Category Archives: ipod

For Sale: One iPod

So as I mentioned a while back, takaza bought me a fancy-shmancy iPod Touch (’cause he’s cool like that). This means that I seem to have two iPods, which is one more than I need. So here’s the deal: I’m selling a black 30 GB 5th Generation iPod Video for $125.00 or best offer, plus shipping. I’ll include the DLO Action Jacket that it’s been in since I bought it (arm band not included, ’cause it’s kind of dumb).

Interested? Let me know with a comment here or via e-mail. First reliable offer gets it.

Booze, Bingo, and, um…Man, I Fail At Alliteration

Let’s get up to speed, shall we?

After work on Friday takaza and I stopped by Gurnee Mills to pick up a few things. We were just looking for a new belt for me but wandered into the game store only to find that they were having a buy-one-get-half-off-another sale on games. We walked out with two games that look like they’re going to be a lot of fun at our next party: Malarkey and Wits and Wagers. When we finished shopping we drove up to Antioch to our favorite liquor store to stock up on a few things for Anthrocon (a couple of new Scotches and a bottle of Grey Goose, ’cause I likes me some good sipping vodka). We met up with genet (roho was under the weather) and had a pleasant dinner at Las Vegas Restaurant.

Saturday was craziness, but in a fun way. For the second year in a row we ran the bingo games for Dan’s company picnic. It’s a good thing that Dan thought to bring our bingo set (purchased for use last year, but not used) because we found that the provided bingo set was missing four bingo balls. That would have sucked. We ran two sessions, each 90 minutes long, and gave away a little over $2,000 in gift cards to Target, Wal Mart, and various restaurants. People seemed to enjoy it. Dan had bought a huge chunk for tickets for the charity raffle (to benefit Gilda’s Club) and for the second year in a row he won an iPod, this time a 4 Gb iPod Nano. Which would be nice except that we both have 30 Gb Video iPods. Ah well, we had fun, at least, and the day’s surreal moment was provided by the CEO of Dan’s company inquiring if we’re brothers. I guess it’s true that the longer a couple stays together, the more they start to look alike 🙂

After the picnic we headed into the city, where we met up with datahawk and emrldgrrl to see the GLBT Pride edition of Too Much Light makes the Baby Go Blind (“30 queer plays in 60 straight minutes”). As always, the show was amazing – funny, poignant, and thought-provoking. I admit, it’s the silly stuff that I remember most, including “Two Minute Strip Rock Paper Scissors” and “All The Boys in the Frat House Say Ho(mosexual)!” Because it was a benefit show, even though they ran out of time on play #25 everyone agreed that we should see the last five plays, so we did! After the show, we drove down to linnaeus‘s place and got dinner from our favorite taquiera. It was great ending to a great day.

And on Sunday? We rested. Well, we did a little work on Anthrocon stuff, but mostly we just rested. And it was good.

Wait for my iPod?

As you may have heard, yesterday was Valentine’s Day. Seeing that on a typical workday morning, I see takaza for all of five minutes before I head off to work (I go in to get dressed at 6 AM, when he wakes up), and given that there are a number of wonderful descriptions for Dan but none of them include the phrase “morning person”, we elected to exchange V-Day gifts when he got home in the evening. That evening, we both had tooth-rottingly cute cards for each other, and there was a folded-up piece of paper in mine. I opened it up and it was a list of upcoming showings for Wait Wait – Don’t Tell Me, a fabulously funny NPR program recorded right here in Chicago, for me to choose from. Dan then opened up the envelope I gave him with his card to find…tickets to this week’s taping of Wait Wait – Don’t Tell Me. We both burst out laughing. Evidently, we know each other well enough and share the same tastes enough that we got each other the same gift. It works out since Dan hadn’t actually bought the tickets yet, and he made my birthday so lovely that it all evens out. He then cooked up some tasty macaroni and cheese (with lots of thick-sliced bacon! arr num num num) and we had a nice relaxing evening.

Well, sort of relaxing. My iPod has become the bane of my existence. Well, not really; more accurately our MP3 collection has become the bane of my existence. We have about 35 Gb of MP3’s (about 8,300 tracks) that we have accumulated over the last six or seven years. Because they’re from a wide variety of sources the ID3 tags (information in each file that contains artist, album, and song title, plus other info) are of varying quality, from quite thorough to completely blank. With my last MP3 player, this wasn’t an issue because it relied more on the file name so I could usually figure out what I was listening to. The iPod, though, ignores file names and relies completely on ID3 tag information. If I want to, say, play all tracks in a given genre, or by a given artist, I’m out of luck if that information isn’t on a track.

I found an excellent program to fill in the ID3 information on a semi-automated basis. In my first pass I fed it all 8,300 tracks and wound up with about6,100 tracks identified and tagged and 2,200 tracks that had to be identified manually. Well, that wasn’t going to work, plus if I want podcasts and room for new music I was going to have to leave room on my iPod for those, and it only holds 30 Gb. So I sorted through the files and split them into those that I wanted to carry around, and those I could comfortably leave behind, with about 20 Gb of tracks going onto the iPod. I fed those files into MusicBrainz and this was better – after some whittling down, I’m down to about 630 tracks still to be identified manually. I think i can pare that down further, but I expect that in the end I’ll still have to sort through 400 files or so. I’m actually glad of it, though – I’m finding that we have a lot more electronica than I thought we did, and that’s my music of choice when working out at the gym.

Once I get all the files straightened out and uploaded to the iPod, I’ve found a nifty utility that will add album art to the files, which will show up on the iPod display when the track is playing. Then I need to start picking up podcasts; I’ve already got Wait Wait.. and NPR’s Story of the Day subscriptions set up, and I need to go hunting around to see what else tickles my fancy. altivo, I’ll admit I’m a slacker and I still haven’t checked out your podcasts, and woodychitwn had a good recommendation a while ago, though I’m not sure how I’d feel about listening to that while working out 🙂 I’ll have to see what I can find. Oh, and on top of all of this, I just found Azureus, and I’m having a lot of fun playing with it. I’ve found that when you have a flaky wireless connection, though, Bittorrent doesn’t work very well. I need to work on that.