Sunday, September 19, 2010

MP3 Player Playlist Suggestion

I must not be a normal person. My friends will immediately agree with this, but I'm saying it for a different reason... Almost all MP3 players and computer-based music programs allow the creation of playlists, but none that I have found allow songs to be added to these playlists while the song is playing, or allow adding a song to multiple lists. From what I can see, if I load a CD into my music archive, I need to immediately assign each song to a single playlist after loading or at some point while my MP3 player is connected to the computer - which I think is kinda stupid.
My suggestion:
- create multiple playlists by music type or listening pattern (ie. driving tunes, quite Sunday morning tunes, dinner background tunes, etc)
- load all the songs from the CD into the computer/MP3 player
- allow the user to select playlists to associate to the song while the song is playing

Scenario is this: load 1 or several CDs onto the MP3 player, listen to the songs however you like (I prefer shuffling everything), while listening to each song, tag it to all of the playlists you want, go to next song....after a while, all the songs are categorized and you can then listen by category. Oh, and be sure to create a "Delete" playlist so that you can flag a song for removal from the library next time you are doing list admin.

Gizzy Howling to Alert the Pack

Our little fuzzy boy, Gizzy, must have a little wolf in him. He is part Chinese Crested and part Pomeranian and the best parts of both. We don't really think of him as a dog, but when he howls like this you just have to giggle! He is mostly blind and mostly deaf so I think he sometimes gets confused and that leads to some howling to bring the pack to his aid.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Stone Lamp and Gate Posts

So the lamp posts at the end of the driveway are starting to fall apart - the brick appears to be disintegrating for some reason. I dug into the crumbling mess and it appears that the inside of the post is filled with loose bricks and then the cement cap was poured on top of these. I've been putting off the replacement of the posts because finding good people for this kind of thing is always a pain, but then we stumbled upon a modular stone pillar/post system by a company called Anker Pillar Systems while paging through a local newspaper. This looks very doable, and since I already have the foundations from my existing pillars, this should work fairly well! It also appears that these can be used as gate posts if the center hole is filled with cement and rebar after its built - bonus! I think this might be a project for next spring....!