Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

SXSWBlog is back in action. Huzzah!
Register before February 13th to save some money.

Well, it looks like the flame war between LA.com, lablogs.com, and blogging.la has calmed down to a low simmer.
I am shocked to find that the discussion never ran into Godwin’s Law.
Hopefully now we can move forward and get to what I have hoping to help organize for a while, an all-LA blogger get-together or mini-conference.
Anyone care to shake hands over dinner at IHOP? I’m buying. (Just think of the blogging & picture possibilities from that dinner…)

Update your anti-virus software and keep it running.
Yes, I’m talking to YOU!

Browsing around my blogroll, I see even my wife has updated.
She mocks my current plans to rip our CD library and calls me a ‘data hog’.
Martin posts our recent evening out with the Gen[M]ay crew.
The blogging.la peeps are in a bit of a spat with the LA.com people. IMHO, LA.com looks like any other generic portal on the web. I mean really, do we need a “Who is LA’s hottest entertainment reporter?”. I think not.
Sonny Parlin who’s new blog I discussed a bit ago, has got a kick ass design going. I dig how he did his Top Picks section. I don’t know if it’s Sonny or his wife, Kara, who did the design, but it is the roxxor.
Matt says that Best Western hotels are all going to provide free wifi. I have an new favorite hotel.
Lastly, here’s some scoopage for you low carb folks. During the Superbowl, Coca Cola will reveal their new low carb version. Using Splenda (aka Sucralose), Coca Cola Ultra will have 12 grams of carbs and 45 calories.

You read it here first…

I spent a large part of the weekend cleaning things. While Michele cleaned the girls room, I cleaned the linen closet on Saturday. On Sunday I cleaned the garage and finally go a chance to sort out our CD collection in hopes of getting them all ripped.

After sorting out things that didn’t need to get ripped, putting scattered CDs back in the jewel cases, I got a final total of what I want to rip. 376 CDs. There are three rows of 100 and the rest add up to 76. Much bigger than I thought.
I began to wonder if the cost was really worth it and considered what it would take to do it myself. I did a few tests and found that it takes about 10 minutes to rip a CD and that if you do 6 an hour, you are doing good.
Doing the math 376 CD / 6 CD/hr = 62.66 hrs to rip them all.
Let’s say I can spend 4 hrs/night doing ripping, it will take 62.66 hrs / 4hrs/night = 16 nights to rip them.
Half a month? Geez. At $6/hr this is quite a low paying job.
So I’m still torn. I want all the CDs ripped, but the cost to send it to RipDigital is high. On the other hand, spending more than two weeks ripping CDs for hours at a time is a pain as well.
What do you, loyal Cruft readers, think I should do?

A week or so ago, I read about the new company RipDigital in a Metafilter thread. RipDigital takes your audio CD collection and rips them to MP3s for you en masse. 100, 200, 500 CDs? RipDigital says they get is done in a couple days.
Michele and I would really like to have our music available in this form. Most of our CDs live in a cabinet up front and we rarely dig through it. Converting these one at time is quite unappealing.
I had a few questions about the way they tagged the MP3s and I wrote off an email to RipDigital. I recieved a reply from Dick Adams, the founder, offering to send me a sample disc so I could see for myself. Kick ass.
The CD arrived today with 5 clips encoded at various bitrates. The RipDigital site says they encode at 224Kb/s, but the sample disc had a wide range.

I don’t have a ‘golden ear’ so the 224Kb/s MP3 sounds great to me. AAC is a good format that Apple uses in iTunes, FLAC is a lossless codec, MP3 is the de facto standard for digital music, and WMA is Windows Media Audio. I’m guessing that RipDigital could encode to any of the standards, but I’d ask them rather than make an assumption.

I opened up the MP3s in an ID3 tag editor and took a look. The filename is the way I like it: Band – Album – Track # – Song. Too me, this is one of the most important things. A sucky filename would kill the deal.

The basic ID3 tags are loaded. It appears to be ID3 v2, for those that worry about such things. There were no extraneous entries or any info in the extended fields.

Each MP3 did have a small image of the album cover included. When playing in Windows Media Player or JetAudio, the image appears. Pretty neat actually.
Overall, it all looks great.
There is one issue though that remains of concern. RipDigital says that in each file, they “include a unique identifying mark with each file to encourage responsible use of digital music”. It’s not an ID3 tag, so it’s probably an audio water mark that their encoder includes. I work with audio watermarks at the office and they aren’t hard to add. They don’t affect the audio in any perceptible way.
I don’t plan to upload my library to the net or P2P systems, but it is a bit strange to have an ID stuck in my MP3s. I’m not sure of the exact type of watermarking they do, but it’s possible it could move to the WAVs if I make the MP3s into a CD for a mix.
But since I don’t plan on sharing my MP3s on the P2P networks, it’s not a such a huge deal. I do wish that RipDigital was explicitly clear on what exactly is going on and in what cases they would release the information.
So I’m going to go count our CDs and place an order with RipDigital. I’ll report back when it’s all done and how it turned out.

After hearing the President’s address last night, I’m glad to hear that we are working hard on two hugely important issues, steroid use by professional athletes and stoping sex between high schoolers. Well, we must have solved the sex tourism issue already.
Sean made a wonderful graphic of the President’s key points.
George Bush is truly a disgrace to those that believe in fiscal responsiblity and personal liberties.

I present to you my review of Space Food Sticks.

I love my mother, but she’s crazy.
Yesterday we were over at my parent’s house for the big surprise party for my father. My Dad turned 65 and we had a big party for him.
I was looking my mother’s freezer for ice when I spied this:

Yes, it says: “Lasagna Sauce 12-21-98”
It’s January 2004. That sauce has been in her fridge for over FIVE YEARS.
Now I’m not one to make comments on the peculiarity of other’s, but this has got to be crazy by everyone’s standards.
I love you Mom, but you are nuts!

At Christmas I recieved this wonderful shirt. My brother Matt found it and thought I would like it.

Can you read it?
I thought that most computer & tech people would get he joke. Yesterday I wore it ot work and everyone kept asking ‘what is 3l337’? Now, I work with an IT and an engineering department and I expected most people to get it.
Only two people, Nathan & Yoshi, read the patch at first glance. Are hacker-knowledgeable people really so rare?
In any case, if you don’t understand it, 3l337 translates to elite in hacker-speak aka leet-speak.
If you are interested in the connotation of elite or the basics of hacker-speak, read more.
Until later, j00 r 411 l4m3rz! I 0\/\/nz0r j00!!!