Years and Years

I was reading this article and thinking “gee, 1980 sure was a good year for music”.

So I wanted to list all the albums I had from 1980.  And then I discovered that I lacked the release year for about 1300 of mah records.

Fortunately, discogs.com has a nice API, so I wrote a tiny, tiny Emacs library for interfacing with it.

And now I  can play all the records from 1980!  Except that discogs didn’t identify about 300 records, so I have to do those manually.  Like an animal!

But the reason for this blog posting is just to beg, nay plead, nay ask, everybody that writes documentation to include fucking examples in their API documentation.  The discogs API 2.0 documentation includes a lot of the particulars, but not any examples on how to fucking actually compose the fucking REST fucking URLs that you have to fucking use.

Fuck.

And they don’t really specify this explicitly anywhere that I could find, either.

So here’s an example search URL:

http://api.discogs.com/database/search?type=master&artist=Grace Jones&release_title=Warm Leatherette

I hope that helps, Interwebs.

The Liquorice Diaries

It has been suggested that the new Hockeypucker candy is simply a way to eat Hockeypulver without looking like a moran.

I, on the other hand, maintain that Hockeypucker is nothing more than a new name for Lakrisal, and tastes nothing like Hockeypulver.

So for today’s experiment, I ground up both these and compared them to the powder.  It’s a zero-blind experiment, since I’m all post-positivist and stuff.

Hockeypucker

Grind Grind

Getting there…

Lakrisal

Grind grind grind

Pucker, Lakrisal and Pulver

Lakrisal is a lot harder than Pucker.  I had to grind and grind and grind, and it still didn’t get very smooth.

The Pulver, on the other hand, is super-duper smooth.  Soo smooth.

Yum yum

All the three taste quite different, though.  Pulver has a pure salmiak flavour, with a bit of liquorice.  Lakrisal tastes a lot more liquoricish.  And Pucker tastes a lot less salmiak and liquorice than either of the other two.

Pulver

 Pulver is the winner.  The other two are just pitiful in comparison.

So, in summary:  There’s no way to get satisfaction without looking like a moran.

1995: En glad gutt

I haven’t read many of the Norwegian classics.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never read anything by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (his name translates to Bear Star Bear Son — like wow) before.

This book, called perhaps “A Jolly Lad”, is a slender volume on young love across the class barriers, as well as a society getting progressively more modern.  It’s quite funny and touching.

And since it’s from 1860, it has some interesting swear words,like “hvalpung”,  which can only mean “whale’s scrotum”. 

I think.

The illustrations are kinda eh, though:

Rating: Peasantific!

CDO Jukebox

I buy a lot of albums, and I have since I had enough money to buy a lot of albums.

Since the late 80s, my listening methodology hasn’t changed much.  I buy an album, and I put it in the “new” stack, and those are mainly the albums that I play.  I delve into older favourites, but new music is fun.

That stack used to be vinyl, and then CDs and vinyl, and an mp3s directory, and now flac.

After a while, an album becomes too old to be in the “new” stack, and I end-of-life the album by listening to it a last time, and then select the best songs from the album and put it on a Stuff mixtape.  The mixtape used to be tape, and then CD-R, and now it’s either not physical, or I burn a bunch of them to an mp3 CD-R to play in the car.

The “new” stack used to be a physical stack of albums, but since 1998 I’m just ripping everything, so it’s now a directory in Emacs.

I use the Stuff mixtapes play in the car, and to play while I’m eating breakfast.  Listening to Certified Good Music is less stressful when I’m zombieing around in the morning.

There’s now 306 of these mixtapes, stretching back to the early 90s.  They’re kinda a diary.  Sort of.  Only very cryptic, and I have no idea what some of it refers to any more.

The reason for this post is that I just got an idea to put the latest mixtape up for listening in the browser, so I did that.  The newest Stuff mixtape directory there will have a JS/Flash-based player embedded so that everybody can listen to the best music in the world!

A year or two after the fact!  I’m always perpetually behind in stuffing the “new” directory.  The first date on the images says when I bought the albums in question, and the last date says when I end-of-lifed them.

I bet this’ll become the most polular Internet Web Radio thing on the Intertubes.