All of you will surely recognize the man on the left.  His biblical image comes at you in all of its hair and puffy-shirtness like a thunder clap.  Yanni stands as the hairiest, women-loving man I know [of]…though Hugh Jackman must be at the top of this game too!  And on his right is the much subdued version of the eighties visage, also Yanni.  When did this happen?  No ‘stache to whisper its childhood stories to concert viewers.  No curly locks of Grecian do to reveal the arcane secrets of musical composition.  It’s a transitive state of Yanni’s image much in the same way we all saw Metallica shed their fettered styles of 80′s heavy metal.

So Yanni will be coming to Duluth in April at the Gwinnett thingy (Arena, perhaps?).  I know most of my known world will simply abuse me verbally for going to a Yanni concert (which will actually be my third or fourth), but I couldn’t give a crap.  If you’ve never seen one of these concerts, you really don’t know what you’re missing.  It’s a phenomenal appreciation of the musical arts, internationally complete.  I suppose many of you only like your music for its pop artist front [wo]man, but I really enjoy the instrumental musicality of it all.  I would compare what Yanni conducts on his stages to that of the Cirque du Soleil band (on a small scale) and Dream Theater / Liquid Tension Experiment.  You could draw comparisons with Phish and Wide Spread Panic.  All of these bands have two things in common: they’re killer jam bands and composed of some very talented musicians.

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I had thought this might be a good excuse to buy an upgrade to the newer generation Zune 80 or 120, but I’d have to find my place all over again in the current audiobook I’m listening to (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”).  Arrrrgh!

Search around on the net and you’ll find no shortage of complaints and Microsoft bashing surrounding this recent development.  It’s a sad day, and ironic one too.  I had just poked fun at a friend recently who bought an iPod without thinking of the alternative.  To be fair, however, had she bought a current model Zune, she’d be unaffected by the problem.

*UPDATE* Microsoft has released a statement regarding the Zune 30 bug that hit all of us this morning. They’re essentially telling everyone to wait until tomorrow morning to turn on the Zune.  As of 7:00am for Eastern timezone folks, your Zune will magically begin working again; almost ass mysteriously as it stopped.

Though it’s not in their official release, the problem is most likely due to a bug in its ability to handle a leap year, which 2008 qualified.  The idea being that a leap year has around 366 days instead of the usualy 365.  As of January 1st, Greenwich Meantime, the device will be back on 1 of 365 – and working.  It’s a logical solution, but a very unfortunate goof for the Zune hardware team.  Maybe we’ll get a coupon toward the purchase of a new generation Zune in the mail for our trouble (ahem…are you listening, Zune team)!

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I worked with one of the more difficult teaching challenges in my experience yesterday at my drum circle. A gentleman joined us with a peculiar short-coming – he had no current musical interest and an unclear memory of the interests from 30+ years ago when he called it (music) quits. I see many people that claim to have “no rhythm.” At face value, it’s true. However, everyone has rhythm whether they recognize it or not. Your heart beat has kept a rhythm for your entire life; surely one can learn to keep one externally for a few minutes. As it turns out, there are some people that this may seem even less possible for. This guy that I worked with seemed to have a real mental block to rhythm, or to something even more fundamental – frequency. In his words, he had trouble with numbers in that they held no relevance. I believe the problem was actually that he assigned no frequency to numbers. In order for counting to assist you in musical timing, one must use a consistent spacing between the numbers. Without it, counting does us no good. I attempted to teach this concept in many styles; visual, tactile, and aural. Each of them seemed to provide a glimpse of what he was missing, but none of them resonated completely. Having thought about it more sense the drum circle, I have some additional ideas of how to get this message across.

For one, utilizing the old method of counting seconds may be helpful (e.g. one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, etc.). Forcing yourself to say one thousand between every second counted manages to keep many of us attuned to a consistent frequency. There is also the issue of matching patterns, which I think people can more easily grasp than timing. My five-year-old is learning about patterns in kindergarten as an introduction to math. Following this course, I may be able to explain frequency in terms that a potential drummer can understand. In the end, I want this guy to grasp the concept of the wave. Hear the noise of each crest. Feel the silence at each trough. Of course, the goal is anticipation. Without that – and this is something that he struggles with – one can never ride the wave!

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The software sees improvements as well. There are some updated looks, an updated social system, and an improved search system among others. Channels in the Zune (software and hardware) look really great. I am a big fan of the Pandora project, so a Zune-similar feature is eagerly sought. The channels are updated automatically and based upon your ratings of music. It’s based on genres, which if yours are anything like mine, will need some cleaning to get narrowed down to a meaningful set. A new social feature allows you to find people in the Marketplace that listen to music like you. As Dunn comments, you can do this yourself now, but it takes quite a bit of time and clicking.

