Because I am the sort of person who alphabetises his collections of things for fun, I’ve been using Applescript to help tidy up my iTunes library recently. It’s actually an efficient tool for the job, and not too horrible to work with either once you get used to the syntax; for someone used to C-based languages, a typical statement seems at first glance to have a load of extraneous words and far too little punctuation, but you soon get the hang of it. Thanks to the integration provided by the iTunes dictionary you can assign genres by artist name, split compilation album track names into correct artist and title settings, sort video files as TV shows, and so on, all with a single click (and a few hours reading the docs and writing the code, of course). It’s one of those gratifyingly useless, boring pastimes that dorks like me prefer to the crucially important, fascinating things that normal people do, like playing golf and watching telly and talking about cars and shopping. A normal person would probably just put up with having all their songs in some sort of soul-revolting, multiple-artist-spelling, TV-shows-in-the-movies-section multiple metadata pile-up, but I am not normal, and I will not tolerate such carnage on my own computers. Nor am I willing to spend days typing all that stuff in manually: I’m a geek, not a lunatic. (more…)
5 comments 2008-01-19 23:54 Categories: Computers, Geek Stuff
This is my obligatory Apple fanboy Macworld opinion post. Deluded advocates of other, lesser computer and consumer electronics manufacturers should avert their gaze now. (more…)
0 comments 2008-01-16 13:35 Categories: Computers, Consumerism, Geek Stuff
Anyone can avoid buying a house. Simply by not doing any of the things that lead to a successful property transaction, starting with looking for a house to buy in the first place, almost everyone in the world doesn’t buy houses every day. Not buying houses, at its most basic, is an easy thing, regularly accomplished by everyone from new born infants to newly dead corpses. There are, however, a few individuals in this world who have elevated this easily mastered non-skill to the level of an art-form, even to the exalted heights of a science, and it is their methods that I will detail here for anyone who might want to investigate the process of really, definitively not buying a house, in the most spectacular style possible, whilst annoying the hell out of everyone involved, and doing yourself and others out of thousands of pounds and months of precious life. (more…)
7 comments 2008-01-09 19:04 Categories: Personal, Rage
At some point in November last year, I forget exactly when, I embarked upon an experiment. Now, those who know me will be aware that, even on a good day, I am not naturally predisposed towards happiness and joy, and on top of that, me and autumn don’t see eye to eye: autumn seems to like gloom, rain, mould, death, and roadworks, whereas I don’t, so I never expect much from the soggy end of the year. But as winter approached I noticed that I was even more than usually grumpy and miserable. I won’t go into great detail, because that sort of thing is deeply boring. Suffice to say, it wasn’t pleasant, and I needed to do something about it. (more…)
5 comments 2008-01-08 12:47 Categories: Personal, Rage
Bill Watterson’s review of David Michaelis’s biography of Charles “Sparky” Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, is a fair representation and, written as it is from the viewpoint of another brilliant comics artist, is probably the best introduction available. That review dates from before the controversy kicked up by Schulz’s family called Michaelis’s account into question, however, and therefore makes no mention of the alleged problems with the book. Shortly after publication the New York Times printed a brief article detailing the family’s main objections, and more remarkable still is this thread of comments on Cartoon Brew, in which four members of the family (Monte Schulz, Amy Schulz Johnson, Jill Schulz, and Jean Schulz) appear to lay into Michaelis for numerous errors and omissions, and for the overall tone of his portrayal of the artist. Michaelis indirectly addresses a few of these issues in one interview conducted before the Schulzes went on the warpath, but the NYT article presents his best response:
Mr. Michaelis said that he was surprised to hear how upset some members of the family were, but that “to their children fathers are always heroes, and very few families can see beyond that paterfamilias.” After interviewing hundreds of people, going through every one of the 17,897 comic strips Schulz drew and doing extensive research, Mr. Michaelis said, “this was the man I found.”
“Did I get the story right?” he asked. “Absolutely. No question.”
The fact that one of Schulz’s children, Amy, actually calls her father “Christ-like” in response to perceived slights in Michaelis’s book would seem to bear out the idea that her assessment, at least, may not be entirely accurate. The biographer naturally dwells on the interesting, but the interesting stuff in a life is precisely what people personally associated with that life will try to hide or revise after the fact, so we should expect a strong reaction to any account that isn’t entirely positive. Minor factual errors aside, the main complaints seem to be mostly unfounded. (more…)
0 comments 2008-01-03 11:12 Categories: Books, Comics, Reviews