The Same River.

Having mostly read from the tech/algorithm point of view, it was cool to read something from the audiophile crowd. A co-worker who I’ve been talking digital radio with for a while sent this along. It’s a nice summation of the benefits and drawbacks of lossy audio file formats with just enough disdain tossed in to give off that nice glow of smug superiority that us audiophiles love to bask in. So, without further ado, here’s the link:

Stereophile: MP3 vs AAC vs FLAC vs CD

Oh, and for the record, I use Apple’s lossless compression for my archival digital files. The tagging and album art capabilities along with (more importantly) the seamless experience with iPod/iPhone outweigh the technical benefits of FLAC.

Brilliant!!

Coding Horror: A Question of Programming Ethics

Staid, boring Bellevue may not be so staid and boring after all. Elz ran across an entertaining review of the local theater while looking for show times for the film we’re interested in seeing…

Twin Creek Cinema – Bellevue, NE 68123 – Reviews: Movie Theaters

Taken from this page.

Jack Rebney has a bad day.

And now, the deluge…
Make custom iPhone ringtones work with iTunes 7.4.1

Works with iPhone 1.1.3 and iTunes 7.6 as well. Serious frazz-i-delic ringtonage to be boinging when folks call me.

The FAIL Blog is epic.

It’s weird how I am more or less ambivalent about Cory Doctorow yet have posted enough of his musings here that I’ve considered adding a Cory Doctorow tag and re-tagging all the Cory-based posts.

If you haven’t read his latest musings on the Guardian on the topic of personal information gathering and unintended consequences, well, I think you might like it. Hence the link.

There was a time back in the early 90′s when I’d sneak over to ESPN’s chat forum while I should have been typing a paper at the computer lab. The pure, unadulterated crapflood that I experienced there was fun because it was so diametrically opposed to the task before me. I never thought much about what was essentially a diversion. It certainly never felt like the beginnings of a cultural paradigm shift.

Yet the Web, and by extension the Internet, have become the subject of authentic and semi-authentic academic research. This is an example of the latter. Good in parts but overly simplistic (whether by virtue of expedience or experience is unclear) when taken as a whole. It does a nice job of relating what a meme is and how it describes vast swaths of Internet culture.

As for myself, I never really enjoyed LOLCATZ. In fact I still have no great appreciated of it. Yet ever since the LOLCATZ invasion of Metafilter I have occasionally dropped a “I CAN HAZ” in conversation. That isn’t to say that I find memes vulgar or puerile. As anyone who has been around me will attest, I plumbed the depths of All Your Base and O RLY.

Anyway, I digress. Enjoy the essay.

Cory Doctorow, god bless his little heart, read all of Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown. He even did so aloud. In to a microphone. You can hear the results too. Even as a podcast. And even though it pains me to no end (like he’d ever link to my podcast), here’s Cory’s podcast link.

The Economist tries to shed it staid reputation with a story on the Texas “Pole” tax. Linked here because there are a plethora of funny headlines I could of used to title this entry…

Ultimately I decided it best to err on the side of tact.