The one point that Dunn brings up as a downer to this feature-rich upgrade is that most of these concepts are designed around the use of a Zune Pass. For $15 per month, the Zune Pass allows you to download all the music you want for up to three people. They still haven’t worked out the issue of assigning different user profiles to this pass. Our pass is in my wife’s name, so I logon with her account to get subscription music. This will effect the way channels work (that is, averaging the music preferences between all users of the Zune Pass instead of offering an individual’s experience), but I know they’ll work this out in time. For now, I’ve learned to deal with the way the pass works and I can accept it. I doubt very seriously the Zune Pass will extend to such services as Audible (it doesn’t currently extend to the MarketPlace video services), so I’d have to look at another subscription price there. I’ve used Audible’s services before, and I did enjoy them very much. I’m a big fan of audio books, so I will likely pony-up at least a basic subscription.

The one thing I don’t know yet is when I can expect this update. Despite Dunn’s lack-luster summary of the 3.0 update, I am very much looking forward to it!

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I don’t really know what Esquire is all about, but I’ll buying a copy of this one off the stands when it comes out.  It’s a historic moment.

Link: BoingBoing

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• Zune Hardware:
  • Alphabet ToC Navigation in addition to click-wheel
  • Ratings categories (so I can play 4-star or 5-star music only, for instance)
  • The ability to remove songs from my “quicklist”
  • Setting EQ attributes to a song or album uniquely
  • Inline normalization
  • New category…or put a recently added link at the top of each category
  • Make playlists of video files
• Zune Software:
  • Faster *My software has long periods of unavailability, though I realize I have an over-sized library
  • Automatic playlist creation
  • Support for OGG
  • Insight into the folder monitoring – some sort of progress or status on this
  • Better album art application – album art isn’t always displayed immediately after you add it
  • Without knowing any better, I wish the album art was embedded within the ID3 tag of the file rather than being added as a hidden file in the directory
  • Perhaps support for a real database back-end – I feel the need for enterprise class media management

There were also some real problems that needed attention:

• Crashing…the software crashes, the hardware crashes. Sometimes it’s solid, but then it goes into a fit and crashes consecutively all to often. **UPDATE – I found out that the hardware is most likely crashing due to an electrical protection feature. Static electricity is not the Zune’s friend.
• Renaming/hiding MP3’s. This could be related to crashing – I’m guessing that MP3’s were being indexed and something went wrong. Then, the Zune software went and renamed a *lot* of MP3’s to their cataloged GUID and hid them. The files won’t play until I rename them back to a .mp3 extension. It will annoy me when it comes up – so far only a few of these songs have come up in my shuffle list.

In the hardware category, Microsoft did exactly zero to fulfill my wishes. The closest they came was to introduce sorting by “date added” to the software. That’s actually very helpful, but it doesn’t help me find new music on my device after I’ve left the computer. The Alphabetical ToC thing would still be cool, but I will say that the click wheel seems to be spinning songs by faster than it used to. It hasn’t bothered me as much that I can’t jump to a letter in the alphabet quickly, though it would probably make me a safer driver if this feature were added. Depending on your attitude towards the “Ratings” debate, the new software either decimated your organization, or has drug you from Ratings procrastination. I’m somewhat in the middle on this. I’m adapting quickly enough, though I had finally figured out a decent way of rating my music along the 5-star basis that helped me managing my music. The new Zune uses only a “Heart” to signify the emotion a given song lends. You love, hate it, or are indifferent. Despite the change, there is still no way to play music on the device that you’ve “Hearted” unless you create a playlist first (static). Microsoft took away the “Flag” option in the Zune hardware. I was using it a little bit, but it was so unnecessarily slow and useless that I had stopped altogether. I had hoped that the new firmware would add much needed functionality to the flagging option, but now we find it missing in action. No love lost for the old function, but I would like to see the ability to flag a song for my review back at the software. I would primarily use it as a reminder to do something with that song (e.g. add to playlist, look up artist, etc.).

