Pete's Log: somebody ought to shut me up

Entry #1323, Sun, October 27, 2002, 02:55 EST (Life in General)
(posted when I was 24 years old.)

music, hardware, geek nostalgia, movies, football. Today I talk about all that and my cat!

iTunes now keeps track of how often I've listened to all my mp3s. And using its new smart playlist feature, I can generate a list of my top 25 most played songs. My collection is now 2365 songs big. That's 10.43 Gigabytes. Five days, nine hours, fourteen minutes, and fifty-two seconds of uninterrupted music. With the exception of maybe two or three songs, all my mp3s are ripped from my own CDs.

So here's the top 25:

Operation Ivy - Sound System
Sonic Youth - Beat on the Brat
The Clash - Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Operation Ivy - Here We Go Again
No Doubt - Underneath It All
Operation Ivy - Yellin' In My Ear
MxPx - Punk Rawk Show
The Pietasters - Higher
Reel Big Fish - Nothin'
Smile dk feat Saxomatic - Butterfly (Pikachu and the Pokemon)
Weezer - Island in the Sun
Against All Authority - Freedom
The Ataris - Angry Nerd Rock
The Clash - I Fought The Law
Hot Water Music - Remedy
Less Than Jake - All My Best Friends Are Metalheads
MEST - Fucked Up Kid
The Ataris - The Last Song I Will Ever Write About a Girl
The Descendents - She Loves Me
Minor Threat - I Don't Wanna Hear It
MxPx - Responsibility
Operation Ivy - Vulnerability
The Queers - Fuck The World
Rancid - Crane Fist
The Skadows - Twice

There are 1742 songs in my collection which I've not yet listened to (since ripping them -- I've listened to them on CD or when I had them as mp3s on my old laptop), 528 songs I've played once, 63 songs I've played twice, and 32 songs I've played three or more times.

I bought a CD by Hot Water Music the other day. I like it a lot. I saw them live last spring, but didn't like them as much as the other bands at that show (tough competition: Less Than Jake and Bad Religion). Anyway, I'm a poser, and some punk comic strip that Adam introduced me to called Nothing Nice mentioned that the new Hot Water Music CD was good. So since somebody apparently more punk than me liked it, I had to get it.

We've got wireless in our apartment now! It's the best thing that's ever happened to me. My memory may be failing, though. Anyway. It's good. I bought a Netgear wireless base station/ethernet switch/router thingy. It talks directly to our DSL modem and took maybe fifteen minutes to set up. Sweet. I love technology.

esgeroth is a dead box. It's sadness. Did I mention it got hacked? It did. Some stupid ass script kiddies found it last spring. Since it was on a slow dialup link, I never even considered it a target, especially since its IP changed every eight hours. So I never kept it up to date. And I got bit in the ass. But I noticed right away, so the bastards never got a chance (that I know of) to attack anyone from esgeroth. To my knowledge, that's the only time a machine of mine has been hacked. So since then esgeroth's been sitting around unused.

A couple days ago I finally tried to reinstall on esgeroth. Bonk. Hard drive is kaput. I remove it and try it in a different machine, no go. The SCSI controllers recognize it as a drive, but give a 'drive not ready' error. Sadness. That was the first hard drive I ever installed Linux on. It's a 4.5 gig ultrawide SCSI drive. It cost me like $500 or so in 1998. I went to Best Buy to get a new drive for esgeroth. I went with IDE and paid $120 for an 80 gig drive. That's obscene.

So further attempts to reinstall on esgeroth have met no luck, since the hardware in that box is all heretical. Debian doesn't seem to find it necessary to include support for my scsi controller on their installers. Which is a problem, since my cdrom drive is still scsi. And my network card isn't supported until the 2.4 kernel. So I borrowed an IDE cdrom drive from NDLUG, but it don't want to work. Blah. So I'm still esgerothless. You'd think that four and a half years later I wouldn't be having the trouble I did back during that first install.

That first install was ghetto. And it was before I kept a journal. I had to download slackware floppy images over a 28.8 modem to my mom's mac (a centris, I believe... I can remember when I would drool thinking of centris/quadra series macs). For whatever reason, I couldn't write those images to disk, though, on mom's machine. So I connected it to my old old laptop via a printer cable and transferred the images via appletalk. On my laptop I wrote the images to disks and then installed them on esgeroth. That was a lengthy process.

I'm feeling very nostalgic, suddenly.

I've also found myself in movie geek mode. So I rented several DVDs. Since I still despise the dollar-based system of ranking movies, and since my last attempt at an alternative was nothing better than a practical joke gone horribly wrong, I'm going to try a new approach. Movies will be rated as follows:

own. This rating means the movie is worth owning and watching repeatedly.
watch. This means the movie is worth seeing at least once.
wui. Short for "Watch Under the Influence." The movie is worth seeing if you're drunk, high, or otherwise in the right mood.
avoid. Don't see this movie.

There. Simple and to the point. And not subject to inflation. Actually, my biggest objection to rating movies with monetary values is that I'm much more concerned about the time I waste watching a movie than about the money I spent to see it. I detest being bored.

So three movies that shall fall victim to this new scheme: The Royal Tennenbaums: own. Comic Book Villains: wui. Clockstoppers: wui. Royal Tennenbaums was awesome. It was co-written by Owen Wilson, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite comic actors. It seems he's also got writing talent. Comic Book Villains was a smaller release film (Lions Gate) which had a good premise, but horrid writing. Bad bad bad. It starred several actors I've liked in other smaller movies, but none of them could overcome the bad lines they were given. I ended up hating all but one of the characters, though that may have been the intent of the film. This film also felt like it was trying to be a View Askew production, but it failed to be nearly as funny as Kevin Smith's works are. Clockstoppers is a silly teenage comedy film with a scifi twist. It stars Jesse Bradford playing a similar role to the one he played in Bring It On. The plot has more holes than whichever type of semiconductor has "holes" ... I forget if it's nmos or pmos. God, somebody stop me. So Clockstoppers was silly and cheesy. As the film progressed, I kept lowering my estimate of the target age of this movie. But I still enjoyed it, sorta. It's good if you're in the right mood.

ND football rules so much. 8-0. That's all I got to say about that.

Why does Apple rule? Because it took very little effort to get my laptop to print to Meg's printer that's connected to her PC. This despite my conviction that printing is inherently evil.

At Blockbuster I bought this card that gets me one 'free' movie rental a week for ten weeks. As a sign of gratitude for this purchase, Blockbuster is going to give me a free copy of Spiderman on DVD when it comes out. Good deal. And this way I'll have to watch more movies, which is good. I've come to realize again that I hate television.

Gandhi now weighs five pounds. He's growing at an absurd rate.