The Evil Eyebrow

This is a sweet picture (not mine).

We often get mail that is addressed to “Mr. & Mrs. William Ruhsam”¹. Or just to “Bill and Jenn Ruhsam”. Or better yet, horribly misspelled “Bill & Jenn Rubslumsraaqq”. At the cat clinic we take Psyche to, I’m “Mr. Bowie” which entertains the hell out of me.

Sometimes, though, Jenn and I have this conversation.

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¹: For clarity, we are “Bill Ruhsam and Jenn Bowie” or reversed. More formally of course we are “William M. Ruhsam Jr. and Dr. Jennifer L. Bowie”. If you feel like being perverse, you can send mail to “Dr. and Mr. Bowie”

click through for lots of notes on the image

I have purchased a new PC. Specifically a laptop so I can be a bit more mobile with my digital life. Some of the travails of this purchase are described in this posting, but I haven’t really talked about how much this laptop has upended my workflow.
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If it did, it would make our web browsing experience more usable, not less.

For example, if you’re a corporation looking to steal browsing by unethically redirecting traffic to your own search page, you might use your monopoly of the cable network to force people to do so. Perhaps, for example, when they mistype a URL in the address bar.

“Not so!” you exclaim. “Surely Comcast wouldn’t do such an annoying thing?”

Alas, they are. Comcast is participating in DNS hijacking. Read about it here.

I’ve found a way around it, though. The problem arises when you mistype a URL, not when you mistype key words. Those key words still get processed by your search provider of choice, in my case Google. However, if instead of typing “Best Blog EVAH” into your address bar, you type “eveileyebrow.com” (note the misspelling) you’ll get shoved to a Comcast Search engine (powered by Yahoo!) instead of Google.

You can instead type in “eveileyebrow com” (note the lack of a “.” in the address) and google will handily sent you to the blog, or to the google search engine if it can’t find it. No Comcastic crap to worry about.

For the record, this is a hack and not a solution. Typing in a long URL with spaces instead of dots will just get you to a search page rather than your actual URL

I am not a fan of the Comcast right now. As evidenced by my twitter posting of a few minutes ago. When I’m dropping F-bombs on line, you know I really mean it.

Last night I attended The Night of Astounding Peculiarities at Lenny’s Bar in Atlanta. We were treated to entertainment by Thimblerig Circus (show above), Witness the Apotheosis, and the always extraordinary Extraordinary Contraptions!

If you haven’t heard the Contraptions play, I highly recommend it. If you have, they’re unveiling new stuff right now! I head a song last night that I’d never heard before (”Hollow”) and it rocked. They’ll be playing Dragon*Con in two weeks.

Witness the Apotheosis was excellent as well. I have missed them several times running and was happy to finally get to hear them, and of course Thimblerig Circus is always entertaining. They perform their death-defying knife throwing, fire eating, nail-bed lying, pin juggling circus act with wonderful aplomb.

Images from last night’s festivities can be found at the flickr set. There weren’t any good shots of the Contraptions, except for one, but you can find others here and here and here.

One of the reasons I purchased my new computer was because Idimager was running soooo slow on my old one. It’s all well and good to have a digital asset manager to wrangle your photography, but if you can’t stand to use it, you’ve wasted some money.

I can say that Idimager works nicely on the new laptop. However, it still has some of its own bugs. Such as this:

There seems to be a lot of the same image in that flickr set, doesn’t there? Idimager is supposed to be easy to use to upload images to flickr and automatically name them and tag them depending on the data you put on your images. Obviously, there’s a bit of a whoopsie.

I’m about to go delete the set and try uploading again and see if I get the same issue.

Update: Figured it out. Maybe
The images you see above that are duplicates? They had the same “Title” in Idimager as each other. I had just named them all “Fire Eating” and “Thimblerig Circus”. Naming them “Fire Eating 1″ through “…7″ seems to have done the trick.

I guess I may have to go back to naming things in Flickr rather than Idimager.

I ran the 2010 Peachtree City Sprint Triathlon this morning. I wasn’t ready, but that’s only 1/3 my fault. Well, 2/3. Back to that in a second.