The Zune software; that is, the part installed on a Windows machine for interaction with media and the device itself, is a piece of work. I mean that in two very polarized ways. Piece of Work: 1) Quality craftsmanship, exemplary; 2) opp. The worst, poorly demonstrated – syn. Piece of Shit. I may sound a little harsh, but this new software encourages me to use Microsoft’s new “Heart” ratings to express my emotions. This brings me to my earlier comment regarding the product’s shift in direction. I really get the feeling they threw the old software out and started fresh. On the love side of things, I really like the new look. While I prefer the technical features of an app to let me do all matter of evil to it (i.e. preferences, customizations, tweaks, etc.), I really do like the slimmed-down simplicity of the new Zune software. The previous software left me feeling like I should see more options, but didn’t. This software, on the other hand, gives me the impression that what I see is what I get. It took a little while to get used to – I’m still a little unfamiliar in its kid-gloves aesthetics – but I’m gaining proficiency. I also like the fact that this software appears to be running faster with fewer crashes. I haven’t had any MP3′s get renamed (and hidden) to GUID replacements. While file monitoring still doesn’t lend any insight as to the percentage complete, it does seem to run faster and more consistently.

On the negative, the functionality of the software has been grossly gimped. I am no longer able to do something as simple as edit my own ID3 tags in a simple form-based interface like before. I can’t seem to update an album against a web lookup – it happens automatically, but I don’t have finite control over the process as was given in the previous software. While I love the addition of the podcast category, I don’t much care for the level of experienced interaction given to users here. I prefer the more technical feel when it comes to podcasts. They tend to vary wildly in format and compatibility, so it seems best that I have the option of modifying URL’s, identifying what URL’s are being used, and possibly see the actual error message for a given RSS URL when the Zune software rejects it.

Ultimately, the Zune software direction has the potential of being good. I feel more like I’m using an Alpha product than something released for public consumption, but the good stuff is really good. With the negatives going against my my expectations of software for this type of work, I would actually rather use a third-party application to synch to the Zune. As I’ve stated before, MediaMonkey is my favorite (in case their developers are reading).

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I haven’t heard much, but I know it’s supposed to be animated 3D – not quite like Beowulf. Synthespian is the term I believe they’re using. The main character(s) will be realistically animated while the others are much more cartoonish. The idea being that this will give the realistic characters more believability because of the contrast between styles. It sounds stylistic to me. I’m all for creative ventures in the style department, I just hope it doesn’t mean less time is spent on the actual story and acting.

Tim Burton will be working with Disney to create the piece. I would have otherwise been worried about the duo, but Disney’s films are taking a more “edgy” quality to them as of late. The recent Pirate’s of the Caribbean trilogy makes me think that Disney’s production studio might be able to handle the macabre nature of Burton’s imagination. Though, I’d really be intrigued if Paramount and Mandalay were involved such as their contribution to Sleepy Hollow.

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There comes a time when I need to do some data manipulation within Excel and import the results into a database. Mostly, I don’t have data in Excel that is overly complex, and so doesn’t pose any particular challenge in doing what I want. Today I’m working on an Excel document in Office 2007 – not one I made, but rather someone else’s wretched representation of data. It has carriage returns within the fields themselves, and I need to clean those out before importing the data into the database. There are a variety of ways to do it outside of Excel, but not a straightforward method within Excel. Microsoft’s search & replace feature in Office 2007 does not appear to be any better than in the former products. Is a little regular expression handling too much to ask for?!? So here are the goods:

If you turn off “word-wrap” on the offending cell, you should see a small box in the field where a carriage return once hid itself. Excel 2007 doesn’t simply allow me to copy this character and use it to search the worksheet. Neither does it acknowledge any sort of ^p, \r\n, or vbCRLF. Instead, you need to key in the ANSI code for the character you wish to search (and replace) on. In this case, I searched for ALT+0010 (the linefeed) and replaced it with a space. You may need to search for ALT+0013 ALT+0010 (CRLF) if this doesn’t work for you, but in my case removing the LF seemed to have worked.

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Silver Stars is described as a classier place, targeting primarily women and couples:

Forget venturing into the sleazy adult video store in the seedy part of town. We strive to provide women and couples with a safe, clean, upscale and positive environment that presents all of our products in a fun and intuitive way.

Not for nothing, the store is located just over the city line to avoid some harsher political scrutiny, as well as maintaining a minimum amount of pornographic material. I believe it’s the magazines that can get you shut down in Gainesville, but their videos are described as “educational” just in case. However, if I read quickly through the list of items bulleted on their site, I get the false impression that I might be able to do a lot of my Christmas shopping there too:

• Bath Products
• Handmade Soaps and Lotions
• Educational Books & DVD’s
• Party Supplies
• T-Shirts
• And Lots More…

*There’s a lot to be said for “and lots more…”

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This image is one I took of the lovely Duct Tape Pirate ladies at Dragon*Con 2007 Masquerade contest. As I grabbed this image, I noticed even Flickr was getting in on the fun!

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