Never been one to let the carrier drop

I am so sold on this whole OGG low-bitrates is better than MP3 thing..

I recently had occasion to encode a boatload of voice samples to several codecs, including mp3, GSM, ADPCM and low-bitrate WAV. Much to my suprise, the codec that ended up being

a: The easiest to impliment on a windows CE handheld (code snippet below)
b: The best sounding with the smallest files

was OGG.

So now I’m ripping a bunch of CDs that I’ve been meaning to rip for oh, say, about 6 years now, and I’m ripping them to 160kbit OGG. Enyc will be pleased.

Code snippet (I wish I could credit everyone here, but I don’t even know who all worked on it – I modified code I found at PocketOgg is located, along with the static libs you need to link against, at sheer.us for anyone who wants to do a oggplayer. Note that this code becomes the controlling thread, so you’ll need to do some thread management – because I was using it inside my CEShell, a program I wrote to handle thread management, this wasn’t a problem for me. Anyway, I hope it’s useful to someone someday.

1) I’ve been really, really sick the last couple of days. Think chained-to-the-toilet, spewing-forth-from-all-orifices sick.
2) It’s occured to me recently that surely there are very few people who actually think they’re evil. I mean, presumably both Bush and Bin Laden think they’re the good guy, for example (while, as far as I can tell, neither of them is). Until fairly recently, I didn’t go around thinking I was awful, terrible, and bad. Actually, I’m not convinced I’m really *that* evil now. I just worry that other entities may have other opinions.
3) I had some really interesting thought, which I knew was worth writing here, but it got lost while I was typing the first two and glancing at a mistake on a web site Kayti found.
4) Kayti points out that I’m really obsessed with the Christian hell, as opposed to any other particular bad thing that could happen to me. I sort of associate Hell with having all sensory inputs fed the most unpleasent signals possible, alternating with all the bad memories or.. well, really, any diety inventive enough to come up with the source code for humanity could do all sorts of nasty things. She thinks I’m obsessed and I should get help. There’s something downright comic.. in a tragic sort of way.. about going to a shrink because you’re afraid God will send you to hell for picking the wrong religion of a myriad of them.

One of my more bizarre theories is that there are a bunch of gods – who somehow concatanate to make up one God – and each of them gets a chance to rescue your soul after you die (‘rescue’ as in move to another place/time). I’ve been playing with the idea that your soul is kind of like a identifier – a prime number assigned to only you, maybe – I don’t know. This is all just babble as I try to sort this out. Ignore me.

(And yes, Lara, I know that I shouldn’t be still worrying about these things. But having givin up recreational drug use, I need some way to waste large amounts of time.. ;-))

The areas I’m exploring are unknowable.. even God can’t know that *e *self isn’t running on some simulator somewhere. At some point, you just have to hope that the universe meets in the middle and love wins. I find the presense of anything as complex as humanity, or as amusing as the internet, as proof of that.

(catty comment about dubya and evil deleted)

So, I’m not feeling particularly too cheerful this christmas. My back hurts, I can’t seem to wrap my head around religion and I’ve this nagging fear that there’s this guy with a pitchfork and horns gonna do a lot of ass kicking when I die..

On the other hand, I made the Mushrooms of Goodness today ™. Unfortunately, I ran out of salid oil and had to use olive oil, and it’s olive oil that’s gone a tad stale so they taste a bit of stale olive oil, but they’re still tasty and they still make me feel somewhat better about life.

I’ve also been enjoying Buffy – we’re almost done with it, and I’ll miss it, but the good thing is I got to see Once More With Feeling again. Ah, such a good episode – take note, all television producers – make at least one episode that is a musical. Does the Simpsons have a musical episode? If so I must make a mental note to download it..

In other news: Prayer, apparently, is thinking words in the general direction of God. This either means that God is monitoring our thoughts all the time – a act of somewhat questionable morality – or can sense when something we’re thinking is directed heavenwords – I guess when you’re omnipotent, doing things like that isn’t a particularly big deal, but it seems quite the impressive stunt to me.

My dreams have been getting stranger lately.. one recently had quite a good, all original soundtrack, including trance and house music – and here’s the amazing bit – none of which I’d ever heard anywhere else before. So apparently I have a midi sequencer in my head just like Mozart. Or else some higher (or lower) entities are injecting messages there. Or some combination of the two.

I have enough hair for a ponytail. I guess this is good news.

Me and Kayti went to visit her family in Colorado, which went mostly without incident, and my family in South Carolina, which also went mostly without incident. (I don’t include my family pointing out that I’m fat, which is obviously true, that I’m unique, which sadly probably isn’t [they somehow manage to make unique into a insult, something I wouldn’t think was possible], or the ‘peace’ which my uncle gave me as I left which I’m just going to assume he meant literally, since trying to figure out if I should be offended for a satorical version is more effort than I care to put in.

My family on my dad’s side I think is thoroughly tired of having kids who wish it was still the 70s, and occasionally insist on acting as if it was. But, hey, from a free-love and peace-love-hope-lets-stop-the-war standpoint, the 70s were my kind of decade. Of course, from a fast networks and really nifty information bits and freedom to say whatever you want in a public, searchable forum, the year 2004 does me quite nicely.

