Gudlyf's World

Just a Flesh Wound

// August 31st, 2004 // Comments Off // General

Passenger: Have at you!
Driver: You are indeed brave, sir passenger, but the truck is mine.
Passenger: Oh, had enough eh?
Driver: Look, you stupid bastard — you’ve got no head.
Passenger: Yes I have . . . Look . . . Just a flesh wound.

Don’t Look Up

// August 30th, 2004 // Comments Off // General

August 8, 2004, 13:18 CST, Chicago River, Chicago, Illinois . . .

Tour Guide: “And here, folks, we have the great Kinzie Street Bridge of Chicago, known architecturally for its interesting underbelly design. As we pass underneath, behold the breathtaking laticework of the unpaved bridge deck, as thousands of motorists pass over our very heads.”

Only HTML Geeks Will Get This

// August 30th, 2004 // 1 Comment » // General

Best sign at the RNC protests:

</BUSH>

HOTW #53

// August 30th, 2004 // Comments Off // Haiku

Overheard at a Home Showing

// August 27th, 2004 // Comments Off // General

Realtor: “And here is the formal living room. As you can see, it has a finely crafted gas fireplace, and all of the windows are newly….oh dear lord….BRUTUS! GET DOWN! BRUTUS NO!” (UPDATE: BAH! Try this instead)

I’m a Criminal in Port Of Sweet Grass, Montana

// August 27th, 2004 // 15 Comments » // Ranting

If this story is really true, my ass shall never step foot in the town of Port Of Sweet Grass, Montana (literally), for fear that I may succumb to some sort of death penalty (by gas chamber…*rimshot*). Lord knows I’ve claimed many porcelain victims in my quest for ultimate flushery.

I do have some things to say to the folks of that town:

1. Have some dignity and get some real fucking toilets, ones that suck the air out of the room so fast they take the hair off your genitals.
2. Did you really expect a town with that name to not witness flocks of stoned masses decending upon it, thinking they’ve found the holy grail of all ganjadom?

HOTW #52

// August 23rd, 2004 // 30 Comments » // Haiku

Chew Toy or Screw Toy?

// August 20th, 2004 // 22 Comments » // General

I guess that’s for you to decide.
(via Engaget)

Obscure iPod Audiobook Issue

// August 19th, 2004 // 39 Comments » // Techie

I realize not many people are using their iPod for reading audiobooks, but the touted features of bookmarking and “speed reading” with audiobooks on the iPod definitely sounded worth at least trying them out.

I hopped on over to the local library and grabbed a few books-on-CD, then iTuned them over. Well, the newly downloaded books did not show up under the audiobooks category. To cure this (at least on Windows), I had to rename all of the audiobook files from the “.m4a” extension to “.m4b”, delete the old files from the iPod, then upload the newly renamed files. Sucks that it takes doing that to get it to work, but it does work nonetheless. Now I can bookmark my place in any of the audiobook files, then go listen to music and come back to the place where I left off in the book. C’mon, that’s friggin’ cool.

The speedy reader is really nice, too. It doesn’t increase the pitch of the narrator at all, just speeds it up somehow without being overly fast. Someone’s probably timed the differences in Normal vs. Fast. (UPDATE: It seems it’s 25% faster, so for the math deficient that means you can read an hour’s worth of book in 45 minutes.)

UPDATE: Found more information on this here, but I didn’t notice an issue with needing to use a space at the end or caps.

UPDATE 2: Another thing I wanted to be sure to mention here. I’ve noticed several times already that if you have a rather large audibook file (larger than 1 CD worth, that is), you may run into problems with the bookmark feature when leaving the book and playing music. At least with two audiobooks so far, which I had combined into one huge file totaling maybe 10-16 hours, I would pause the book to listen to music. When I came back to the audiobook, my bookmark was there and I was able to continue playing from that point, but about ten seconds or so into the book, it would stop and dump me to the main iPod menu. When I went back to the audiobook, my bookmark was gone and I had to start over. Once I did start over and fast-forward to my old spot (which I luckily caught a glimpse of before starting), it would continue fine. This only happened when I left the book to listen to music; if I simply paused or turned the iPod off while listening to the audiobook, I could go back without a problem. Again, this only seems to occur with very large files.

UPDATE 3: Here’s a handy shell command I use on my .m4a files to convert many to .m4b files:

ls *m4a | cut -d . -f1 | awk '{print "mv ""$0".m4a" ./""$0".m4b""}' | bash

Works like a champ.

It’s Pronounced Keth

// August 18th, 2004 // Comments Off // Ranting

According to this article, I’m considered one sexy dude! Apparently only if you say my name with a short ‘ei’, though. At least “Gudlyf” seems to be on the sexy side.