Philonoist.net

As my girlfriend will attest, I have a plethora of junky music that clogs my iPod. It’s almost embarrassing: a lot of the songs are holdovers from my “I need every song in existence” period. (I’m looking in your direction, Hootie and the Blowfish.) Lately, I’ve been asking myself: what’s the point of having 60 gigabytes of music on your hard drive or mp3 player if you don’t listen to 80% of it?

At any rate, I got it into my head today that I wanted to listen to some music, and perhaps start the process of eliminating some songs from my iPod. Reducing clutter on an mp3 player is the same as reducing clutter elsewhere in your home: it’s one of those things that requires an unemotional, unattached view. (Or, you know, you can just wait for the zombies to arrive and start chucking your LPs at them. That’ll separate the wheat from the chaff real quick.)

One big problem: my apartment is configured in such a way that it’s a pain to hook up a USB hard drive and my speakers to my laptop. Oh sure, I guess I don’t *need* my speakers, but listening to *anything* except the aforementioned Darius Rucker et. al using lappy speakers is a crime against musianity.

My parents gifted me a crummy old workstation*, appropriately renamed on my local network as “busted”, from their now-closed medical practice. It’s been holding the floor down since I moved in as a future Ubuntu linux box that I haven’t gotten around to reformatting, one of those rainy day projects for a couple of months down the road. It’s not a *terrible* computer, and it’s really just a big hard drive away from being a decent FTP server. Unfortunately, the apartment is configured in such a way that it’s a pain to hook up a monitor to this computer.

I haven’t gone the entire four months I’ve been here sans music, of course: when I wanted to listen to some music, I either plugged my iPod or busted into my slick TV with its monitor port and mini-audio inputs. The problem of course, is that it sucks to have to *get up* and *walk over* to change the song when Toni Basil’s “Mickey” starts playing.

This is what’s great in theory about VNC: I can connect to the computer using a virtual display on my laptop where I’m doing my work, make some quick edits to the playlist, and go back to work. The memory hog that is iTunes isn’t using up cycles here on the lappy, and I can ostensibly get more done, especially as iTunes tries to find nearly 3000 album covers.

VNC can be crappy depending on which instance of the software you’re using. I’d been using RealVNC and found the performance sluggish at best: good enough for when we needed it for our SCOPE project, terrible now. The RealVNC viewer is probably OK, but the RealVNC server choked on just about anything I threw at it.

Then I discovered UltraVNC, and once I had quit jiggling with domain settings (busted may be old, but it’s a WinXP box) by disabling the MSLogin junk, I hopped right on… and the general navigating around Windows performance was just as good as if I had been sitting in front of busted itself… (Of course, busted and my laptop are both behind the same firewall, so there’s not a lot of net traffic to deal with. YMMV). Or so I thought.

Busted is just that: an old, busted computer: I didn’t realize how old until I pulled up the Recycle Bin and found some stuff marked for deletion in 2004. So iTunes the memory beast will work on busted, but it won’t necessarily work well…. and especially not well when it’s trying to dig through 11000 songs. My preliminary tests on busted had been with only a couple dozen songs or so at a time. So I have access to my library, but only in ones and twos.

Of course, there’s other media programs out there, and moving to Ubuntu would let me do the exact same VNC without the windows cruft. But the prospect of doing more jiggling outweighs the want of listening to some music. *Sigh*. Looks like I’m stuck with this POS music and POS computer until I get my new iMac or MacBook.

I only wanna be with you………

*The fan on this sucker kills me. Any suggestions on how to quiet it down?

Technorati Tags: music, iTunes, technology

Filed by Adam College at 10:24 am under Technology
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Ah, if only.

(via the McDonald’s sign-o-matic.)

Technorati Tags: McDonalds, I can has cheezburger

Tagged with: Humor

Filed by Adam College at 10:34 am under Uncategorized
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There’s little in life more depressing than an airport full of fat people. And that’s exactly what my layover in Philly had in store for me.
Now, I won’t go so far as to accuse the entire city of Philadelphia of being fat — though those cheesesteaks can’t help the situation — but if the city itself isn’t the problem, then it’s connected to the cities that are. (I’m looking in your general direction, Houston).

