MP3 renaming

On Friday, I successfully renamed my MP3 collection using TagScanner, which effectively placed all of my MP3s into directories as sorted by artist and album. It's nice for songs from artists who I have many songs for, but not so much for the artists whose songs I have very few of. But I'm not going through the additional time of trying to put all of those songs in a "miscellaneous" or "various artists" folder.

So, aside for the one CD of Chinese MP3s that I got from Michael, everything is sorted and burned onto two DVDs for easy backup. Guess I had less MP3s than I thought I did.

Halloween party

...and me without my costume.

Lucy called in the aftertoon to invite me to a Halloween party, and since I didn't have anything planned and hadn't seen Lucy in a while, I decided to go. Since it was kind of last minute, I didn't get any costumes for the party.

Saw Shirley (Viv) at the party, which was not completely unexpected, since I also saw her at the last YGAP event that I went to.

Made a few new friends there, as well. Since I didn't bring my camera, I took these pictures from my cell phone (which I'm now using for their respective cell phone entries).

Fenni was not quite satisfied with the quality of the pictures, and wanted me to take new ones, so now I have more pics of her...

This picture of Angel is pretty dark and hard to see... which I knew right after I took it. Although it didn't seem as dark then as it does now; I think it might look better if I try to adjust the gamma correction a bit. I suppose there's some sort of irony involved with a girl named "Angel" who dressed up with little devil horns.

Hopefully Lucy will send me the pics she took from the event, and I will have more usable pictures. Or I will just have bring my camera along the next time I see them.


The party was not too bad, although not being much of a dancer, nor a conversationalist (sheesh, what can I do?), I felt more like a fish out of water.

After the party, Lucy and I went to Regent Cafe for a drink.

"Frustrated" is an understatement.

For the past two days, the SQL replication at work has failed to properly connect to our server in China. Despite the many fixes that were tried, it would not complete the replication. And about an hour ago, one of the mirrored drives in our RAID server went down. Now I've got to let it rebuild itself, which (from past experience) will take around 10 hours, all while the replication problem is still not fixed, and will likely take even longer to fix.

"Supernatural" and urban legend(s)

Last night's episode of Supernatural claimed to have the most famous of urban legends, and in the preview you can tell that it's the "Hook" legend that they were going to use.

Except it wasn't. Not really. Aside from the use of a hook, most of the other stuff shown actually came from two other urban legends. One was somewhat similar in nature, since the beginning circumstances of both involved a teenage couple in their cars, necking.

The other was totally unrelated, while the writers had the characters saying that it's "right out of the hookman legend."

The variations are:

1. "The Hook" - the obvious one, since the episode was called "Hookman." A teenage couple was necking in a country road, and a "man" with a hook shows up.
   
   
2. "The Boyfriend's Death" - Rather than the couple escaping to find the hook attached to the door handle, the boyfriend goes out to investigate, and ends up dangling over the car.
   
   
3. "Aren't You Glad You Didn't Turn on the Light" - A few days later, the same girl goes back to her dorm to find her roommate already sleeping, so she didn't turn on the light. The next morning she finds her roommate dead, with the message scrawled on the wall.
   

As the show and the urban legends are all fiction, I guess there's not really much room for complaint, and one can easily argue that, if indeed these urban legends were rooted in real events, and perhaps of a supernatural origin, that they were all originally from the same root... but obviously the legends that have been passed on now are three separate stories.

I don't mind so much that they used three separate urban legends to have one origin villain, but I think it would have been much better to show the characters as knowing these are from three separate legends, rather than trying to glomp them all into one. These were characters who were supposed to know more about this stuff, after all.

Barbecue

Just got back from a barbecue at George's place. "The last one of the year," he says. Strangely, my left index finger was somehow over exerted, and now has trouble reaching further to the right, which is affecting my typing--when I try to reach for the letter "T" on the keyboard, I end up with the letter "R."

I got to test out my new "Sanitizing Steamer" that I just got from the Sharper Image, by using it to clean the grill. Overall, it did a decent job, though with the wire brush attachment, the effects were probably not too different from using a hose and a regular wire brush. The upside is that much less water is needed this way. I wonder if the Magic Eraser from Mr. Clean would do a better job.

I bought three bags of Bay Scallops from Trader Joe's, but forgot about them until most people had left. So I managed to cook one bag. Guess I'll pan-fry the rest and use them in pasta or something.

Weddings

This year started out as a departure from the last few years, as far as weddings were concerned--I didn't have a lot of friends getting married this year, that would have me going to various weddings every month or so.

