It's All About the Benjamins

On persuasive Internet essays, or Op-EDs

BHLamb — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:39:01 +0000

If your first or second paragraph starts with the phrase “Let’s face it”, a jump colon, and the point you are attempting to make, I have no interest in reading what you have to say.

Let’s face it: you are an idiot and are trying to make your opinion look like an already-substantiated fact that people are possibly unwilling to accept. Also, there is a time and a place for stock phrases, but “let’s face it” is just garbage.

Note to self

BHLamb — Mon, 10 May 2010 17:34:49 +0000

When your webhosting company send you an automated response because they think that your site has been hacked, and they send you what looks like malformed sed strings to clean up SEO spam, don’t run the sed strings to check whether or not they’re malformed. They are, and what you thought was sed’s test flag is not in fact sed’s test flag.

Three hours of my life I will never have back.

EDIT: All portions of iaatb.net not in blog2/ or upload/ are no longer web-reachable. The first time this hack-and-spam thing happened, I thought I could solve it by updating all of the many cms packages scattered around iaatb and then just turning off on things that weren’t the blog. Looks like that just isn’t going to work.

FLAC in iTunes: Congratulations, It’s Working

BHLamb — Sat, 01 May 2010 17:39:13 +0000

Want to skip all this backstory and just learn how well Fluke works? Click here to skip it, skip it.¹

One of my biggest issues when I switched to macintoshes back in 2006 was my enormous (at least in terms of file size) collection of music. After the high school days of listening to midis and 96kbps napster mp3s in winamp, I had fully committed to make lossless digital backups of all the CDs that had come into my possession. Of course, the best way to that at the time, and even nowadays, is by encoding audio CDs to FLAC. If you’re not in the know, FLAC is sort of like a zip file for raw CD audio² and it’s superior to everything else in every way except it doesn’t play in iTunes.

Or at least it didn’t when I got my mac mini. So, I transcoded some of the music that I liked the best at the time, and threw it into iTunes. The then-egregiously-humongous external HD with all my FLACs on it stayed at home, sitting dormant until the day I could find a way to resurrect them.

Every so often I’d make a trek into the wilds of les Internets to find a cure for these problems. Sure, both of the iPods I’ve owned over the years have been kinda sub-optimal, so maybe I should have dumped iTunes for another media player. In fact, I really hated all this “media library” crap when they added it to winamp, so why was I was I even using iTunes in the first place? Well, because anything else to play music on mac sucked. The only real alternative back that even worked was VLC, and half the time it would pull this really buggy nonsense where it would only play every other second of the audio stream, so that was out of the running. Nowadays there’s Songbird which looks like a worthy replacement except that a.) it’s just as much a “media library” as iTunes and b.) THERE IS NO ~~DANA~~ OSX-NATIVE FONT RENDERING, ONLY ~~ZUUL~~ XUL. And seriously, eff that. At this point, there are four reasons why I use a macintosh:

Pages is so, so much better than Word
The user interface is so much more consistent and less nasty than windows, especially when it comes to typefaces
It’s a UNIX system, I know this
Oh crap, all my graduate work is formatted in .pages so I can’t really get out of it anyway.

So why would I give up point number two just to listen to flacs, especially since my decent speaker system was, by then, totally trashed? This font thing also the reason why I used safari over firefox even back in the days when the former was crashtastic. I mean really mozilla, would it kill you to at least have the option to use the OS’s font rendering malarkey? Anyhow.

After FLAC got absorbed by Xiph (aka the ogg vorbis/vogg orbis/wuagh gorbis people), there were some rumblings about a FLAC quicktime component, but it was buggy and never really worked with iTunes etc., so my external HD of FLACs got left in the US while I went to Italy to listen to music on the tinniest laptop speakers ever created by humans.

At some point, I found out about some work a person did that actually makes flacs work in iTunes in a quasi-native way. But, when I got a chance to plug in my external HDD, which in the ensuing years had become decidedly less enormous, it didn’t boot. Nothing. Turns out somebody had placed my brother’s old POS laptop, running, on top of the HD enclosure for months. It was a nice big 3.5″ aluminum heatsink. Now that I had all the ability to listen to all my precious lossless music for the first time in ages, it was all gone. Gone! Except some concert bootlegs I had stashed elsewhere. But those are boring.

Well fast forward to today when I got the first CD I’ve bought it ages, and decided to give Dimitry Kichenko’s Fluke a try. After dealing with my beleaguered laptop’s optical drive (which only works with the laptop upside-down), I ripped and FLACked² all the tracks to MGMT’s new album Congratulations. Didn’t bother tagging them or anything, in part because xACT is really crappy compared to what I used to use to rip on windows (Easy CD-DA extractor, which is great by the way), and also I wanted witness the power of this fully-operational battle plugin.

