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June 26, 2005
An Evening of Surprises
Most of today was normal, but the evening got a little, well, unexpected.
Just before dark, I took Fezzik to Crestview Park for a little exercise and training. I noticed a new plastic fence at the other side of the park and thought this was rather cool as Fezzik has been known to venture in to that area and this seemed like an easy (for me) way to keep him out. Surprise #1 was that the fence was there not only to keep out the likes of Fezzik and the local coyote population, but to keep in a herd of goats recently employed to rid the hillside of all vegetation. I further noticed that this plastic fence had little yellow warning signs stating that the fence was electric. As I was unable to relate the nature of this warning to Fezzik, he unfortunately discovered surprise #2 on his own by sniffing around the fence while I was busy pulling burrs out of his tail. He voiced his surprise rather loudly which attracted surprise #3 - two very large Great Pyrenees dogs who communicated to us that if we presented any danger to the goats, they would not hesitate to get all medieval on our asses.
Oh, and surprise #4: I learned a super fast and easy way to fold t-shirts. I love the internet...
Posted by nickh at 10:21 PM | Comments (1)
June 24, 2005
My wife completes me
We recently purchased a shredder because I've been collecting little pieces of paper for close to five years. I haven't been simply disposing of them, you see, because they might contain bits of personal ID information and I'd rather not have my identity stolen. I spent a few hours tonight going through said pile of paper to determine which we should keep and which should be shredded and returned to the environment.
One of the receipts that caught my eye was from a business trip I took to New York City in August 2001. It turns out that I'm relatively boring when I travel, as even though I may hit one or two of the more obvious tourist attractions (in this case, it was the Metropolitan Museum of Art) I also tend to sit in my hotel room and read alot.
A few years after this trip, I went back and Judi went along. She tends to have an itinerary of interesting places to visit, and I'm always glad to follow her around as I would otherwise miss out on plenty of cool sights. During this trip, she was flabbergasted that I'd been to New York City at least twice and not only hadn't visited the World Trade Center but had no idea where it was and had never seen it (I do find myself wondering how I managed to miss a couple of 1300' buildings.)
That trip in August 2001 was clearly my last chance to see the WTC, but I am somewhat comforted that I probably won't look back on silly missed opportunities like that as long as I include Judi in all future travel plans.
Except to Merrimack, NH. That place is boring.
Posted by nickh at 12:10 AM | Comments (0)
June 18, 2005
New Music
I like finding new music but I'm not a music geek. I used to commute with one but we've long since gone to work for different companies. I used to listen to the radio but I just can't deal with it anymore - anything new is overplayed so much that I start to dislike it, and I like listening to DJs and commercials even less.
Lately I've been playing with a few online music services; I'm still figuring out what works for me but so far I'm encouraged. Audioscrobbler tracks what I play (compatible music with compatible formats, at least) and after quite a bit of lag produces a list of similar music and people with similar tastes. liveplasma provides a search tool for music artists (and movies) which offers an interesting visualization with links to similar artists. Yahoo Music provides access to a large music library along with search and recommendation tools, and sells music for $0.99/track ($0.79 for subscribers.) If you subscribe to Yahoo Music you can download most anything in their library to play when you like, although they use Windows WMA format which is not universally supported - of particular annoyance is that the iPod cannot currently play this format and I'd really like to buy one.
While none of these services does it all, I find that using the three together has made it much easier for me to discover artists and buy what I like. I very much like that Yahoo's service allows full access to the library rather than just 30-second samples, but I'm currently stuck without a portable music player because of the WMA format problem. The iPod makes the most sense for a variety of reasons but I have yet to find word on whether that will ever work - to be fair, this problem could also be solved by Yahoo using an iPod-compatible format instead of or in addition to WMA.
For now, I've got a way to find new music and at least listen to it in the car by burning what I like to CD.
Posted by nickh at 12:05 AM | Comments (1)