Hunting The Muse

Return From Florida

Welp, back from Florida. I suppose it wasn't quite as recharging as last year, although I didn't exactly have as much to recharge from, so overall that's a good thing. In general I think I actually had a better time with my parents this year - we had a good time on the final full day, went to a nature preserve and took a lot of pictures of animals with my digital camera, and talked a lot of photography. My dad worked at Kodak for many many years and I had forgotten we had such a fun subject to talk about. He was really impressed with my camera (canon s200 powershot elph).

I spent a lot of time with Mir also - my sister's family was there for the first three days and Mir is the wonderniece. I took an absolute ton of pictures and little movies. She's 3 1/2 and hilarious.

At night I sat around with my iBook and did whatever I could without internet access, which it turned out was quite a lot. I obviously did a whole lot of iPhoto categorizations. But I also played with iTunes a lot, too. I got some new cds and for the first time I have more than 5 GB of music in iTunes, with a 5GB iPod. So I was over. So, while before I had iTunes just syncing everything, I figured out a really cool system to have only the best subset of music in my iPod.

Basically what happens is that when I have new music that hasn't been rated or heard yet, it goes to my iPod. The iPod keeps track of play count. Once it has been played a couple of times, then it goes back OFF my iPod, into a "rate me!" playlist in iTunes, since that's the only place I can rate music. Finally, any music that has been rated three stars or above is stored back on my iPod. So, if I listen to new music that I really like, of course I will want to rate it highly so it will show back up on my iPod.

So basically what that means is that I have a lot of music that is not on my iPod now - one-star, two-star, and music that I have listened to multiple times but haven't rated yet. By the end of this, all my music should be rated. I accomplished it by making a few smart playlists, telling the iPod to only update those playlists, and also taking advantage of the whole checkbox feature in case I had a highly-rated song that I didn't need on the iPod (like the star wars radio drama, for instance - it's great, it takes a lot of space, I already heard it).

The other thing I did was go through a bunch of Project Builder tutorials. I'm learning Cocoa programming. I'm doing it in an unconventional way - I'm learning it using Java first, since that is what I know, and then trying to learn some Objective C on the side since that's more mature for Cocoa. It's weird though, because I'll really be learning Obj-C from scratch - most tutorials assume you have proficiency of C/C++ and I'm only moderately familiar with them. So what I really need is an Obj-C book that either teaches it from scratch, or (better yet) teaches it to people that already know Java.

Right now I'm waiting for Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my iBook so I can take it into the shop - it's got at least a bad battery, but might also have a bad power management system. Booo! Posted by Curt at November 27, 2002 11:03 AM