Plaidophile

iTunes 9 has an "automatically add to iTunes" function. On its own that simplifies the process of adding music to iTunes (since you just drag files in there and iTunes will organize them into the library without any work on your part), but the really killer thing about it is that, being a Mac, you can place an alias to that folder on the desktop of another computer. Since I do all my work from a MacBook but keep my iTunes library on my old PowerMac, it used to be a major pain in the butt to download an mp3 and put it in my library, but now all I do is download it to my MacBook and then drag it to the handy "itunes dropbox" alias.

It helps that they finally fixed network share automounting either in 10.5 or 10.6 (I haven't tried it since 10.4 when it was still horribly broken).

Anyway, this makes it much easier for me to get music via my Magnatune subscription and the random mp3s that friends post on Twitter and the like.

As soon as I got home from work, Mark IMed me suggesting we go to Buena Vista Park and try using my telescope where there would be more visibility and substantially less light pollution than my roof. So we met up there at 9 PM, and after a rather interesting climb (apparently homeless people think that anyone with a flashlight is a cop, and that simply freezing in place and not answering a simple "hello" will make them not be noticed) we made it to the clearing at the top of the hill.

Once again I trained my telescope on Jupiter, and we managed to see it. Unfortunately, right now Jupiter is about the only interesting thing up in the sky, and the Galileoscope is still not particularly good for looking at it. I also looked at a few other random stars, but those basically aren't at all exciting unless you have a really good telescope. Now I'm thinking about buying a $250ish wide-field from Edmund Scientific.

We spent the next hour just yammering on about computers and anime and whatever, as we usually do, so it was still a worthwhile excursion.

On my way home, the back row of the bus had a bunch of high school students. They made me feel very old. When I was their age, the Internet was just what nerds like me used, and these cool kids were talking about their Facebook friends issues and whatever. THey also used the word "hella" in ways I never thought hella possible. When I realized the jacket I was wearing was probably older than they were, I suddenly felt very old.

But not as old as the stars.

Back in May I ordered a couple of Galileoscopes (two for me, and two for donation to youth programs). Unfortunately, due to an ordering mix-up the order got canceled, and I had to reorder in July. My scopes finally arrived today, so of course I assembled one of them and started to see what options I had for actual stargazing. (Not many, unsurprisingly.)

My good friend Ken just pointed me to Kickstarter, which is sort of a venture capital system for creative talent. If you're a musician, filmmaker, animator, artist, author, etc. who needs funding to get a project off the ground, Kickstarter could be a useful way to go about doing that.

I have a song in this week's fight, entered as "Sockpuppet" as usual. You know what to do (namely, listen to all the songs and vote for the ones you like).

Was it really a cost-cutting measure that kept a camera out of the iPod Touch to keep it as cheap of a gaming platform as possible? That doesn't seem very likely to me. Cameras are very useful for gaming (which has been recently rediscovered by Microsoft and Sony, but was previously known by Treo owners), and if they really do want the Touch to be an ubiquitous gaming platform, not making quite as much profit on one would be more than balanced out by the large numbers of games being sold for it, right?

Also, "8GB of storage for free" is a bit disingenuous when it only applies to an iPod Nano which doesn't actually have any music loaded on it.

On that note, I also found Phil Schiller's comments about gaming to be a bit off-kilter. Yeah, there are a lot more games for the iPod than for the PSP or DS, but how many third-rate Same Game knockoffs does a platform need, anyway? Also, his mention of the "purchase experience" being bad on the PSP and DS because of the supposed lack of an app store is just an outright lie. (Okay, the iPhone App Store is admittedly a somewhat nicer experience than the PSP's, but he made it sound like the PSP could only play UMDs.)

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Over a month after I terminated my contract with AT&T and it seemed as if they were letting me off easy for the ETF which they have absolutely no actual right to (since I provided my own unsubsidized phone for the line I had to pay an extra $25 "naked SIM" charge for), they're charging me a $123 ETF. I have the right to dispute it through arbitration — with a $125 "filing fee," which will be refunded if and only if arbitration finds in my favor. So I can either pay the $123 now or I can pay $125 now with the hope of getting it back but the risk of having to pay $248. GEE WHAT A GREAT SITUATION.

Anyway, I had planned on paying the ETF as part of my migration back to T-Mobile anyway, so I'd might as well just pay the damn thing. It's actually lower than I was expecting. It's just a bit aggravating to be hit with it so much later, and to still be held to it even though the purpose of an ETF (recouping the cost of a subsidized phone) did not even remotely apply in this situation.

So I upgraded to Logic 9, and have finally had a chance to use it for a new project from scratch. I like how keyboard focus is now finally indicated on the screen, so I don't have to click on the element I want to manipulate every time just to be sure it's going to go to the right thing (which was a major problem with 8 and negated much of the point to keyboard shortcuts to begin with), but on the minus side they completely screwed up the way comps work.

So, I finally got myself one of the portable hand-crank burr grinders. It does in fact make a much nicer grind than the mill grinder, although there's still enough powder that there's a bit of sludge at the bottom of the cup (when using my current filter setup). It's not nearly as bad as it was with the mill grinder though.

I do still want a better filter than the Finum Teeli filter I've been using. The mesh holes are fine for tea but they're a little too big for coffee. Still, it makes an excellent brew. Maybe I'll try bringing my French press in.

We did start getting pre-ground coffee at work, but I'm still using my burr grinder and beans from home, because the pre-ground coffee is terrible (not to mention WAY too finely-ground for anything other than paper filters).