Entries this day: Earthquakes Work anki iTunes_grrrrr

Earthquakes

9:29pm JST Tuesday 11 August 2009 (day 14384)

There have been some big earthquakes recently starting on Sunday night I think. Soness said she felt a big one then (which I missed), but then this morning we had a big earthquake, and during work today another big earthquake. So I downloaded 今日の地震, "Today's Earthquakes," for my iPhone. Just kinda intriguing in a semi-scary way. Alfonz kept saying, "Earth is trying to tell us something," and I would finish his sentence, quoting Earth, "get. off."

Work

9:34pm JST Tuesday 11 August 2009 (day 14384)

Work was aight today; I got a page finished in two days.. it allows people to update their information, and includes json to load possible regions, and then Google maps v3 api calls to convert an address to coordinates.

I don't know what's next for tomorrow, but hopefully something exciting! Like an earthquake wooooo!

9:54pm JST Tuesday 11 August 2009 (day 14384)

Alfonz and I were laughing today from I conversation I started as, "grampa, did you really have to program computers through trial and error?"

"Yep, and we couldn't just talk to the computers, we had to use our hands."

"omg!"

"We couldn't say, 'computer, I want you to find the smartest dinosaur on this planet and simulate its evolution sixty million years into the future and make me a clone so I can ride it now.'"

"Really??"

"We couldn't even say, 'computer, find all the bugs in this program and fix them for me.'"

"What about, 'computer, are you going to be busy on Tuesday or can we go play frisbee at the beach?'"

"Nope, we couldn't ask that, either. We had to wait until Tuesday to find out, and even if it wasn't busy, computers couldn't play frisbee back in those days!"

"Woowwww. You must be really old, grampa!"

But what was really funny was even dumber as we mimicked hick voices, let's say from the Simpsons, all like, "Hey there, that's one mighty fine comPUter you got there..." and then even sillier, "Hey computer, are you busy?"

It musta been a location joke.

anki

9:37pm JST Tuesday 11 August 2009 (day 14384)

Have just studied (English) meaning --> writing for about 70 some odd kanji over a few days. I can just about write them all, too. Dunno how to pronounce them, so I can't write them here, but I can draw them on paper.

iTunes grrrrr

9:40pm JST Tuesday 11 August 2009 (day 14384)

Stupid iTunes. I mean it's a great thing and coordinates my iPhone and music and all kindsa stuff, but I have one (1) big problem with it, that's kinda hard to describe. But basically I can't tell it to chill out about not finding my music. I've got all my music stored on Amazon S3, and my Jungledisk drive isn't always connected, because I'm not always connected to the internets. If iTunes starts trying to look for music while the drive isn't mounted, it panics and quickly disables all the songs it can't find. Like zoooom a hundred songs all marked as missing.

BUT

To unmark them, to indicate they're available, I have to do each one individually. The fastest technique I can find is to look up their Info, which will intice iTunes to search, find, download (around a minute for 5MB file), and then discover yes, in fact, the file exists.

That's roughly two orders of magnitude slower, AND manually intensive to restore the files' status. ARGH. iTunes, get smarter!!!!!!!!

I'm choosing not to move my files off Amazon; it's cheap as chips to store them all, with 99.9% guaranteed uptime, plus unlimited storage space. Otherwise, solutions would be well appreciated.

9:51pm JST Tuesday 11 August 2009 (day 14384)

Wait, what??? I just wrote all that, but just now looked at my iTunes and all (all) the files are listed as available. A magic solution has occurred, but I don't know how!

(( Even so, unfortunately, the files have already been removed from my iPhone, and will have to be redownloaded from Amazon S3 to reinstall them. Hours and hours of download. ))

11:35pm JST Tuesday 11 August 2009 (day 14384)

Hmmmm I might know a solution. I closed iTunes and then plugged in my phone. iTunes was launched and the songs all had their DNE flags reset to !DNE, and subsequently downloaded. Easy!