Screensaver hotkeys and iTunesControl

I made the switch to Windows 7 as my primary operating system on Wednesday night. As is customary, I decided to fiddle with and tweak my new setup. The first thing I went looking for was a global hotkey for turning on the screensaver. I sleep next to my computer so when I go to bed I want the screens to go blank. I was using Ultramon to accomplish this on Vista, but since Ultramon is kinda broken on 7 (Maybe I should just make the switch to DisplayFusion?) I was wary about installing it. After going through a couple freeware applications that didn’t work, and deciding not to purchase Turn Off Monitor, I bit the bullet and installed Ultramon. I basically disabled everything except the hotkey.

After looking into it further I probably could have used AutoHotkey with NirCmd. I’m not sure if this combo would work on Windows 7 but I’ll try it out this weekend and see what happens.

The next thing I wanted was to be able to control iTunes with my multimedia keyboard keys when iTunes didn’t have focus. I found 2 different ways to do this: a plugin for iTunes written in 2003 and iTunesControl. I tried the plugin first and it worked great but I was a little wary about what some people had posted about problems with smart playlists. I installed iTunesControl and was very impressed by the available features. At first the on screen display bothered me, but after playing around with it I really started to like it. It’s mostly unobtrusive and it allows me to skip songs without having to listen and find out what they are. It even pulls album artwork, which is something I really appreciate. I’d recommend trying it out and seeing how you like it.

2 years 3 months 20 days ago

(Time courtesy of Wolfram|Alpha)

Taken on Feb. 8th, 2007

Since I started this blog. I was a sophomore in college. So much has changed since then.

I last blogged 4 months 3 days ago. Since I last blogged I graduated from college; I worked on Beauty and the Beast and had the biggest house (sold out!) in 10 years; I went on a cruise for the first time. I had a lot of average days, some great, some terrible. I’ve stressed out a lot less.

The summer has started for me, which means I spend most of my days at work for 8 hours a day in front of a computer. Strangely enough, this gives me a lot more free time than I had during school between classes, friends, theater, work, and relaxation. This is the time when I start to seek people out online, I start to blog again, I start following twitter and friendfeed like a fiend. I start other random projects that may or not pan out. I watch more TV. I read.

Taken on Jan. 15th, 2009

My goal for the end of the summer is to learn how to memorize a shuffled deck of cards. Useful? No. Cool? Hell yes. I’d also like to catch up on my reading, my TV, and say goodbye to NYC.

I can’t believe I never mentioned it on here but I’m going to be moving to Seattle to work for Microsoft. I’m excited and scared at the same time. I don’t know anyone over there.

Now that I’m sitting here I find that I have so many things that I could write about, but I don’t really feel like doing it. I think I’ll go back to reading The Host.

Taken today May 28th, 2009

January Failure

Did I make only one post so far? That’s atrocious. I went to California, does that make it okay? No, I didn’t think so either. It was a blast. I love skiing, it was warm in the bay area, and Napa was pretty sweet. Check out the Del Dotto Caves if you get a chance. The tour was awesome (and full of tasty wine!).

So I didn’t make my resolution this month. I read a lot though, and did some traveling. I’m back at school taking classes now and getting ready for Beauty and the Beast. Auditions are next week and we had a minor crisis with directors. It’s taken care of now, but it was a stressful couple days.

I’m going to keep reading books. I’ve been checking out LibraryThing, Shelfari, and Goodreads to try to figure out which one I want to use. This involves actually joining each one, adding books, checking out the community, etc. This might take a little while, and it isn’t my main priority.

First day of a new year

What did I do today? Well last night around 2am I finished Marked. I don’t have a lot of positive things to say about the book. I decided to read it because I really enjoyed Twilight. Twilight had it’s issues, sure, but it was a story that I could really get behind. It was paced well, it had a good cast of characters (maybe a little Mary Sue, but even so), and I didn’t have a lot of reasons to complain about the writing.

Marked covers all of maybe 5 days in 300 pages. It was terribly slow getting started and all I wanted was for it to start going somewhere. You know how as you get closer to the last pages of a book, you start wondering how it’s going to wrap up everything in time (I felt that way about The Diamond Age)? Well as I neared the end of the book I started wondering if it was going to go anywhere by the end. The climax was hardly worthy of a novel and all I wanted was to see the story go somewhere. So there’s a sequel, in fact there is a whole series of books that follow this one. I don’t know that I want to go out and buy them because I was so disappointed by this one, and yet I want to see where the series is going. Decisions, decisions…

I slept in and downloaded a bunch of movie trailers.

