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Where’s the slow motion button?

I noticed that I’ve been “acquiring” more music that I can actually ingest. I’ve now had to create a special playlist in iTunes just to dump all the albums I haven’t gotten the chance to go through. I haven’t sorted everything yet, but as of now there are like 3000+ worth of songs in that playlist alone.

You see, my “method,” when it comes to iTunes and my iPod, is that I only leave the “nice” songs (according to my taste of course). This is so I can conserve space since my collection is merrily on its way approaching the 60GB mark (and my iPod is 60GB, so you see my dilemma). Of course I want to use the iPod for something other than music since it’s a very handy mass-data-storage device.

To do this, of course, I have to know which songs are worth leaving in the iPod. What I do is listen to songs by albums. Yes, I purposely go through entire albums even if the first impressions suck.

I think this is a very healthy thing musically. As human beings, we all have opinions and preferences. I’ve always wanted to do away with my “musical preference” and just enjoy music as such… any kind of music. This means taking a particular piece in its context, understand it, and appreciate it.

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iStickyWiki – skinned by yours truly

With Tiger’s dashboard feature. I mentioned in the past how useful it would be for note-taking. And I was right… if only there was a widget that did it right. Apple’s built-in Stickeys widget (not to be confused with the actual Stickeys application) should’ve been called “suckys.” You can’t paste long lines of code because it dynamically adjusts the font size… and it doesn’t scroll. Pasting long code/text that exceeds the limit will not paste at all. And you can’t type anymore either if you’re at the said limit.

Then I stumbled upon Wikity Widget. A cool wiki-style, database-driven, auto-linking note taking widget, and winner of the Apple dashboard widget competition. Simple and extremely effective implementation – perfect for my note-taking preference. But alas, the interface (if you visited the site) looks horrible.

Since I really wanted to use the app, me being turned-off by its aesthetics on all counts didn’t deter me from using it. First thing I did was check the license to make sure I wasn’t breaking any laws, then started hacking the visual aspects of the widget. I think I did enough tedious work to merit dubbing a new name for it. I decided on iStickyWiki to hit multiple birds with one stone. One is to acknowledge Wikity Widget‘s original concept that it is a wiki-type widget. Another is to emphasize that it has been somewhat “merged” with the Stickeys interface. And the “i” is both a tribute to Apple’s naming convention… plus it makes the widget very Filipino when pronounced as ees-TEE-kee-WEE-kee 🙂

Of course for good measure, I hacked the the scripts to insert a “readme” or “ReleaseNotes” entry to give credit where credit is due. Honestly I think I would’ve modified it regardless of the legalities, since everything was done for personal use. But since the license which governs it stated that it could be modified and re-distributed – so I thought I might as well share it with others. Read More

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MovableType 3.16

I checked out http://www.movabletype.org and found out that there was update to MovableType 3.x. Naturally, I thought “what the hell, might as well upgrade too.”

Absent-mindedly I set the FTP upload to replace any existing directories… so the plugins directory was obliterated and replaced with a fresh empty one.

My blog is heavily modified with plugins and hacks, it simply will not work without them at this juncture, so I began the quest of looking for every last one of ’em – which was rather difficult since you don’t really remember these things.

So here I am, online again. And this time, I’m listing the plugins I use for later reference (read: in case I try something stupid again)

While I’m at it, might as well include links and explanations.

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Strange Dreams

Where’s Joseph (yes, the Biblical OT character) when you need him.

POW

About a week after we came back from our pilgrimage, I had a weird dream where we were prisoners trying to escape from a highway, which was enclosed in a tunnel. I guess you could call it a tunnel, but there were rows of Gas stations beside us.

Anyways, at the end of the tunnel was a wall and a small door to freedom… but there was a helicopter that turns around to check every 5 seconds. And to get to the “border” (of freedom) takes about 20 seconds. So even if you start when the helicopter is facing the other way… it will see you, and fire a missile at you.

Strangely enough, these “missiles” are timed; before and when they’re fired. Taking into consideration the time it takes to sprint, obviously the math shows you can actually make it unscathed, but obviously in my dream I never even tried that.

What kept on happening was I show up outside of the door, run a little bit, notice the helicopter turn, run back – and the helicopter sees me, fires a missile (I’m inside the tunnel again by this time), missile lands… and waits a while (while I continue to run inside, further from it) explodes and affects the gas stations beside it. And then we have the domino-effect of gas stations blowing up and catching up with me – – I live; barely escaping the explosion(s).

Replenish gas stations… reset timers, and repeat excercise.

Oh and did I say that Mom was the helicopter pilot? She was trying to kill me!

Now all of this sounds absurd of course (the sheer settings and events in the dreams, but they’re dreams after all)

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