You May Be Wrong, But You May Be Right

 

Come In Here Dear Boy (II)

That silly box of location/mood/music actually looks good on the Works document.

That is all.

Come In Here Dear Boy

 

[Current Location| Greenwood, IN]

[have you had a violent moodswing today?| amused]

[the sounds of| The Fridge]

Huh.

This thing really does still exist.

Interesting.

Lost In Thought And Lost In Time

Last night while I was thinking through my post, I got to thinking. I started wondering if my DiaryLand blog still existed. So I just went looking for it. After working out the naming convention, I found out that it is no longer listed as active. It is probably still archived and I can get it back, but I cannot remember my password. Is it worth $19 to have them look up my info and reactivate my blog? Maybe. I don’t know.

After five minutes of scrolling through my life, it appears that I have been mildly interested in discovering the fate of my DL account since February of 2028.

Go me!

In so doing, I ended up resetting the passwords to both of my LJ accounts AND posting in one for the first time since 2007.

To quote Captain Shaw from Star Trek: Picard “It’s been kind of a weird week.”

In so trolling through my irnothing LJ account, I came across a still functioning(!) link to an old friend’s blog. I feel bad that I haven’t actually done much in the way of speaking to her for probably fifteen years now? Which is weird, considering we have never actually met.

I need to get some new friends. I need to start writing again.

I have that wacky creative prompts book. Maybe I will actually start using it.

But You're Older

Here we go again. It’s been nearly a year since last I put anything in this thing. What has changed? I’ve moved into a supervisor position at the afore mentioned medical warehouse, so that is fun.

If one of my co-workers had his way, I’d have a ‘friend’ at work. But I don’t play like that.

I found myself staring wistfully down an aisle at work this evening, ruminating on all of the bad decisions I’ve made in the last fifteen years of my life. Trying to come up with a better way of fixing everything than the plan I came up with a few months back. After that, I had to get my speaker and an iPod…I just couldn’t stand being alone with the things going on in my head anymore.

Speaking of iPods…The iPod thing sort of spiraled out of control for a couple of months. I now own ten of those plus a Zune.

I’ve done some streaming on Twitch for various things, but life got in the way.

I jumped into M:TG again for about a month. Still haven’t played an actual game with anyone for around ten years, but that is whatever.

Star Trek is actually good again these days. Lower Decks is fantastic, Strange New Worlds is equally fantastic, and Picard managed to undo the damage the movie damage to TNG’s legacy.

I’m not real happy about the state of my overall general health, but that comes of eating like crap and not doing anything about it. I guess I need to change that. More than that though, my mental health, while somewhat better than my days at The UPS Store, still leaves a lot to be desired. I feel like, for lack of a better phrase, excessive screen time, has messed up my ability to focus on things like books or think through a coherent sentence/story/idea.

It is interesting how much the phenomenon of “doom scrolling” has affected my ability to think like I used to. Yeah, not a fan of that. I’m thinking it is time to back off on things like the Kindle, Smart Watch and phone time in general. It is interesting…Where I used to pick up a book, I now pick up my phone and start scrolling through crap I don’t care about. Recently at work I’ve been reading an actual, real book on my lunch break and it is glorious!

Not just because the book is The Princess Bride.

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain?
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war
For a leading role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here
We’re just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here

Dominance

 

This week I reformatted the output files to match the color of the blog.

I also added a page listing the total play count for each iPod and a top ten albums page.

The Top Ten page is total plays of any track off an album from the entire time I track, so 10/01/2022 – Whenever I lose interest in the project.

Without further explanation, here is this week’s listening stats:

Device Plays:

This week’s music:

Top Ten Albums (Based on individual track plays):

There’s A New Kid In Town

 

I am going to try to catalog what I listen to each week and start posting it here.

I put together a spreadsheet and linked it to a mail merge file in MS Publisher so I can get a .pdf printout of the information that I want. I’ll be interested to see how this works, for how long I can keep it up, and how the spreadsheet changes along the way.

Ain’t Gonna Help You None

My previously mentioned 4th Gen iPod Photo (henceforth referred to as grossPod) has a dying HDD.  I went ahead and ordered some parts to FlashMod it, and get it running for decades more to come.

This required a series of adapters to replace the HDD with a MicroSD card:

 

 

 

 

 

We needed a cable to go from the IDE interface to something the board could handle, the board itself then a CF to SD card adapter.  I also added a SD to MicroSD adapter, because I had a 128GB MicroSD card for this project.

(Original Drive)

IPod once the modifications are complete:

 

(Everything complete)

(Still a little gross around the edges)

 

I now have (yet another) 128gb iPod for the collection.  Hooray!
 

They See Me Mowin’ My Front Lawn

 

Mowed the lawn today. The iPod Shuffle did not do a great job of shuffling…

All Your Pretty Paint And Powder

I picked up a 60gb 4th Gen iPod Photo from eBay for practically nothing.  The picture was kind of gross, to the point where people on Reddit were aware and somewhat afraid of the iPod.

 

(grossPod)

Well, it arrived a couple of days ago and true to the picture it was kind of gross.  It turns out the issues were cosmetic, so hooray for that.  It cleaned up fairly well:

 

(Considerably less grossPod)

With that, I finally got around to plugging it into the PC and looked it over with iTunes.  It turns out that the last time it played through a complete track was 3/24/2008.  I find it entertaining that the last track played was from Led Zeppelin II.  Naturally the first thing I played was the next few tracks on the album.

The time gap was entertaining to me to say the least:
 

Yes, it was a fourteen year transition between tracks.  Yes. That amuses me greatly.

With regard to the player itself.  The hard drive is failing.  It isn’t there yet, but if I transfer large amounts of data to it at a time it will just die.  Also, considering the fact that the player is 18 years old, the battery is shot.

Battery will be replaced and the HDD will be replaced with a flash card.  I just haven’t decided which one yet.  Meantime, I will continue using it.