• I think 9 looks pretty cool.
• Dragonball might not be as bad as I initially thought (and Emmy Rossum is in it)
• Fast & Furious must be better than the last two movies because the entire original cast is back.
• Fired Up looks legitimately funny.
• I watched Gran Torino and it was amazing. See it if you can!
• He’s Just Not That Into You looks like a great adaptation of the self-help book for women. I want to get it and read it actually.
• Inkheart might be good. Dunno.
• I missed Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and I wish I had had a chance to see it when it was in theaters. When does it hit DVD?
• I watched a bunch of others, but I really don’t have much to say about them. [shrug].

I’m going to try to finish Let the Right One In tonight so I can watch the movie tomorrow. It’s okay, not what I was hoping for but an interesting read nonetheless. I seem to be on a vampire stint recently. That’s another thing I disliked about Marked: vampire is spelled vampyre. I’m know it’s a legit way to spell it, but it distracted me from the text every time I saw the word.

New Years Resolution

I have never once followed through on a New Years Resolution. This may be due to low willpower or the fact that I’ve never really wanted to follow through on any of them, but I want things to be a little different this year. I want to write every day for one month. It doesn’t need to be January, but I’m going to try to make it January. If I fail I’ll try February. I’ll have 12 shots to do it, so I hope I succeed.

Why do I want to write every day? I was thinking back to my senior year in high school when I went on a trip to Mexico with my AP Spanish class. It was suggested that we keep a journal, but I thought I was above that and I didn’t bother. Now looking back I have some great memories, but I know I must be forgetting things. If I had written things down, even just a list of things I did that day, I could reread it and remember everything that had happened.

I don’t expect any of my months to be terribly interesting, but I want to see if I can. Plus I will be traveling quite a bit this year, so it will be good practice for the future.

I’m not sure if I want to do it in a pen and paper journal (which I am horrible at, I think I type faster than I write at this point) or if I want to blog it or if I want to do it in my iPhone. I may have to find a good journal type application for the iPhone. Or I can just use the notes feature.

Will anyone but me want to read this? No, probably not, but this time I’m not doing it for them, I’m doing it for me, and I think that is why I might actually be able to last longer than a week.

One more resolution, next year I need to go to a real New Years Eve party on 12/31/09. Think I can do it?

Death Cab For Cutie – The New Year

So this is the new year.
And i don’t feel any different.
The clanking of crystal
Explosions off in the distance (in the distance).

So this is the new year
And I have no resolutions
For self assigned penance
For problems with easy solutions

To Be Continued…

Many people think that if they were only in some other place, or had some other job, they would be happy. Well, that is doubtful. So get as much happiness out of what you are doing as you can and don’t put off being happy until some future date.

- Dale Carnegie

I was reading over some of my old blog entries tonight and I was reminded of how I used to start every blog post with a quote. I’m not sure why I started doing it, but looking back I always appreciated the quotes I found. I’m trying to get my hands on some of my old blog content that was on a free hosting account that went down. With any luck I’ll get all those posts back. It ought to be pretty intersting stuff.

I remember when I used to spend hours every night trolling Deviant Art for new and cool art. This is what I found after about 5 minutes of looking around, It’s a Christmas version of the Twilight book cover. I read Twilight, and I really enjoyed reading it, truth be told. It is far from a literary masterpiece and the story is contrived, but for those of us who want to escape into a romance where everything works out in the end it does it’s job well. I was not a big fan of the movie, simply because the romance was unfortunately cut short. I really liked the way Edward courted Bella in the book, and I think they got fast tracked in the film to make room for the conflict at the end. It became an action movie instead of a romance. You can probably guess what I care about more.

Christmas is coming up, and I should do some shopping. Meh, that isn’t really worth talking about. I don’t know why I’m writing. Again. For the millionth time. You’d think after stopping and starting so many times I’d have it figured out. But I don’t. So I write when I want to write. And I don’t when I don’t.

This might have to wait until later. I feel like I have a lot to say, but I don’t know that I want to say it to the world. It may be time to start writing private posts again. In any case, to be continued…

“Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.”

Courtesy of Niels Bohr

Lesson for life: when you say you’re going to be somewhere, show up. Someone might be looking forward to seeing you, even if you don’t know it.

Chat Logs

One of the great features of Gaim (now Pidgin) back in the day was logging. You could log all your chats in txt form or in HTML and go back and read over them later. You could quote from them, search through them, read them at your leisure. You could ponder about what that one little line your crush sent to you could mean, long after closing the conversation window. It was a great feature that I probably used all of 10 times since it’s been available.

