Year End Review: Music
WIth the end of the year here in a few days, I thought I'd spend some time reflecting on things from the past year. We'll start with music.
This year has been good for me and finding new music. My roommate over the summer, Adam has a wide taste in music and introduced me to a number of bands. Some of these aren't represented in the following list because their albums did not come out during the past year. My top three albums are all new artists to my collection.
Number One: The National, Boxer. I thought it was good the first time I heard it, but after seeing them live in San Fransisco there was no doubt. This band is amazing. Boxer contains a great range of wonderful songs. From the laid back songs like "Brainy," "Green Gloves," or "Start a War" where the vocals and ...
Oggify 2.0 In Progress
So it happened. I got a new album ripped and went to run Oggify on my Mac Mini. It didn't work. Audio::TagLib was no longer installed due to the OS X upgrade, and I really didn't feel like making a new, sub-par, patch. That and install TagLib again. So Oggify 2.0 is in progress. Here's an idea of the big changes to deserve a major version number bump:
- It's written in Python.
This change and being able to start fresh has provided a number of excellent benefits. These are also worth noting.
Plugin architecture. Oggify provides a parent class, oggify.plugins.Codec, which if implemented provides everything for Oggify to use an input or output format. Currently I've got plugins done for flac as a source. Ogg and MP3 (vbr, cbr, abr) as output formats. So someone writes a file (flac.py), puts ...
Year End Review: Music, Honorable Mentions
So with yesterday's post on my top three, there are a number of albums that still deserve some praise for being good choices to listen to.
Arcade Fire, Neon Bible. Arcade Fire's sophomore release, and my first experience with them. "Keep The Car Running" still dominates as my favorite single track but usually I just listen to the whole album in bulk. The album flows well together, and makes for excellent music to listen to while coding.
Jimmy Eat World, Chase This Light. This was not what I expected from Jimmy Eat World. The style found in Futures or Stay On My Side Tonight is only found in "Gotta Be Somebody's Blues." The rest of the album tends towards strong, clear, upbeat rock sounds. The lyrics aren't all upbeat though, and the contrast of music to lyrics is delicious. If you've listened to a lot ...
Year End Review: Video games
I've been enjoying video games since I was a kid on the Apple II and Nintendo. After graduating I've had a bit more time to play them, enjoying both the Wii and Xbox 360; having played a few wonderful games this year. However, if you have the time and a system that can, you need to play Portal. The game was short but it was funny, original, and required you to think outside the box. There was something wonderful about jumping off an impossible ledge to launch yourself up to a higher ledge. The guys at Penny Arcade have summed it up nicely (caution: coarse language). Not only is it a great game, it has a great song (warning: spoilers).
My Blog Code
Well, I've cleaned up the Django app that runs this blog. If you look at it, you need to read the README file first. Trust me.
Highlights:
- Comments system that uses akismet to filter spam. After-the-fact comment filtering.
- RSS feeds on a per-tag basis and one of recent entries.
- Uses only the Django admin.
- Uses django-svn revision 5994. Probably broken with current versions.
- Shamelessly used calendar snippet.
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Provided templates that assume all sorts of CSS you probably aren't using! Luckily you only really need to override
templates/blog/entry_abbr.html,templates/blog/entry.html, andtemplates/blog/calendar.html.
Available at hg.scottr.org via Mercurial: hg clone http://hg.scottr.org/blog
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