The above computation is actually erring on the side of lenency.. and yet, it’s one of my favorite relaxing tunes by Gustav Grefburg.

You kids and your silly little 180BPM songs. Pfft. ;)

I’ll admit it: I’m not as interested in tinkering with things as I used to be. I’d rather they just work so I can get MY work done. That way, I have more time to play.

Well, since my foray back into the world of Windows, I’ve been sadly lacking a mod player. DeliPlayer v2 is probably the best for the task, but it’s ugly as all sin, and despite being developed for years, isn’t the world’s most CPU friendly.

WinAmp’s MOD support is awful on a good day, and really, it doesn’t do what I want it to: not suck.

Enter foobar2000:

If you think the above is sparse, you should have seen the work it took me to make the beast print THAT much information about the files it’s playing..

foobar2000 makes harcore UNIX users look, and feel like they’ve taken first class – on the back of a camel, downhill, with a breeze. If you want to add support for something that it doesn’t natively work with, after researching the hundreds of plugins for foobar, seeing which are still developed – and still work – with the latest version, You’re usually copying a DLL into a subdirectory of the installation, then tinkering with one of the myraid of preference panes to try to see where what you did went, and what it does. “What? Me? Documentation?”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great player, and from what I can see by ignoring the recent v0.9 SDK (surprise, nothing from v0.8 works – they’ve reinvented it, again), it does an incredible job at taking files, and formatting the data for your screen to your exact specification – then rendering an audio stream in one of about 3 ways to your same audio output device.

Now, I’ve grown to like it for what I want it for (Thank you, kode54, for foo_dumb, an incredible multiformat MOD rendering plugin), but honestly – I wish Apple would update and allow people to develop plugins for QuickTime.

Why? iTunes just works. If I want to listen to a song, I click a button, and it works. I don’t need to spend 10 minutes in a binary file editor to extract variables to find out exactly what the plugin system exports. No kidding.

Here’s how I got my final statusbar:

All this to find out about the @#$%)! file I wanted to play. Damn it, Steve, release some docs on interfacing with QuickTime, already. Some people still hate iTunes. Make it a little easier for others to support, and they’ll accept it with open arms.

The alternative, well, is foobar.

There’s been quite a bit of misinformation on the internet about the Core Duo, and now, the Duo 2 CPUs regarding Windows XP Home.

Observe. Windows XP Home SP2, 2002 release.

Note the two CPU graphs.

This is standard Windows XP Home SP2, I have done nothing to enable this.

Note the processor affinity, with the two seperate defined CPUs.

I hope this has cleared up this bit of misinformation – you don’t need XP Pro, unless, well, you need XP Pro.

Ok, so, a friend sent me this link, which is regarding a smudge of chocolate that was collecting under a vat. While many may see a health issue, or as I prefer ‘guano’, a worker swears it’s the Virgin Mary.

This reminded me of the old Upright Citizens Brigade “Spaghetti Jesus” sketch. I never liked UCB – most of the jokes were too forced, or just asinine. This is no exception. I still think it’s hilarious.

Ok.. I’ve become a British Television snob. I can’t stand laugh tracks, and if it’s not either absurd, or intriguing, I don’t want it. I’d rather read a book.

Yes, I know, this is abnormal. I’ve never watched a single episode of “Survivor”, and I never plan to. My only “reality TV” addiction is COPS – and hey, that’s just good television. Drunk rednecks with no shirts being arrested. God bless Nielsen ratings.

COPS is probably one of the longest running shows that isn’t a Soap Opera(, which doesn’t really count, anyhow.) It was initially broadcast in 1988. It’s almost 20 years old. That’s a heck of a long time for a TV series (Simpsons, which started in 1989 is the only one that I can think of that comes close.)

Anyhow, I was recently introduced to Love Soup entirely by accident. I was watching the BBC World News, and left the TV on.

I’ve missed most of this six episode series, here, in episode 4, We find that Alice, played by Tasmin Greig (Black Books), is getting older, and trying to find her place in life. Pretty standard drama, right?

Well, an ex-bf’s parents drop by. She finds that he died of an incurable nervous disease which took hold shortly after they broke up. In his will, asked [his folks] to bring her the tapes he secretly made while they were having sex.

While there, they tell her she has the only tapes, but they’ve used the internet to convert them into MPEGs, and everyone in the family has a full set of DVDs.

All of this while sitting around a coffee table. The absurdity of this is just brilliant – even if it makes the rest of the show incredibly mundane by comparison.