Category: Soap Box

Not my day..

I’ve got a pretty bad DVD habit, which is pretty evident if you check out my collection hosted on MMDB.  When I first got started, I’d pick up at least one new title a week.  My purchase rate has slowed down, but I tend to binge.

The previously viewed movies at Rogers is a terrible temptation.  Recently I picked up Casino Royale in a 2 for $10 deal.  Unfortunately with dirt cheap prices, I also end up buying movies that I probably should have just rented.  The other movie I bought paired with Casino Royale was Night at the Museum, of course I selected a box that was the widescreen version – yet upon opening it at home I discovered the full screen copy (sigh).  So, back to Rogers for a refund as they had no copies for exchange.

Tonight, a bit at loose ends, I figured I’d visit the local Rogers video store and browse the previously viewed section.  I had almost made it though the entire section of 2 for $15 when I came across a copy of Night at the Museum.  Now it so happened that this was a different Rogers to the one that I had previously bought a mis-boxed full screen version.  I figured my odds were pretty good on finding an actual widescreen version this time (at least, that’s what the box said).

It is starting to seem like I’m doomed to either watch the full screen version, or not see this movie.  Yup, I managed to buy another copy of the movie that was mis-boxed.

At home I figured that I’d check out IMDB viewer ratings on this movie to see if I should even bother to try to find a widescreen copy.  Almost beyond belief, it seems that imdb.com is down tonight?

To top it off, today I had picked up an external USB enclosure to stick a 60gig IDE drive I’ve got sitting on my desk into.  As you can guess at this point, it seems I managed to get one that is DOA.  So it will be off to exchange that sometime next week.  When I do get it working, I plan to pair it up with my slug and possibly use it to run a RESTORE backup server.

Summary: 2nd failure to purchase a widescreen version; Unable to check IMDB ratings as the site is inexplicably down; DOA hardware purchase.  Just not my day.

Playlists

It seems some people are really into creating playlists.  I’m not one of them.  While I have a lot of nasty things to say about iTunes, the smart playlists feature has been the only way I’ve bothered to make playlists.  At least until now.

The other day I was thinking that while its nice to have iTunes recommend songs that you might want to buy that are similar to what you’re browsing in your music collection, and Amazon has lots of recommendations on what you might buy based on your previous purchases.  No one seemed to be harnessing the relationship between things that I already own.

Well, it turns out there is a bunch of stuff out there that does exactly that.

At first I ended up at wikipedia on music recommendation systems.  Further digging turned up something called The Filter which was blogged by Wired a while back, unfortunately it doesn’t seem quite ready for prime-time so I keep hunting around.   Then I came across MusicIP mixer, and a related comparison review article on lastfm.

MusicIP seemed like the best, most available candidate, so I gave it a shot.  The free version is limited, but not crippled.  It installs as a stand alone application, but is aware of iTunes and will read settings from there to figure out where (and what) your music collection is.  Out of the box, all you do is pick a song (or a few) and ask to make a mix.

I picked a random Haujobb track and asked for a mix of 75 songs (the limit for the free version).  The sample_mix was a fairly good selection of the music in my collection that I’d consider to be fairly compatible.  There were a few odd songs in the list that I trimmed out by indicating “less of this” and it shuffled things around (and I suspect remembered the error for later).

I then burned a MP3 CD for the car with these 75 songs (some 500MB).  As an aside, I’m terrible for updating my driving tunes, so what I had in the car was pretty stale.  Well, its been 2 days so far and I’m very pleased with the experience.  This is a much better mix set than the smart playlist I primarily use on my iPod.

One note about the MusicIP system, it needs a lot of processing time until it has consumed your music collection.  I ran my PC for well over 24hrs processing 3500 songs.  This is a one time hit, and I consider it a fair tax for the free version of the software – especially if it gives me an easy way to make new mix CDs, or new playlists for my iPod.

Be it through some social network, algorithm, or mixture of the two – I hope that this type of technology grows in popularity.  As we gather more and more media, we’re going to need better ways to interact with it – and insisting that we manually tag, sift and sort our data simply won’t scale.

Imagine if your email could be grouped and sifted based on how others had handled the same messages?  How about if your PVR could just record the same shows your friends are watching?  If you always answer “yes to all” on that dialog box, why not let me make it a sticky setting?

Travel & WiFi

Here I am sitting in the Vancouver airport waiting for my flight, writing a blog post using the free wifi access.  It isn’t all that speedy – but its free.  The Las Vegas airport also had free wifi, and better speeds.

Now the Ottawa airport doesn’t have free wifi – they’ve partnered with Boingo to provide a for fee service.  At least the wifi in Ottawa gives you access to the airport website for free, so you can check flights etc.

If you naively connect to the Boingo wifi and open your browser, you are redirected to the page which lets you sign up.  You can choose between a monthly rate of $11.95 or a 24hr pass for $9.95.  The monthly rate seems like a deal.  Of course you can also use your Boingo account a number of other places, but from what I saw it wasn’t enough other places to make it useful.

Examining the URL that I was redirected to, it was clear I was getting a special deal via a promo code: &PROMO=UNL01093CAD3.  Removing that promo code, resulted in the same page – but with different pricing.   Monthly jumps to $14.95 and 24hrs drops to $6.95.  Seems like the promo code doesn’t really help as much as it should.

Digging around, Boingo also provides 30 days free for mobile access.  If you read the terms of service, they specifically restrict laptops.

The National Captial Freenet offers DSL service for about $30 a month, and encourages you to share it with your neighbours.  While the costs might be slightly different for something the scale of an airport, it has to pale in comparison to some of the other airport costs.  Most of them levy an airport improvement fee in any case.  If you didn’t want to squeeze out the for fee providers, just make the bandwidth and reliability the distinguishing factor.

Time to get on a plane..