One of the really nice features that came out of it was the little bit of history that gets injected into your window the next time you talk to them. It reminds you about what you were talking about and gives some continutity to each conversation and I don’t know that I could live without it. But that’s about as much as I need, the last 5 things we said to each other. I have never once, since I started logging conversations, gone back and read through them all. So why do I have a folder in My Documents called Chat Logs that holds all my old chat logs from circa 2006? Why do I habitually carry them around with me from computer to computer as if they are some sacred data?

Sure, going through them might give me some insight into who I was. A little time capsule of sorts, just like old blog posts. Should I keep them as a reminder or delete them and focus on looking forward? When would I ever spend time looking at them unless I was trying to look back and recover something that is long gone? I should just get rid of them.

I have a better idea, I’ll post them up online and place a link here. If I ever go back and read over this I can download them all and re-read my old conversations.

The Paradox of Hedonism

I find that I am always falling victim to the paradox of hedonism. I see a group of people enjoying something so I go out and try that thing, thinking it will make me happy. I don’t end up getting any pleasure from it because I’m not doing the activity for love of it, I’m doing it so it will make me happy.

It’s clearly reflected in the way I look for a relationship. I’ve been looking for a relationship under the assumption that a relationship will make me happy. I’m not sure what it is about the relationship that is supposed to make me happy, but I keep looking for one anyway. I think that’s one of the primary reasons that once I’m in the relationship I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing. Do I even need to be in the relationship?

I’ve never been able to determine what makes a relationship different from other interactions people share. You hook up in a relationship, but you certainly don’t need a relationship to hook up. You go out and spend time together in a relationship, but you don’t need one to do that either. You’re monogamous in a relationship (unless it’s an open relationship, and then I don’t know what the heck that means) but that seems to apply on the physical level much more than on the emotional. Is a relationship a really good friend that you are monogamous with? I don’t really want an answer, I’m just thinking out loud.

So I sat here for 15 minutes thinking about my past relationships, close friendships with the opposite sex, and one night stands. I’m having a hard time figuring out what I was looking for in each instance. I suppose I could think about it forever and never reach a consensus.

It’s time to take a pledge: no trying to meet girls online this summer. No craigslist, no MySpace, no Facebook, no Yahoo Personals, no Stickam. If I’m meeting people it’s going to be in person.

This is about nothing at all

This is a meandering post about nothing in particular. I’m supposed to be writing 5 papers. I’ve kinda written an outline for the first one, but I just don’t seem to care enough to get it written. I don’t want to hand in something atrocious, which would be very easy to do, but I also can’t afford not to hand in anything at all. It’s a horrible conundrum.

I learned a new word last night: valediction. I found it while looking up the meaning of “yours truly.” See, in Snow Crash one of the main character’s names is YT, short for yours truly. It’s cute, but I wanted to know if it made sense by the formal definition, or if it was only acceptable in common usage. Not that it makes much difference, I just wanted to know.

New paradox of fun: “Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation,” yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

I know this blog is mostly noise and not a lot of signal, but I just don’t think I have anything interesting to say. I know it isn’t true, but that hasn’t made me write anything of substance yet. I just ordered parts for a new computer on Friday. My old computer doesn’t seem to want to start, so it either means the motherboard has gone bad, or the power supply has gone bad. My options were to buy a new power supply and see if that fixed the issue, or to buy all new computer parts. I’d rather buy another motherboard, but this computer is 3 years old and they don’t make this board anymore. I suppose it’s also worth noting that 2 of the PCI slots don’t function correctly on this board, another reason to get rid of it.

So I spent $650 on new parts. There’s a $40 mail in rebate, so I’ll get a little bit of money back, but I really didn’t want to spend this money. If anything I would have bought myself a kindle. Actually, maybe I should just ask my family to pitch in together and get me a kindle for my birthday. I’d like that.

It’s a sweet new computer, I don’t really feel like talking about the specs right now. Maybe I’ll take photos of putting it together and then write a post about how awesome it is. Yeah…

So I started using twitter again. I’m also more noise than signal there, but what can you do. I just like to put stuff up about what I’m up to. Like right now. I think I mentioned using Remember The Milk and pimping out my Google Calendar. It’s awesome. I feel organized and I like completing things. Whoo.

I’ve run out of steam at this point. I’m sure I’ll have something to write about later.