It's Tuesday morning, but that's not what we're talking about here, other than to clarify from yesterday's post that the reason MLB TV will be nice is I will be able to keep up with both the Red Sox AND the Cubs while mired in the land of figurative and literal Diamondbacks. So Tuesday discussion over (I won't even mention that another topic bombed in class today; seems I teach 18 year olds who are incapable of following instructions. The adjective "feeble-minded" is being tossed about...)
Sunday was spent behind a drape of rain. I woke up early unable to sleep and worked on my iTunes library for a bit - now THIS is the kind of dynamic writing the people tune in for! Seriously, I am adding album covers and putting dates on all of my iTunes music, and it's taking forever. Things I have learned from the process:
Greatest hits / compilation albums - in most cases, iTunes puts the year that the GH was released on the individual tracks instead of the year of their release. Argh!
Jazz compilations - because of the above fact, the jazz compilations I have are all labelled "2005" when the music was quite plainly recorded in the 1930s. Some of this information, because of the huge number of different versions of the same track, is essentially impossible to accurately determine without a huge amount of leg work, so I end up making generalizations like "The Charles Parker Dial Masters comes from 1939," even when I know this is not true. I am otherwise pretty strict about the accuracy (Though I also make big approximations on the classical music I own, usually putting "1730" as the date for a composers entire career. On the plus side, I now have electronic files from 1730 on my computer, dope).
iTunes album covers - are occasionally just wrong, and often unavailable because they only have album art for music they sell in their store. This means the entire Beatles catalog was unavailable and I had to grab the art individually from le internet. Very time consuming.
Also with the covers - embedding the art in the files wastes memory and is time consuming. Ideally I could just download one copy of the album cover and "point" all the files to it, but it seems iTunes very arbitrarily does this with some album art and refuses to do it with others.
End fascinating clip - but I should note that I have spent a good deal of time on this already and only got up to "Cheap Trick" this AM. I'm about 20% done, I think. This is going to take a while, but it would be nice to have it done display-wise for le wedding. All of which drives me insane, because I feel like I'm throwing hours and hours into a project just to pass the time - the project itself will not really be that meaningful once completed and I'll just have to go on to the next thing. Haunting. Oh, well. At least I get to look at the pretty pictures... anyways, speaking of le wedding, beck is getting her dress fitted today with the help of the make my goat the Pgoat. This whole thing is starting to get eerily real.
So that was part of Sunday, the rest of which was watching some hockey, some baseball and later that night the series premiere of "Drive" which is another chapter in the mindless drivel novel that is Fox television. And we might as well throw out there, television in general - did you *see* Lost and it's "twist" this week? You know, the one a blind, deaf and tactileless man could have seen, heard and felt coming from a mile away? It absolutely breaks my heart that Lost, "good" as it is, is the apex of what's available. Another rant for another time, but they put out some WEAK crap now and again.
And yet he continues to tune in...
So, continuing back, Saturday, the undoubted highlight of which was "Nyetian psychosis while playing Boggle." Ali/Grin/Sarah/Cristophe came over for pizza drinks and games, and we had a grand ol' time. I probably should have prefaced the entire thing by admitting that I hate word-based games, especially ones with arbitrary definitions of what is and what is not a word. The ling major in me, aka he who hates pointless prescription, rears its ugly head. I kept including words like "doer" and "toer" and "donner" in my lists with the idea that "one who (blanks)" is a fairly accepted convention of the English language, only to be shot down rather emphatically by the Goat. I also tried to say "crit" as short for "hematocrit" or "criticism," depending on your academic atmosphere, e.g. chic lit crit, and this was also shot down with reckless abandon (despite "crit"'s presence int he dictionary). So I got more irked than I should have and tried to joke about it but ending up sounding more caustic than I should have, and later when I used "lathery" and tried to not take credit for it because it seemed to me to be just as constructed of a word as the others I had previously tried, I got accused of being passive aggressive and martyr-like. So I'm sorry to my friends and the Beck for getting overly emphatic about the game; I was clearly not in the mood for it (as others were not in the mood for singing and Encore) and I should have just said so instead of playing while in a foul mood and being a general jackass. I'm sorry pals.
Otherwise Saturday night was fun, replete with 1950s moments where the men sat in the living room with beers and the women were pregnant and in the kitchen... ordering a pizza. So close. Anyways, good times and funny discussions abound. The earlier part of Saturday for me was spent running, tutoring, and completing student comments. Ah, student comments, the fork through the temple moment of every mid semester. One of these semesters I will go minimalist and give it this treatment:
Version A: Your son/daughter is good and works hard.
Version B: Your son/daughter is a chump-ass punk who does not work hard, does not pay attention, sleeps in class, forgets homework assignments, can't really write in complete sentences and makes me feel like education is a waste of time.
Version C: Your son / daughter is somewhere between A & B.
That would have saved me a lot of time; as it were, four hours of giving individual attention, the apex of which was the beck convincing me not to use the term weasel. Argh.
Okay, so the week in reverse review angle has grown predictable tiresome. I will try to stay on top of things better in the near future. In quick sum - Friday, dinner with GrinGoat at the Cactus, somewhere in there Swirls & Scoops opened and Beck, Ali and I hit it up after one of their long days of surgery together. I continue to be fat accordingly.
More exciting things to come. I hope.
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