After a quick DL and install of Fluke Beta 2.5 I was able to import and tag those bad boys. All I had to do was launch iTunes, and then drag the FLACs to the Fluke application icon in /Applications (not the iTunes icon in the dock or whatever). Boom.

Now the question was Album Art. When iTunes started auto-play of the first track (serendipitously entitled “It’s Working”), I noticed that the art viewport was blank with an “Album Art Not Modifiable” message. Hrmph. Well, then again, I realized that I didn’t even know if FLAC files could embed album art – certainly back in the height of my FLAC usage I wasn’t doing any album art embedding; cover art was just .jpgs in the album folder as far as I was concerned. The seventh google hit for “flac artwork” was a comment bitchfest over on macupdate, about Fluke no less, and how people weren’t able to get their embedded artwork to work. But hey, guess what, one of the posters said that using iTunes’ “Find Artwork” did the job. I guess its a good thing that I didn’t bother trying to tag the flacs in xACT because I would have been fighting a losing battle with the artwork otherwise. So here’s a screenshot for proof, you macupdate crybabies.

So, uh, special thanks to the author, who you should follow at http://twitter.com/imissmyjuno even if you don’t use macs or flacs.

–––
1. But the very best thing of all is that there’s a counter on this ball.
2. This isn’t entirely true. FLACs are a bunch of (functionally-identical) calculus approximations the original waveform; the older SHN format was in fact basically a zip file for audio data.
3. I have now unilaterally decreed that the past participle of FLAC is FLACked, like trafficked or hilarious Samuel Johnson-era stuff. I don’t care what I’ve used in the past or maybe even earlier in this blog post.

Hey all you clever facebookers that are mock-suggesting secession

BHLamb — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:19:43 +0000

I have prepared an informative diagram for you, so that you might further assess the feasibility of such an endeavor:

Your cache of AR-15s draped in a Gasden flag is so cute.

Okay seriously guys

BHLamb — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:41:06 +0000

Dear J. Crew:

I know that you’re sorry about pissing me off because you made your sizes too small for a few seasons. I appreciate that you’ve been trying to make it up to me since Christmas by listing more clothes than just dress shirts in XL-Tall and XXL. You’re even selling the only pair of jeans I would ever consider wearing for reasons of fashion rather than just doing farm work – 501s – and I’m willing to overlook the fact that you made up some silly reason to charge a buck forty for them. I mean, it’s okay, the ones I already have will last another 10 years so I’ll just buy another pair for 40 bones at J.C. Penney if they still exist in 2019. It was a good effort by you guys, and I appreciate it.

But this here offering, J. Crew. That’s just flat out groveling for me to buy stuff from you again. They’re not even some sort of silly special edition like you did with the converse shoes. You have listed $55 black adidas sambas. You know, the ones I can get from the Kern Bros for the exact same price, and have repeatedly since they still sold them in green back in the early nineties. I mean, look, okay, I’ll buy some new shirts once I get another paycheck, you don’t have to pander that hard.

Love and kisses,
Our Bennyfactor

Did you know that when it comes to economic policy…

BHLamb — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:43:13 +0000

I AM AN EXPAIIIIIIIRRRRT?!

Yeah, so thanks to one of the cool kids from Hardizzle, Ian Thomas, I got a chance to play the hottest Ben Bernanke simulator around: The Bailout Game. On the first play through all you haters ought to know that Our Bennyfactor stemmed off the the recession, only spent about 30% of the 700 billion bailout package, and, oh yeah, that’s right. The DOW was at 16k and climin’ vavy! Do you know why? That’s right, just like my main man J-C Trichet,

I GET MONEY.

Let’s see how you guys do! I think I’m gonna try to keep things going without bailing out GM next time.

PS And if the Notorious is out there still reading this, could you make a real Ben Bernanke sim? You know, like Gran Turismo, only it would be THE REAL CENTRAL BANKING SIMULATOR. Instead of starting out with like a ’81 CRX or a ’83 Corolla Levin, the player would start out with a selection of say, an entry position a member bank of the Eurosystem or the Federal Reserve, and move up the ladder. Or, maybe, as the head of some LDC’s central bank and try to make that LDC a regional economic powerhouse. You’d have at least one buyer.

