Plaidophile

Whose bright idea was it to synchronize address books and calendars based on matching textual content rather than based on GUIDs? Was it Palm?

The fact that every single device on the planet seems to do that seems to follow from that bad decision, and the fact that every device uses a different set of matching and "cleanup" rules is only too obvious.

Of course this means switching to a GUID scheme is now impossible, because in order to do that you'd need some way of mapping GUIDless entries to GUIDed entries (since most things don't use GUIDs), and you have the same many-to-many relationship all over again.

Slippy is as useless and annoying as ever.

Instead of waiting for a Wii, I decided to be like Retro Thing and just get a GameCube. GameCube + generic wireless controller + huge memory card + 3 games = $200. When I finally do get a Wii I can use the controller and memory card purchases to keep playing those games on a Wii.

Strangely enough, nobody carries the really good games (Wind Waker or either Metroid Prime) anymore. So I got Paper Mario, Super Mario Sunshine (why is that game still readily available?) and Star Fox Assault (why is that game still readily available?). Guess I'll have to go to my alma mater to get the games I really wanted. Oh well.

Also it turns out that all GameCubes made after May 2004 only support 480i, and s-video at best. No component video, and no S/PDIF, because "less than one percent of GameCube players used this feature." Annoying. Oh well. Yet another reason to get a Wii when it actually becomes available.

The expression "fighting fire with fire" refers to a common and sound practice of causing an uncontrolled fire to burn out by using a controlled fire to remove its future fuel source. It is not a general-purpose solution.

If you were to "fight fire with fire" when dealing with murder, you would do it by killing all of the possible next victims of murderers. If you were to "fight fire with fire" when dealing with crime, you would commit all the possible coming crimes.

It is a necessarily destructive technique that only applies in a few select situations.

So, I finally got around to upgrading my 12" PowerBook to OSX 10.4. It was getting slow and unstable and crashy, and Disk Utility was complaining that it was unable to repair some volume damage, and a friend told me about iScroll2 which finally replaces uControl for scrolling on my pre-dualtouch (or whatever the name for it is) trackpad, so I backed up all my user data (which I had about 5.5GB of!), formatted the drive, and installed 10.4.

Now it's running a heck of a lot better.

This is the season for rampant consumerism, and it's infectious. I keep seeing all these good deals on 42" plasma TVs and computer hardware and other stuff I've been kind of thinking of getting even though I know I don't need any of it, and I definitely don't want to go fight my way through the crowds at the mall or Best Buy or whatever, but this nagging voice at the back of my mind keeps telling me that if I don't maximize my savings potential today I'll be wasting this holy day of spending money.

Every time I'm at a party, I introduce myself as "Hi, my name is [realname] but everyone calls me 'fluffy.'" Invariably I get about 20 people asking me how I got the name "fluffy." Of course the full history is pretty convoluted, long-winded, and deeply personal, and the concise answer is rather artfaggy in a way that most people don't get, so I need some sort of witty comeback aside from "probably from my hair" (which no longer works as it's rather long these days) or "I'm not sure." If I just say, "It's a long story," they just want a summary.

So. Does anyone have any ideas?

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Strange. iSync 2.3 (the latest and greatest from Apple) needed a third-party plugin to work with the K510i, but iSync 1.5 (the version in OSX 10.3) didn't. Looks like one of iSync 1.5's conduits behaves much more generically, since 2.x's seems much more strict about matching model names rather than just using published protocols (like SyncML).

Could it be that Apple has figured out that SyncML isn't all that it's cracked up to be, or something? It seems strange that they wouldn't just generically support all Ericssons though. Their underlying PIM capabilities haven't changed significantly in the last five years. Or maybe there's some other (business-level) reason that they don't want to just generically support SyncML anymore.

Amazing! There is such a thing as a good Chardonnay!

On Friday night, I went to Mr Spots Chai House [sic] to see a freejazz band. It is a pretty awesome venue. It's a coffee shop, only with beer, and decent food portions! Amazing.

Anyway, I really like their music booking stuff; seems pretty good for a no-cover venue. I think I'll send them a demo CD. Or maybe go to one of their Thursday night open mic events and see if they like me that way (I wonder if I can convince the Thursday Night Drinking Club to make that a regular place).

I've been messing with my new phone (Sony Ericsson K510i) for the last couple days. It's great, every bit as good as the Z520a, though it'll be a lot better when T-Mobile fixes my GPRS settings again. I was happy with the Z520a. I should have never listened to the siren song of the Sidekick 3. The K510i is a bit better than the Z520a though... it's got a much better browser in it (NetFront) and also has an RSS reader built-in so I don't have to put up with Google Reader's somewhat-terrible mobile UI (I can just use GR's aggregating RSS output instead). Whee.

I was also thinking of getting a Wii, but I'm a bit cash-strapped right now. Wii stuff adds up quick.

Hm, I don't actually have any. Am I going to end up just eating a turkey burger alone again this year?

I still have frozen cranberry sauce left over from last year's foray into abject lonliness, at least.

So, last night I was at a party until about 4 AM. My friend Sean just moved to Seattle, having finally gotten his graduate degree in microbiology and subsequently a job, and so he had a housewarming party. He has a talent for making friends quickly, and the various people at his party (most of whom I'd just met, and most of whom he'd just met) were all pretty cool, though one of them seemed a bit clueless about how independent music works (she kept asking us if we were going to play at Sasquatch next year, and didn't understand that just because there's four stages doesn't mean we'd be appropriate for such a venue).

Today it was dark enough that I had to turn on all the lights in my condo at 3 PM.

Yet another reason I should have gone with the waterfront condo, which had more and bigger windows, some of which were south-facing. Meh.

Of course, then I wouldn't be able to afford as much of the stuff I continue to enjoy (though my commute would be a lot more pleasant, I tell you what).

So, one of my former coworkers has been working on a startup called Jamglue, which is sort of like ccMixter only with a Flash-based mixing app built-in (the idea being that people can quickly throw together a mix or whatever). I've uploaded a bunch of my loops and song fragments to it, and people are doing some pretty cool stuff with it. I've also made a few mixes on there, one of which have been featured on a number of weblogs now.

Back in March, I moved from one neighborhood to another.

A few weeks ago I got this postcard:

so of course I immediately filled out and returned the form.

So, <3 and I have collaborated on a Song Fight entry this week (as So<kpupp3t). And this week it's MASSIVE. So listen to a few songs and vote for your favorite!

According to my mail logs, I got 323677 emails in the month of October. I am pretty sure most of those were spam.

Also, what is it about forums which turn people into ginormous combatative sanctimonious asstards? I'm thinking that I need to participate in much less of that crap. There's a reason I haven't been posting so much on the Song Fight forums anymore and I see no reason to reverse that now.

I've just gone and unsubscribed myself from all of my watched topics and turned off the auto-subscribe function, so I'll have to specifically elect to watch a thread now, and will try to only watch threads and reviews I'm genuinely interested in.

Lately the Hiptop has taken to waking me up in the middle of the night when it gets disconnected from AIM and thinks it's absolutely urgent that I know this. Argh. The only way to disable this behavior would also disable other notifications that I do rely on.

The Ericsson T39m was the perfect phone EVER, but mine recently stopped working (last time I switched back to it yet again) and it's getting harder to find new ones, what with it being made a whole 5 years ago.

So I am looking for a perfect phone. Here is my list of criteria, which is probably the same as the last several times I've posted this sort of list.