Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy
Posted on Written by Diane
For Darin: Emma of Late Night Thoughts… appreciates Miles Vorkosigan. Since Darin is a big fan of Lois McMaster Bujold’s series about Miles and his family and their various exploits, I thought he would enjoy reading how much others seem to be enjoying it too.
(The reason I keep putting links here is that normally I’d mail them to Darin, but a)I know he reads this page and b)perhaps one or two of you out there would appreciate a pointer to something offbeat as well.)
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I read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning:
StreamRipperX is, very simply, a tiny piece of software for the Mac that records live, continuous MP3 audio streams from Net radio stations, automatically breaks up the songs they play into individual, high-quality, discrete MP3 files, names them and then lets you listen, organize, burn custom CDs, whatever. All free.
This is all it does. It is very simple. But it is, quite simply, the greatest thing ever in this lifetime ever. Think about it.
Here’s an example of what you can do right now: Click on one of hundreds of DJ-free, 24-hour online music stations of a particular, favorite genre, leave StreamRipper running for a few hours (or all day) and come back later — and, boom, waiting for you is a couple gigs of fresh new music, hours and hours worth, all organized by song name and group, ready to burn right to CD. Amazing. So much for Napster.
I mean: Damn. I am so behind. And like I’ve said, I’m on the Internet 24/7.
Needless to say, guess who downloaded StreamRipperX and set to work minutes later?
It does work as advertised, by the way.
Posted on Written by Diane
I want to post an entry every day for three weeks. Why? you ask. (Yes, I have preternatural hearing.) Because a friend once told me that if you do something every day for three weeks it becomes habit and you don’t think about it any more.
This sort of wisdom probably belongs in the same category as something a friend once told me in sixth grade: that you can get yourself to wake up on time without an alarm clock if you bounce your head against the pillow the number of hours as the time you want to wake up — that is, 7 bounces to wake up at 7 o’clock. That sounds ridiculous to me now, but you know what? It has always worked. Belief is a powerful tool.
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A few days ago I posted a little about why I decided to come back to doing Nobody Knows Anything. I thought about (but evidently didn’t say) that one of the attractive features about coming back was there are hundreds and hundreds of writers doing blogs and journals now; I could just do my thing and not worry so much.
Then I was tooling around my list o’ links (available on my front page) and ran across this entry in Brian’s Education Blog. I didn’t even realize right away that the mother of a 3-year-old he was talking about was me.
I don’t know Brian, I’ve never communicated with him, I should be flattered that in a few short days other people have noticed me, right?
I freaked out. I started talking to whomever would sit still long enough (happened to be my friend Rob and my brother-in-law Scott, both of whom were on iChat right then) about it. What did it mean? Why me? What had I done? Had I exposed my daughter to the world in some terrible way? (I’ve already thought about that a lot, believe me.) Why in the world is anyone paying attention to me?
It’s strange how I covet attention—you can’t put a journal on the Web and pretend you don’t know what you’re doing, sorry, no sirree—and then am truly surprised when I discover that yes, indeed, attention is being paid.
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Wanna know something hilarious? I just looked up “nobody knows anything” on Google and discovered that Yours Truly is the number one hit. <bats eyes, looks down demurely, says, “Aw shucks.”> That’s not hilarious, that’s simply as it should be. (Heh.) No, the hilarious part is that it’s not immediately apparent where the phrase “nobody knows anything” comes from.
For those of you pondering this exact question, I wrote a wee something four—oh my God, four—years ago on this very topic. Go read that.
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Something even more hilarious—or completely barmy, you decide: The Lord of the Peeps. (Via Interesting Times.)