Here are my times (this course is ~450 meters, 14 miles and a 5k):

William Ruhsam (35-40 Age Group; Total of 92 Competitors)

• Swim 10:35 22nd in my Age Group
• T1 1:32 22nd in my Age Group
• Bike 43:07 59th in my Age Group
• T2 1:11 45th in my Age Group
• Run 26:27 42nd in my Age Group
• Total 1:22:50 45th in my Age Group (270th overall)

Compared to Last Year with 124 in my Age Group

• Swim (1/3 mile) 8:42 12th in my age group
• T1 1:50 21st in my age group
• Bike (13.9 miles) 37:39 28th in my age group
• T2 0:50 3rd in my age group
• Run (3.1 miles) 23:35 24th in my age group
• Total 1:12:35 18th in my age group

As you can see, I lost over ten minutes from last year. Most of that on the Bike. There are two reasons for this (well, three):

1. I wasn’t training for an Ironman this year. I didn’t have eight months of constant long-distance endurance training to give me a base
2. I was injured for the last three weeks. I didn’t move a muscle so that my calf would heal. I’m trying to train for a marathon, after all.
3. I was a lazy butt for the last three weeks. I could have gone swimming at least.

Anyhow. I’m perfectly happy with the race. As always, it was a well-supported race with great volunteers and superb organization. I had a friend with me, David Tyberg, who was kind enough to take some cameraphone videos of me transitioning. I’ll see if they’re worthy of being posted here.

I had a commenter a while back say that he missed my posts about running and triathlon training. Alas, for the last little while there hasn’t been much to post, but here is a general update:

Jennifer and I are registered for the 2010 Marine Corps Marathon in Washington DC. This race is October 31st. Those of you good at math may note that date is about 2 months away.

We’ve been training regularly for this race, doing quite well keeping up with our schedule. Until… [duh duh DUHHHH] I pulled my calf muscle and Jennifer started having some feeling-well issues. Right now, I’m about 4 weeks behind on my training and Jenn maybe two. But all is not lost! Things seem to be better in my calf and this weekend I will be resuming my exercise schedule by participating in the Peachtree City Sprint Triathlon (Tri-PTC) which, if you recall, I had to walk 2 years ago due to another calf injury.

I think I’ve given the leg enough time to rest and heal. Now I need to see if I’ve got enough time left to prepare adequately for the marathon. I’ll know that in a few weeks. Jenn is coming along well; if she can survive this CRUSHING SINK OF DEATH known as submitting her tenure dossier, everything will be fine.

Despite the fact I’m racing a triathlon this weekend, I haven’t been doing any real training for triathlon this summer. I’ve been swimming enough to not drown, but I haven’t been on my bike in weeks. No, I’ve pretty much just been concentrating on running, except for the last 3 weeks where I just Sat On My Butt And Ate Bon-Bons™.¹ That will obviously change soon and I’ll be back to doing three-days a week runs at work (please oh please oh please will the humidity drop soon?) and long runs on the weekend.

I also need to work in some basic strength training. I can’t really know but I blame my lack of any strength training this spring or summer for my calf strain. I plan to go (after the marathon) and get an evaluation of my muscular weaknesses from an expert and spend the winter working on those.

So, Triathlon this weekend. Marathon on Halloween. I’m sure there will be some other races in there, also. I’ll keep you posted.

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¹: SOMBAABB is a trademark of the JBWR community. This is what we do when we’re not doing anything else.

I was lighting up the internet last night with foul and obscene posts regarding Apple and Steve Jobs and iTunes’ general suckiness because of one thing: An inability to—inside iTunes—easily make the switch from one computer to another.

I eventually made it work, and this is documentation how. For people who found this via Google, let me specify the exact conditions I was working with:

Old PC

• Windows XP
• iTunes 9.0?
• The iTunes library was not in the default location (i.e. c:\documents and settings\my username\my music\whateverthehellitunescallsthisdirectory). The media folder was in a separate (internal) hard drive specified as E:\Music
• Home Network (i.e. didn’t have to mess with iPod transfers or external hard drives)

New PC

• Dell Studio 16 XPS Laptop
• New installation of iTunes 9.2.1.5
• Defaults for directory settings¹
• Windows 7

Goal
Move the entire E:\Music directory from the Old PC to the New PC’s default iTunes directory while still maintaining my Library data (i.e. playcount, playlists, song rankings, etc.)

Difficulty
From the initial research that I was doing via Apple help (useless) and Google searches (a bit less useless) it seems that iTunes brands itself as the best music database manager evah yet can’t do what I would regard as a simple task, which is to pick up the database from another installation on the same home network and port it to a new location.

