I’ve been carrying around a Lumia phone the last week, so I recorded a couple of shows.
Getting the videos off of the phone proved to be challenging. Google has sabotaged the Microsoft Youtube app, so you can’t upload directly from the phone. And using normal HTTP uploads is disabled in the phone, apparently.
So I had to install tons of stuff in a virtual Windows machine and upload via USB.
So modern.
Anyway:
I was out at a show on Friday, and had a few beers, and then suddenly I was home, and I was listening to Xiu Xiu’s version of Fast Car, and I really had to know what the lyrics were.
And before you know it, I had won around fifteen new iPhone 5s from various lyrics sites.
So yesterday I thought there should be a way to display lyrics in Emacs without winning any iPhones, so I went looking for APIs. First I did MusixMatch before discovering that they only returned 30% of the lyrics.
Lyric Wiki seemed more promising, although heavy on iPhone winnings. The API doesn’t return much, but I cheated.
The world should be safe now.
For a brief, shiny moment back around 2007, it seemed like crowdsourcing would really take of
f. However, by now it’s become pretty obvious that we just saw an enormous influx of Can Do people as (pretty much) the entire Western world got reliable Interweb connections at all at once.
Then most of these people grew tired of updating and fixing stuff on corporate web sites, because, after all, where was the pay off?
And the trickle of new, helpful people isn’t sufficient to keep up with the attrition rate.
I’ve been relying on the concert listings on Underskog and last.fm for years, but they have been growing increasingly erratic. After missing a few shows that I really wanted to see, I’ve now gone back to old-fashioned web scraping and aggregation. The thing we imagined to be a thing of the past.
What’s next? Newspapers paying journalists to maintain listings?
I’ve put the source code up on GitHub, but it’s just a trivial Emacs Lisp HTML parsing and extraction script which outputs the result to this web page. I’ve just added the clubs I’m interested in, and I’m not going to extend the listing to anything beyond what it’s displaying at the present.
So: Welcome back to 1999. The brave new world was kinda amusing while it lasted.
The September t-shirts were finally ready yesterday, so I picked them up today, along with stamps, envelopes, rum, ginger beer, DVDs and other things necessary for packing stuff.
The number of shirts wasn’t enormous (just 30 or 40 or something), so carrying them up the stairs was no problem.
The Norwegian postage system changed since the last time I did this, which has to be more than five years ago. Using big envelopes is like 2x more expensive than smaller ones…
So I used magical Japanese folding techniques to fold the shirts into the allowed size.
Quality entertainment is necessary when doing repetetive tasks.
Look at all those envelopes! Gotta love plastics.
And here we see our model modelling the shirt in the traditional Internet manner. I hope I got all the details right. Directing is so challenging.
I’m not really the most observant person in the world. However, having this escaping my attention is a pretty big achievement.
But today, while watering the plants, I noticed something odd on one of the aloes:
Some white fluffy things on the leaves. Hm. Then I looked further down:
Lots more! And the soil! More fluffy white mold!
Infected! And behind the potted plant?
EEEK! SPORES!!!!
Dear Interwebs, what is this? And what’s the best way to deal with this? Should I kill it with fire, before going into one of those scenes you see in the movies when somebody has detected something yucky (i.e., scrub my skin in the shower until it bleeds)?
Or is there a less drastic solution?
I can just throw away that aloe, but I see that it’s spread to the plant next to it:
And that’s a huge one that I’m not that keen on throwing away.
Please advise.