Let me be clear, I don’t expect society to be full of waiflike, please-eat-something teens and twenties who look as though they’ll fall over in a stiff breeze. I’m perfectly aware what normal body weight looks like, and the deviations from the norm that any population will have: five, even ten pounds over I’d still tally as normal. But there’s slightly overweight, and then there’s fat. I wouldn’t be writing about something so humdrum as the former, would I?

As I sat to board yesterday, I lost my appetite at the sight of rotund bellies spilling over straining beltlines. Which reminds me, if you’re going to be fat, at least be a proud fat person: wear a muumuu, or at least some jeans that fit.

Look, besides the obvious health, socioeconomic, and intelligence reasons, I have no problem with others being fat: even though this land was made for you and me, I don’t mind if you take up just a little bit more of it. Just don’t overdo it, OK? What I do have is a serious problem with those people who think their fatness is the result of something out of their control: lack of time to exercise, lack or proper diet, lack of restraint.

It’s outside the scope here for me to talk about any valid points contained in these whinings (though there are and I promise to talk about them at a later date), but by and large it’s a crock of crap: you got yourself into this mess, you’re going to be the one who gets you out of it.

I used to be a fat person. Not morbidly obese; just a good fifteen pounds past the point of bodily safety. I had 90% of a double chin. And I was horribly depressed about it. Depression plus poor self image should be a clear motivator to change. I couldn’t. In fact, any stupid fat fad diet usually ended up making me heavier in the long run: the math speaks for itself. Losing five pounds and then gaining ten results in a net of… anyone?

Then I went in for some routine bloodwork. And the doctor let me in on a little secret: I was going to die. Much sooner than I needed to.

That’s a pretty good load of motivation juice, if you ask me. I worked off thirty pounds in four months. And kept it off. Much more cheaply and having much more fun than one of those fad books could ever instill in me.

Fad diets aren’t called fad because they last forever. If fads lasted forever, you’d still be taking care of your pet rock and your Tamagotchi.

So here’s a simple formula that gets omitted from every Atkins, South Beach, GutBuster, SugarMaster, and whatever hell else they call those fad diets:

Calories Out > Calories In.

That’s it. That’s all you have to remember. No “40% sugar, 30% protein…” junk. No “less than 3 bad carbs” schlock. What the hell is a bad carb anyway? Just write that formula above every where you have food: your fridge, your snack drawer, your pantry, your grocery list. Burn it in your forehead backwards and eat in front of a mirror if you have to. The calories you take in should be less than the calories you put out. Simple.

Here’s the fun part: You don’t have to restrict your diet at all. There’s absolutely no food off-limits. Want to eat an entire pound cake? A bag of Fritos? Two pieces of KFC? No problem, thunder-thighs: just remember that you’ll be working that off later. Fortunately for you, jogging an hour would work off one of those. You can jog for an hour, right? For what it’s worth, sitting on your computer for about fourteen years would work off one of those too. So it can be done.

Don’t feel like running an hour? Don’t have the time? It happens. Guess what: apples fill you up and are low in calories. So does salad with a teaspoon of dressing. They make the tops of those bottles smaller than the rest for a reason, smart guy. Water works really well too, and that’s completely free, calorie-wise. Vegetables are excellent.

Remember that I said you could eat anything you wanted? That’s for the runners. Lazy people who can’t find an hour in their day to run or walk do not get to eat anything they want. But that’s OK because nature has still given you loads of tasty things that work. You’ve just been a hamburger-munching toolbag for so long, your tastebuds that like tomatoes and apples have taken a siesta. The only way to wake them up is to use them.

In closing, here’s an extension of the formula, written as a balanced equation.

I do have time in my schedule to run = I can eat shitty stuff.

Which of course, yields:

I do not have time in my schedule to run = I cannot eat shitty stuff.

Holy shit! This is really just math and formulas, huh? Tell that to the schmuck in Philly who tried to wedge his girthsome body into the seat on the plane next to me. Reduce the square area of your ass and things will be much improved.

Filed by Adam College at 8:03 am under Life
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