Difficulty Defined
You see, iTunes isn’t a media directory, it’s a media database and the important distinction is that you could have media files (mp3, wav, mp4, aac, videos, etc.) scattered all across your computer and iTunes, being a database, doesn’t care. It simply sticks the (for example) music file into your Library, with the correct labels and artist and album art and links internally to that particular spot on your hard drive. So, if you look at two adjacent songs on your iTunes library, it’s perfectly possible for one of them to be at C:\Music and the other to be at D:\Another Directory\On Another Disc\Deep in a Subdirectory but from the perspective of you using the iTunes Library, it doesn’t matter.

iTunes does this by keeping track, in its library file, where that internal directory reference for the music file is. And herein lies the rub: You can’t just copy all your music to another spot and keep the same Library because every single one of those internal reference links will break. So, in order to move your music from one computer to another, you have to insure that your library references either remain the same, or get changed to reflect the new locations. If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said that the new version of iTunes should be able to do this automatically, I mean it’s not like no one’s ever going to buy a new computer ever again, thank you very much Apple. Apparently, I would have been wrong.

My Solution
As specified above, my directory structure was changing once I was at the new computer so I had to make modifications to my Library in order to change the directory path of each media file. Then I copied over the entire Music directory from the previous computer and voila, it was fine.

Details
This is the exact sequence of events I used, minus the crap that didn’t work

1. Exported the Library file from the Old PC: iTunes menu File –> Library –> Export Library and I saved the exported file (an XML file) to my new computer. I was operating on a home network so this was easy.
2. Downloaded and installed a trial copy of UltraEdit, an XML editor
3. Did a Replace (under the Search menu of UltraEdit) of every instance of “E:/Music/” with “C:/Users/Bill/Music/”.

Two Important Notes:

• In windows, the directory path uses backslashes, like this “\”, however XML uses forward slashes, like this “/”. Make sure when you’re replacing the directory structure text that you’re using forward slashes. If you copy/paste the path from a windows explorer path bar, you’ll get backslashes.
• Also, and I don’t know if this is critical but I didn’t want to find out the hard way, but the directory path in the XML Library file was “E:/Music/”. Note the very last slash. In the windows explorer path bar (suitably modified with slashes instead of backslashes) it was only “C:/Users/Bill/Music”. Note the absence of the last slash. When I did the replace in UltraEdit, I added the last slash onto the path so that I ended up with “C:/Music/Users/Bill/Music/”²
4. Copied the entirety of my E:\Music directory on the Old PC to the C:\Users\Bill\Music directory on the New PC.
5. Opened up iTunes and imported the library file I modified two steps ago. I’m sorry, did I say I imported the library? I meant to say that I imported the “playlist” because despite the fact that you can export libraries, iTunes doesn’t seem to think that it’s important to import them. However, you can import a playlist and choose the library and this apparently does the same thing. File –> Library –> Import Playlist and select the library file you just modified. This took me about 5 minutes to run.
6. iTunes then did [stuff] and gave me a message that said it was unable to import some songs because it could not find them. A cursory look at the Library on the New PC seemed to indicate that whatever it couldn’t find wasn’t important (and wouldn’t it have been nice if it gave me a text file or something that listed exactly what it couldn’t find? yeah, it would have) so I decided to move ahead, clicked the “ok” button or whatever it was that was offered
7. iTunes then proceeded to run through my entire library (took about 5 minutes) to verify the gaps of the songs? I’m not precisely sure what it was doing.

And now I have an iTunes Library on the new PC.

I haven’t yet run all the various features of iTunes yet, such as authorizing the new installation to use my password and the files that I downloaded eons ago (if I still have to do that?). If I run into any trouble that makes me scream for Jobs’ blood, I’ll let you know.

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¹: Many moons ago I learned/decided that it’s just so much easier to always go with the default directory settings that Windows and iTunes and other programs such as that specify. It makes upgrading and keeping track of things that much simpler.
²: This may or may not have been important. The majority of the paths that were being replace looked like this:
file://localhost/E:/Music/Music/The%20Extraordinary%20Contraptions/Inappropriate%20On%20Purpose%20EP/01%20Kiss%20From%20A%20Girl.m4a
When the replace I describe above operates, it will replace the the last slash (after /Music/) with another slash; basically a wash in the operation. However, I do not know if there are any locations in that XML file that didn’t have anything after the /Music/ which would have ended up with /Music without the slash if I wasn’t careful. This was me being paranoid. I suppose I could have done a search for /Music/ without any further text string but I didn’t think about that until just now.

It’s interesting to me to read the Beloit College Mindset List every year which picks some cultural references that incoming freshman just won’t get and also situating their outlook for the rest of us.

Beloit College Mindset List

Some of my favorites:

35. Once they got through security, going to the airport has always resembled going to the mall.
62. Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.
63. Their parents’ favorite TV sitcoms have always been showing up as movies.
75. Honda has always been a major competitor on Memorial Day at Indianapolis.