The best part of wikipedia is the vandalism

BHLamb — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:02:58 +0000

So I was reading this article on slashdot about how paypal reneged on a bunch of payments to Indian subscribers, essentially because Paypal pretends not to be a bank and the Indian central bank is turning the screws. At least, that’s why according to this slashdotter Naturally the first thought to my mind and that of many other was that beautifully racist phrase “Indian giver” and naturally somebody posted a wikipedia link. It’s pretty informative about the possibilities of the origin of the phrase, and then, you know, I scrolled down to the “See Also.”

PRICELESS, ERR

Intuition once again substantiated by facts

BHLamb — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:39:05 +0000

Ever since I moved to Norfolk I’ve always thought that traffic was terrible and that these people drive like idiots! Turns out I’m freaking right and here are the statistics to prove it:

Most likely place in Va. to crash is Hampton Roads (Virginian-Pilot)

Oh, and here’s some delectable morsels:

On average, thereÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s a traffic accident in Hampton Roads every 19 minutes. Every 2Ã‚Â½ days, someone dies from one of those crashes

The leading causes of accidents here include following too closely, distracted driving and failure to yield.

AKA, driving like idiots!

A taste of the old vitriol

BHLamb — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:24:00 +0000

Did you know that there are people out there who don’t believe that people drank alcohol in classical antiquity? Did you know that these people probably call antiquity “Bible Times” but never distinguish between classical antiquity of and the Late Bronze Age, which are so totally like 800 years apart? And plus in the Late Bronze Age they only had a little bit of iron, which must have been a pain in the butt when you were a bronze-age military going up against an early iron-age culture that also had a guy that was really a lot taller than you were? Oh and also did you know that these people are uniformly uniformed?*

WELL NOW YOU KNOW DEAR READERS.

So what is wine anyway? I’m a big fan of chianti, almost as much as San Pellegrino (1 2 3 4 5 6 7), so I know a little bit about how it’s made**. See, the really cool thing about grapes is that they in a symbiotic relationship with yeast; the yeast grows on the grapeskins and then, when one mashes up the ripened grapes to get the juice out, the yeast comes along for the ride and helps preserve the juice: by turning it into wine!

You see, grape juice as we know it didn’t exist until somebody invented it – I’m serious – until the 1860s. That fresh-squeezed stuff from the recently-picked grapes isn’t grape juice even though I called it that, it’s more like a grape cider, since it’s got a bunch of mush and grape solids in it. But anyway, you take this freshly-pressed grape mash and put it in a container, and, in about a week, you get primary fermented wine! So what the little yeasties do is take the sugar from the unfiltered, unpasteurized grape juice-and-bits and convert some of it into ethanol and carbon dioxide, which acts as a preservative, killing off bacteria (but not the little yeasties). In classical antiquity, an easy way to make a sealed container that could handle the expansion from the creation of a bunch of CO₂ (and concomittantly enthanol, hereafter known as “booze”) was a bag made out of animal skin. And then, after the primary fermentation is done, one filters the wine, pours off all the carbon dioxide (otherwise known as fizz) and puts it into another sealed container where it undergoes some secondary fermentation to bring the alcohol level up to about 12%. These days this is usually done in an oak barrel or maybe in the glass wine bottle, once again in those heady Bible Times they used the ol’ animal skins. In fact, they used the old ol’ animal skins because secondary fermentation doesn’t make a lot of fizz (red wine doesn’t have a head like beer does, or champagne – which is a complicated production) and thus wouldn’t pop an old, hardened wineskin that had already been stretched out once already. Because you know, unlike today the ancients just didn’t waste packaging when they were done with it, they, uh, recycled! For example, here’s a quotation from a source written down during the Classical Roman period:

And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, Ã¢â‚¬Å“The old is good.Ã¢â‚¬Â

Man those crazy Greeks and Romans and their enjoyment of well-fermented vintage wines and drinking different kinds of wine and saying things like “the old is good”! Man I wonder who was the writer of this mysterious quotation Ben Lamb just put in there, maybe it was like Virgil or Cicero or some crap, or maybe Martial since he was always writing about scandalous activities.

Oh but hark, what heading from yonder leather-bound volume breaks? ‘Tis the fifth chapter of Luke, and Jesus Christ the speaker. You know, that guy whose first miraculous sign was making a bunch of booze at a wedding? Yeah, him. Well, my stomach hurts and I just had another winter nosebleed so I’m going to follow the advice of a wacky ex-Pharisee and get off the Internet for a while.
—
*Well at least, the people who doubt the consumption of alcohol; though I guess the bronze-age militaries facing iron-age militaries were uniformly informed of, uh, ironmaking.

**PS Czech this photodump for some serious old school shots of Ivo.

IAATB.net is well within the Cone Zone

BHLamb — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:23:11 +0000

Like Andre 3000, I just want you to know how I feel.