Anyway, so let’s just say that the visit with my family went well, for a visit with my family. (I can rest fairly safely assured that they don’t read this, aside from my mom occasionally, because I suspect they’d really rather forget what I’m up to. I have this nagging feeling the opposite might be true as well. Might be the ‘support our troops’ bumper sticker and the american flags and whatnot.)

I read some of Al Franken’s latest book. Apparently it’s just as well that I’ve been completely ignoring the news and mailing lists and whatnot, because if I hadn’t been, I’d be having heart attacks about the horrible things Bush is doing. But I’m looking the other way and figuring it doesn’t concern me, which probably is another offense that will have the guy with the pitchfork and horns standing over me shortly after I die, but that’s neither here nor there.

Argh. There must be some literal biological difference between liberals and conservatives, just as there’s some literal biological difference between gays and straights that we haven’t found yet. (I’m so annoying, thinking gays are gays because the software made ’em that way, and that maybe it’s our world’s automatic reaction to overpopulation)

If anyone wants the recipie for the yummiest pickled mushrooms in the world, just ask.

Anyone for a game of kitten poker?

I really want to think I’m not evil. But I’ve broken people’s hearts through gross incompetence, I’ve no idea what I want, and my back hurts and I’m really inclined to drug it into submission and beyond. ANd I don’t particularly feel guilty about that. Why couldn’t the human software designer have included a ‘okay, acknowledged’ signal for pain?

I want to be happy.

I hear they make drugs for that too. Maybe I should try some happyzac..

Oh, and I’m writing a novel. I’ve got about ten pages so far, but it’s a start. And I will finish it, and I will publish it on my web site, and no one will read it, and I’ll get bloody depressed about that. And it will have always existed lurking somewhere in the digital equivilant of infinity anyway.

According to The Wikipedia, the HitchHiker’s Guide series sold 15 million copies. This worries me because there are 6.4 billion people on earth – which, even if each copy has been read 20 times (a generous estimate), only 4% of the inhabitants of earth have been exposed to Douglas Adams. This would seem to be a serious oversight.

[Interestingly enough, that 4% includes my mother]

As a side note, he died of a heart attack while working out. If this isn’t a good reason not to work out…

For those of you who don’t already know, I recently became the owner of a second-or-possibly-thirdhand enormous stuffed tiger named Khan. It’s always fun watching people react as they come into the living room and find him there, sitting on the couch. He’s a fairly realistic looking stuffed tiger (I thought he was life-sized, although I’ve been informed that real tigers are a bit bigger than he is.. still, he’s large enough

Well, that was a fun bit of frustration. Mysteriously, it works if I use a dynamically created object, but not if I use a static one. Go figure.

In a bit of home-construction-work the other day, I created a replacement window facing for the heat pump.

ANd now I’m listening to the Funky Ceili, which lately has been stuck in my head, especially during sex. [Hm. That’s not a song you want stuck in your head during sex. People getting inadvertantly pregnant, castrated, and shipped off to New York.

And, I’ve ordered another heat pump for the office, so I guess I’ll be creating another one. I bought a handheld reciprocating saw, which has to be one of the most satisfying (if hard on the back) tools ever. The last time I used one was when I was building the EV to remove large chunks of the rear to make room for the battery boxes. They go through sheet steel like a blowtorch through butter.. 3/4″ plywood is a little trickier, at least until I found the speed control.

Anyway, so, the end result wasn’t the most beautiful thing ever, but it keeps the window from leaking, which is the important thing.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

So, I’ve completed my most recent project, only to discover it won’t work in WinCE, even though it works beautifully in unix. This apparently has something to do with the Embedded VCE linker being the most braindead beastie on the planet.. even though I’ve generated a valid DLL by anyone’s standards, whenever I try to link to it I get LNK1136: invalid or corrupt file (aka I have no idea what to do with this file, you want me to glue it on?)

Whenever I try to statically link using the .lib version, even worse things happen. Like, when the DLL gets loaded the application hangs in system calls unidentifiable.

(tears out hair)

I note that texas has a ballot initiative to define marrage as between one man and one woman and make recognizing any other relationships similar to marrage illegal. It’ll probably pass, too, texas being texas and all. (We are talking about the state that is proud to have brought you dubya, after all)

Why must people spend so much time in other people’s bedrooms?

I got most of that out my system. It’s amazing how much fun you can have with two MC505s and a DJ mixer. I want to write some patterns for them and go out somewhere in seattle and do my own show this way. All my equipment would fit in a small car, if I just brought a couple of 450s, the DJ mixer, the microKorg, and two 505s.. and I could *rip it up*. I kept a solid 20 minutes of bangin’ psytrance going without dropping the beat once.

I know that Grei would look down on the DJ mixer I have (it’s a Berengher DJM-700) but for me it’s a incredibly nifty mixer. I’m really not clear on what the difference between it and the pioneer is.. it’s about as noiseless as one could wish for, and all the faders are VCA, so waht’s the big deal?

There are times I go for brand loyalty.. but most of the time, I just want things that work.

IN debt beyond all possible belief, and yet I’m tempted to buy a bunch of house records and a pair of turntables and learn to be a DJ

What is wrong with me?