk

Ignite Boulder 10
Andrew Hyde

—

Winamp rules. This song in FLAC rules.

Frolfing today was awesome, but Hannah didn’t come, so maybe frolfing was not awesome.

It’s profound eloquence like that that makes me think I should’t be blogging.

—

Grooveshark has a negligible amount of Smashing Pumpkins songs, and Deezer only has horrific covers. So for the first time, I uploaded a bunch of songs to Grooveshark tonight, 139 of which were Smashing Pumpkins. It says that they will be reviewed and added to my library within 24 hours.

I wonder what that review process is. Are there certain artists or songs that are blocked? There’s no way a human could do all the reviewing, there must be way too many songs uploaded every day. So is there an algorithm they go through to make sure uploaded songs not on the black list? Do they just look at the song’s metadata and compare the song title & artist name against a database? If so, you could just change the songs info to something false, then upload it. Or perhaps they use acoustical signature recognition like Shazam?

Maybe I’m over-thinking it because the *NSync albums I just uploaded are already in my library. Apparently they don’t go through too much scrutiny.

Eight photos were used to create this. More != better.

I just got a new laptop, and it came with dozens of annoyingly bloated applications that I really don’t need. At least 4 different media galleries and organizers were pre-installed. To get around having to delete and uninstall everything, I just wiped the C: drive and installed a fresh, albeit cracked, version of Windows 7.

As it turns out, a lot of the terrible annoying applications were actually there for a reason. They made my computer work. Specifically, they made all the features that originally made my laptop badass work. Not only did a bunch of features stop working (touchpad scrolling, bluetooth, the Fn key), Microsoft somehow found out that the new version of Windows I installed was not genuine, and they reminded me that they knew every 5 minutes.

I called Sony to see if I could buy a restore disk, which I was hoping would be able to restore all of the lost functionality. After a lot of confusing phone calls, I found out that a restore disk doesn’t even exist for my computer. They said that it’s most likely because it’s a new model, and often restore disks aren’t created for at least several months after new products are released.

Which makes NO sense.

Maybe that is in fact the case, but don’t you think it’d be easy enough to create an install disk BEFORE you start selling a specific model. But whatever.

Anyway, I eventually was told that my computer actually has the restore “disk” built in. When I was installing the fresh version of Windows, I noticed that there was at least one extra partition on my hard drive. I had no idea what it was for at the time, but I decided not to erase it…just in case.

Thank god I didn’t. That extra partition contains what is essentially a snapshot of your computer when it left the factory. It had a backup of the original operating system and custom applications Sony spams their new computers with. Ultimately, it was entirely painless going through the restoration process, and within an hour or two, my computer was back to normal.

What I’ve learned (aka the moral of the story):

• Don’t delete mystery factory-created drive partitions…just in case.
• Uninstall shit like Norton 60-day free trials, but if it says “Sony” and you don’t know what it’s for, simply don’t touch it.
• If a cracked product requires activation to work, always activate it OFFLINE if possible.

This morning I was lying in bed coming up with great ideas that could change the world. One such idea was a concept for a service that I think is desperately needed. I got the idea while thinking about the iPad’s limited release, and how it’s not yet available outside the US. I bet there are some people in other countries that would pay well above retail prices to get one early, and whoever provided this service for them could make a hefty profit. And it doesn’t have to be limited to useless Apple gadgets.

Then tonight — literally less than 15 hours after my stroke of inspired genius — I was reading about absolutely awesome websites, and I found out that somebody had my idea first. MyUS is apparently a pretty big deal. Though I’m not going to make any money off of it, I at least know that my original ideas are worth millions. Awesome.

I have a backlog of posts that I’ve just never finished. I tend to start posts, make them much longer than they were originally supposed to be, then lose interest 3/4 of the way through. It’s a bad sign when a blog’s content bores the author.

So until I come back with some real content that’s worth a damn, check out duplos.org. It’s incredible what’s possible with some jQuery and a pinch of creativity. Ah creativity, how you elude me.

Not that it was a living hell. It wasn’t. But it sure as hell wasn’t heaven, either.
—Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Ally and I are going to a Bar Mitzvah in Miami later in the year, and when I found out about it I started panicking about all of the 5 year old cousins I’d be surrounded by.  I’m not so good with the lil’ ones, you see.  I don’t know how to talk to them, or what even to talk to them about.  They’re quite dumb creatures if you think about it.  They have few reasoning skills, and their abilities to carry on complex conversations are limited (to put it lightly).  They’re still in that phase of their life when they’re not psychologically capable of handling emotions in an appropriate manner, so they cry a lot.   Hell, when I introduce myself and hold my hand out expecting theirs in return, I’m usually met either with silence and overwhelming shyness, or a crusty booger-covered set of toothpick fingers.

