Voder-Vocoder

I stayed up til dawn last night. Insomnia led to one of the most productive days in months. I spent a lot of time cleaning up the mp3′s on my hard drive. The problem was that I had not decided how to go about organizing them until I had already massed a couple of gigs of them. Each file should have a correct id3 tag and a filename of
$HOME/Music/[genre]/[artist]/[artist]_-_[album]_[track]_[title].mp3.

A lot of my old files had filenames that included spaces or non-ascii characters. These are a pain in the ass when your main mp3 player is command line mpg123. What kind of idiot came up with the concept of spaces in filenames anyways?

I now have 8 240 250 880 bytes of music.

I also paid my bills, cleaned my apartment, did dishes, folded laundry, threw out old clothes, and reorganized parts of my closet.

As of June 2, my 273 phone number will cease to work. When I get back to town at the end of the summer, I will finally be forced to get high speed internet access. I find it off that internet connection costs never seem to go down. You would think that as the technology continued to mature, costs would go down. I have some bad habits when it comes to keeping track of pieces of paper. I tend to organize them by placing them in little stacks and the forgetting about them until I realize that all of these stcks of paper have now bneen mixed together again and need to be resorted before I can find anything again. If only I could just throw things away sooner.

I have reciepts for every dollar I’ve spent for the past six years. I have never once looked at a single one after it went into the pile.

#/bin/sh
#DTPD#
# ~/bin/despacify v2003-05
ls -x1 | \
  perl -e 'while(<>){chomp;$x=$_;s/ /_/g; \
  system("mv \"$x\" \"$_\"") if ($x ne $_);}'

When you give your address or email to any corporate entity, they immediately begin to junkmail/spam you. But I need that line of communication. I have to check every piece of mail that looks like it comes from my phone company, insurance company, bank, credit card company, etc; any envelope might contain a bill, and I’d be stupid to forget to pay it. I wish I could have a spam filter for my mailbox that would reject anything which was not a bitt or personal correspondance.

If I gave all of these people my email address for an electronic bill, they’d just take that as an invitation to spam me, and I’d be even less likely to find the signal within the noise.

And forget automatic bill payment. Why would I trust an automatic system to find errors in bills?

Photos here and here.

New look again. This time I cut my own hair.

I have photos from the past couple of months to post up here, when I get around to it.

It’s a rainy grey week. That’s okay, because the plants need rain. But it had better brighten up soon.

This summer.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned my plans for the summer yet. I’m going to go hike pieces of the appalachian trail. Here’s the plan :

1. Next week and the week after: Take exams
2. The week after next: Find apartment for next fall, start packing up my things, rent storage location, get new cell phone. Buy new tent, backpack. Order more maps of the trail.
3. The weekend of the 17th. Do some hiking and camping. Shakedown.
4. The Week of the 18th: Move all of my possession into (1) Storage and (2) my car. Buy a lot of food for the trip (Plan on buying more along the way). Liquify investments to pay for summer. Set up automatic bill payments for most bills. Cancel phone. Have mail forwarded to <where?>. Tell landlord I’m gone; turn in keys.
5. Weekend of the 24th: Party. When I’m sober again, begin drive east towards misty mountains. (Don’t forget to budget for gas. Thank Allah we won the last war.)
6. Go to somewhere on the southern end of the trail, park car and begin hiking. Buy more food as appropriate. After 10 days, turn around and hike back to car.
7. Weekend of June 20-22: Visit Memphians. Attend a wedding. Get smashed and embarass the bride and groom.
8. After that, go back to AT. Hike loops in VA and parts north. Visit family and friends in DC area. Meet parents in DC.
9. Spend two more months doing that.
10. Be back in Madison by September 2.

This should be fun.