May 14, 2013
So you've decided to throw an Octonauts party
Our little girl just turned three, and we had some family and friends over to celebrate. Since we had a lot of fun with Darren's Train Party last year, we decided to focus on a theme for Ally's party this year as well. She chose "The Octonauts," one of her favorite TV shows. She also picked "Cars 2," "Toy Story 2," "St. Patrick's Day," and "Alarm Clock", depending on when we asked her, so for the sake of sanity, Amy and I settled on The Octonauts, and promptly stopped asking her.
March 26, 2013
Filling in music metadata
I don't listen to a lot of music, even though my hard drive is filled with gigs and gigs of the stuff. Actually, the fact that I have so much of it is part of the problem -- I can't just hit "Shuffle" on my music collection and enjoy. With Amy's music, Kid's music, Christmas music, etc., in the mix, it's only a matter of time before I hit a dud. Even within the music I've collected, not every song on an album is a winner. (I don't have the heart to delete the other ones, though. It just feels wrong to only have part of an album). And now that I have kids, the problem is further complicated by the fact that some of the lyrics in my music have what we around my house call "grown-up" words. So playing random songs when the kids are around is out. If I have my hands covered in finger paint, I'm not going to be able to get to the computer to skip tracks if Eminem decides he needs a rhyme for "truck."
These problems would be alleviated if I entered ratings and tags for all my music with something like iTunes. But that involves me sitting in front of a computer and doing this for every song. Thousands of songs. That's not going to happen. I've tried the "rate-as-you-go" approach, but I never remember to do it. So I wanted to find a way to automatically fill in the song information I was looking for.
Luckily, I did.
Continue reading "Filling in music metadata"November 01, 2012
Halloween 2012 - Homemade Robot Costume
