Wierd CD ripping

Recently I bought Josh Turner's CD Long Black Train, because I liked the title track. I also love Itunes, since I could listen to the others, and decide if I liked them enough to get the CD. I did, so I did. Since I bought an Ipod to listen to my songs at work, I ripped the CD to an MP3.

Anyway, something very weird happens when i play the MP3 on my headphones from my Ipod. The beginning of the song has a train sound, and then a few guitar chords. For some reason, the music is offset such that it is alternately louder in one ear that the other. Think of holding your headphones away from your ears with them turned up loud, and shaking your head in a NO motion. I actually find it sort of disorienting, since I feel like my head is turning really fast, but I don't have any of the other sensations besides audio.

I think I'll try to rerip it here soon. But I'll save the first one, just because it sounds so strange.

Avril Lavigne

She sings songs. She has feet. I want to get random hits on my site like Dave and get asked for Avril Lavigne's email address. Maybe I should write a poem about her feet. They seem to be quite popular

oh avril's feet,
how you bring out the
strangest people
I never want to meet

Anyway, her email address certainly isnt avril@mail.erohw.com. Don't even think about sending mail to that address.

Über nerd

Its 11:00 on a Friday, and I'm making a blog post about grammar!
This was linked off penny-arcade, and if you don't read it, or didn't see it, you should check it out. Its pretty interesting to see how certain terms are spread across the country.

Go NASA Contractors!!

Woops, We put the gear in backwards. Now, I realize mistakes happen, and things might be designed poorly(to fit in more than one orientation)...but give me a break.

There are 2 things that stand out to me about this story. First, there was more than one of these put together wrong. At least one of old ones had been put together wrong, and the new set also one in backwards. They also apparently found one of them in another shuttle as well, bringing the total to at least 3 assembled incorrectly. I can understand one of 16 getting through inspection. Not 3. That's almost 25%. I'm not going to a doctor that only gets 75% of his surgery right.

Secondly, this is America, arguably the most industrialized nation (okay, maybe Japan) in the world. The company that makes these, can't produce them fast enough in my opinion. They have "enough spare parts in house to build up two of the four actuators" for a spring 2005 launch. If you look at the picture of the actuator, its fairly good size. Are the tight (probably) tollerances needed for such a device the thing that's keeping them from being able to produce them a a decent rate? I would think with today's machining technology, something like that should be able to be produced rather quickly.

Good think I pay taxes that let people who obviously never played with LEGO's enough put together Space Shuttles.

Its Been Awhile

I've been slacking off on writing, mostly since I've been busy the last two weeks. I got to go to Detroit with Dave for some software training. We learned about VehicleSpy (a very nifty program designed to monitor vehicle bus traffic). We specified that we wanted a room with High Speed internet access, and ended up with a 3 room suite for only $84! We drug our computers along, since we're certified geeks. I ended up leaving my keyboard on my desk, so I had to go buy one at Best Buy. I debated getting a wireless logitech one, but they were all dual Mac/PC keyboards, and had evil evil mac symbols on the keys. I ended up getting a $10 one. Once I started using it, I hated it. Its was one with a large enter key, and instead of making the backspace key shorter to have room for the \ key, they made the right shift key half the size. Since Its pretty much the only shift key I use, i ended up hitting \ instead of shift every time I typed a capital letter. It sucked. I took it back. Guess that means I rented the keyboard for a few days.

Of Video Games, and Slashdot

First, Sony reports that most of its online gaming community plays between 5 and 11pm. The jist of this is that many people are playing games instead of watching TV.

That's pretty much right on for me. Since I don't even have cable, I never watch TV, and end up playing games from about 5:00 till when ever i decided to fall asleep.

Next, the Slashdot effect is well known, it basically sends 100's of thousands of people to a site, effectively slowing the site to a crawl for a day or two. Most people bring down their site in a few hours, till the demand goes away (the slashdot crowd has a short memory span). NASA did something else with a recent story about the deepest image that Hubble has taken. They set up 3 mirror sites on the link to the story. So what does an impatient person like me do? I immediately open all 3, so I get the one that is still working! Doesn't seem like I'd be the only one doing that either, as all 3 were about as slow as the main story page.