So how am I going to deal with a long weekend—mere days before I begin taking upper division university courses about complex algorithms and low-level machine representations of data, no less—talking with these developmentally primitive miniature humanoids?  I’ve decided to come up with a few talking points to initiate conversations that would both be engaging for me, and dumb enough for them to understand and relate to.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. “I can solve a Rubik’s cube in about 1 minute.  What colorful toys are you that good at?”
2. “I see you have hot dogs in that mac & cheese you’re eating.” [side note: I totally expect to be referencing the food on their bibs] ” I once ate an entire package of 8 hot dogs—including buns!—in under 5 minutes.  Boom goes the dynamite!”
3. “Come on, think about it logically.  What sort of physical explanation can you come up with for how those reindeer stay in the air?  It’s just not feasible.”
4. “If you were an animal on Arthur, what kind of animal would you be?  I call lion.  I’d never go hungry with all of those aardvarks around, that’s for sure!”
5. “Don’t hang out with little Suzie too much.  Before you know it middle school will roll around, and you’ll be stuck in the ‘friend zone’ when it actually counts.”
6. “Back in my day, garbage men used to hang off the back of the truck!  It’s never too late for you to change your aspirations, kid.  If you really put your mind to it, you too could hang off the back of a garbage truck someday.”
7. “So your twitter background is a photo of elmo, huh?”

Hopefully Ally has seven or fewer 5 year old cousins.  I’d be completely stumped with what to talk to number eight about.

Let me know if you can come up with any.

I’m a fan of Disqus. It’s a great commenting system, the Gravatar support is a plus, and the comment tracking they have for your profile is awesome. So a few months ago when I was still in the process of creating this blog, I installed it here on Rhymes With Milk using the official Disqus WordPress plugin.

As the process of creating this site started to wind down, I started thinking about validating my code (as any good developer would do). Essentially this just means that I check to see if the organization that governs internet standards thinks my XHTML is up to snuff. And whaddaya know, the homepage alone has over 3 dozen errors*, but none of them are errors I made. They mostly come from the code Disqus adds to the page (with most of the others coming from an embedded YouTube video).

This really rubbed me the wrong way. These weren’t simple negligible errors like “you shouldn’t have a border size declared on an iframe because that’s not allowed” (this in fact is an error on Mark’s blog — I think it’s a Tumblr thing, so give them shit for it, not Mark)** but ones like “there’s an extra link closer-outer tag for a link that doesn’t even exist.” Seriously, Disqus? You didn’t test the plugin before you launched it?

So I decided to hack it. The php files that actually define the plugin’s actions are a bit more advanced than I was prepared for (I can usually pick my way through other people’s code pretty well. Just take a look at my archives. You think those looked like that out-of-the-box? Hell no.). I Googled the problem with very low expectations (Disqus dev documentation is surprisingly scarce) but stumbled upon this gem. This blog takes you step-by-step on how to correct the invalid markup that Disqus adds to your page. Awesome, it just saved me at least 4 hair-pulling hours.

I think the post was written at least one plugin version ago because some things looked a bit different on mine than in the examples, but for the most part I was able to do just what it said verbatim. And happily it worked. My site’s validation checked out (aside from that stupid YouTube video), but for some reason I lost comment count. All posts said that there were zero comments. With my tail between my legs, I got rid of the hacked Disqus and reinstalled a factory-fresh version, complete with its terrible markup.

But not all is lost. The site doesn’t really visually or functionally “break” because of the poorly written code (at least not on good browsers), so in the short run I can ignore the validation issues. And hopefully “the short run” is all that I’ll have to worry about. 3 days ago Disqus posted this on their blog:

We’re nearing the release of our new WordPress plugin that contains bug fixes, better importing, compatibility fixes with themes and other plugins, as well as offers new improvements in performance and speed.

And one of the comment moderators (aka a Disqus employee) said that the plugin is supposed to be released this week! It feels like Christmas in the RWM household. Hopefully they get it right this time. All the way right.

* Take a look for yourself. Click here to see all the errors.

** The only reason I looked at the validation info for his site was because he also has Disqus installed on his blog and I wanted to see if it generated the same errors there, too. It does not because the Tumblr and WordPress inclusion codes are different.

…of Ally’s new blog design. Dustin and I worked all night on it.