However, the last two weeks saw me going to two different weddings. The first was Coco's wedding. I would later find out that most of our friends didn't get her invitation (for reasons unknown), and thought her wedding date was a week later than it actually was. So basically, when I got there, the only person I knew was Coco. None of our mutual friends showed up either the wedding ceremony nor the banquet to follow.

Coco's wedding was "short and sweet." It supposedly started at 1:00 PM, and by the time I got to the church in Palos Verdes Estates at 1:20 PM, the ceremony was nearly over. The ceremony itself was rather standard, but the banquet was a bit different: it was a karaoke banquet. I talked with some of Coco's other friends at the banquet, though now I cannot remember most of their names. The only names I do remember are Jeremy, Adrian, and Lilian. I didn't even talk to Lilian, and barely spoke to Adrian, so how I remember their names and not the people I spoke more to is a mystery to me.


Then there was Claudia's wedding. Her ceremony was less like a wedding ceremony, and more like a worship concert. She people doing short skits, sing worship songs, and even had a call to altar (minus the going up to the altar part), before the ceremony ended.

More Mr. Clean products

A while ago I bought the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser Wheel & Tire, but haven't tried it until last night. Which means there's been several months of brake dust buildup on my rims.

The same type of sponge has been available in Asia for some time, I remember watching a news report of some people who tried to use it to clean their faces, and it made their faces swell up.

Anyway, the "Wheel & Tire" version of the Magic Eraser comes in a pack of four, and what you're supposed to do is to wet it, squeeze out excess water, wipe, rinse, and repeat, until you have a clean rim. The sponges are reusable to a certain extent, and then you throw them away. Since they didn't cost much, I wouldn't mind too much if they cannot be reused very much.

It worked quite well on my rims, and quite easily picked up the brake dust and dirt, leaving behind my shiny alloy wheels. However, with the amount of dirt that had accumulated on my rims, I've had to use up three of the four sponges to clean all four of my rims. So there's not much in the reusability department from my initial use. Perhaps if I cleaned my tires more regularly, they would have lasted through more cleaning sessions.

Of course, I still got plenty of brake dust on my hands, but not nearly as much as I used to when I cleaned my rims, and it's a much easier effort this time. So overall, it works as advertised.


Good thing I don't have chrome wheels, 'cause I think it would scratch up the chrome finish.

Frapper! Beta for Clug3G

This is pretty neat... although it really only makes sense for online communities where the "members" are spread out across the country. I mean, you can't really use it with the friends you hang out with, since most people hang out with friends who are from the same state.

Effin' Spammers II

It's bad enough that they fill our email boxes with annoying and useless junk, but now they've taken it upon themselves to send their filth through web forms? My personal web page's guestbook forms have been repeated filled with such junk, so I tweaked it a little bit, and it was good. For a while.

Now the spams are back again. For good or for ill, these entries do not show up directly on the website, but are sent to one of my email addresses, at which point they get filtered out as junk by the Bayesian filter I've got on my client.

It still annoys me that they're there, though.

Camel Toads!

Yes, I'm sure every man would love to lick himself some camel toads.

Product placement on Joey

For the past two weeks, we've seen characters on Joey with take-out from In-N-Out, a burger chain on the west coast. I guess it makes sense that Joey, who is known for loving to eat, would go for one of the best burger chains after moving to the west coast.

Still, I wonder how much In-N-Out paid for such a product placement... or if someone on the show just really likes In-N-Out.

Effin' Spammers

I've been getting a lot of spam comments from the blog, so I've had to change the way comments are allowed for the blog to help counteract these A-holes. Other than being a nuisance, what effect do they think they really have on people?

If I ever meet a spammer in real life, I'm gonna go Tyler Durden on his ass.

Ahh, new Ionic Breeze

One of the Ionic Breeze GPs that I got suddenly stopped working last week. Because the GP model has an UV light (and gives off a faint blue glow to indicate it's working), I had to make sure that it was the unit that wasn't functioning properly, not just the UV lamp.

Since I got it quite some time ago, I wasn't sure if I can get it easily replaced. But I couldn't just let a $500 machine sit there and collect dust... uh... Actually, its main function is to collect dust. It's just supposed to collect much more than anything else in the room. Anyway, I didn't want a $500 machine that doesn't work like it's supposed to, so I took it back to the nearest Sharper Image store.

As I had hoped, they did have my purchase on record, so I didn't have to bring in my receipt (which I had already lost anyway). And they replaced my unit on the spot, with one of the newer units, that have slightly more functions.