Live Blog: I’m Studying!

So in a spontaneous decision to reset my sleep-wake-cycle I decided to go to the library at 7 in the morning, the time I’ve been going to bed in the last week or so. The lack of sleep means my brain is working randomly, so I thought I’d do a live-blog.

I arrived at 6:55-ish, and the place was deserted! Woo. Or something.

07:40 Pretty hot blondie just arrived and is sitting 2 places away from me. Hmm she smells good. I wonder if I should ask her what perfumé she’s wearing. And then what. She unpacks an elaborate array of decoys to occupy the seat between us.

Maybe as a joke I should get Autopilot from the movie Airplane! (here’s a picture) and inflate him to take up space in the library. Where does one buy one of those anyway?

08:07 So she unpacked her things, and left. That was 20 minutes ago. That’s a bit cheeky, but hey, better than not having any place to study. Now she’s returned, with a coffee. Still fragrant. Still blonde. The library is not as full as it was on 8 AM two weeks ago, there are still about 5 seats available in this wing.

08:23 Wow, 15 minutes ago I felt fine, now I’m drowsy.

08:56 Two girls on my table of 6 have Starbucks coffee mugs, the ones that you re-use. Oh one of them’s the blondie from before, and the other one has a shiny MacBook Pro, 13″. But Starbucks, heh what’s the psychological term for that feeling of satisfaction of drinking crap that you get only because the crap has a brand?

Here’s a starting point for that thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption

09:52 Ooo fuck, my laptop blue-screened, a VMWare workstation error popped up when I mistakenly clicked a Windows Explorer window of a disconnected network drive (which always hangs Windows Explorer, fuck you Windows), and then it BSOD’ed. I wonder what VMWare had to do with it, since I’m not running it. Maybe my Windows environment is inside a Matrix-like virtual machine, which apparently some malware are capable of creating.

10:44 So 3 hours later blondie’s boyfriend shows up, the one he’s been reserving the place for. He looks douchey. This is petty, but hey, I set out to document my environment for a day, so it’s all in the name of… documentation!

10:50 And 5 minutes later they go for coffee.

11:19 Aaand blondie and douchey are back. 1 minute under the 30-minute break limit too. Not bad.

11:57 And I think I’m going home. Sleepy. I wonder if I should sleep, or keep going since my brain is still able to understand concepts…

The .nomedia Dilemma

This should be part of a larger critique/review of the Android operating system, but since I lack time, here’s one annoyance I’ve found on it.

The plus side is, you can plug the phone over USB and it will act as a USB storage device to the computer, not requiring resource-hogging iTunes to copy files into it. This also works for the music files. Another plus side is, the music player apps can semi-sanely deduce that a JPEG file inside a directory of MP3s is probably the cover image of the album. This is better than having the image embedded in each MP3 file. Or at least to me, preferable.

A cover image, what is that, you ask. Well, you see kids, music used to be delivered on circular 12cm shiny platters inside boxes…

But annoyingly, the music and gallery programs look in the entire SD-card for music (or image) files. So the gallery program shows folders with single files, which are the cover images to each album on my phone.

The internet says, if you don’t want a directory to appear in the music/gallery program, you can add a blank file called “.nomedia” into the directory.

Do you see the problem yet? If I want the cover images to disappear from my gallery app, I can put that file in the directory of music. But guess what else that does? Exactly, it will make the music invisible to the music player.

I wish the programs can be made to only look in certain directories. Not having to search the entire filesystem would also make them more efficient.

Short Enough for Twitter…

I wonder if The Simpsons will ever die, or if it will live a zombie-like existence to satisfy the needs of the long-tail* consumers…

* I keep using this term, I’m not sure it means what I think it means.