Credit where credit is due!

It just occurred to me that it would probably be nice to give my friend Bobbi credit for that cartoon version of me as a scientist. But don't be fooled, I just play one on TV. Bobbi makes these adorable bracelets, and she peddles them online, but I'm too lazy/busy at the moment to find the link. I'll add it soon.

Anyway, isn't it a cute cartoon?

Oh crap, I forgot about poor Dave. Oh well, he's probably just finishing up a 168-hour outro at one of his live shows. (Seriously, the intros/outros when you see him live are expanded to an average of 5 minutes each. Sheesh! I'd rather hear more songs, personally, but whatever.) More about Dave later.

Let's talk about concerts, shall we?

I finally got my iPod ... hooray! It's the most fun you could pack into however-many ounces it is. Anyway, creating the different playlists reminded me that I saw two of my playlist artists, Evanescence and Dave Matthews Band, in concert this summer. I just rewrote that sentence about five times, and it's still a grammatical disaster. Oh well.

So I'll ramble about those performances, because all of this not writing my thesis is kind of boring. Oh, and I saw Clay Aiken too. Shut up, he has a beautiful voice. In addition to a training mullet, an INSANE fanbase, and a pair of pants that I am fairly sure he bought in 1986 at Chess King. I remember them, they had a matching vest and skinny tie. Oh, and that link? Is a prime example of his insane fans. Do pay them a visit, and be appalled.

I saw DMB first, so I'll start there. Although I'm very tempted to start with Clay Aiken, because both his first and last name should be before DMB and Evanescence if I arranged the three of them in alphabetical order. I have a kind of weird obsession with alphabetizing stuff. It's just so orderly, I don't know. That doesn't make any sense considering my car, my computer room, and anywhere I spend a lot of time looks like the eye of a hurricane. But some things just don't make sense, like the fact that people insist on declaring that they "gave 110%." Uh, no you didn't. That would be impossible. One hundred percent is all you can give, see. Listen up, athletes and coaches and the guy who accepted Oscar #655 for Return of the King. You can't give 110%! They should have taken away all of your Oscars for that little blunder. ALL! Well, except for Annie Lennox's.

Well, look what's happened now. All of the people who misuse percentages just used up my rambling quota for today. Tomorrow, Dave, you and I have a date. Let's leave our political views at the door, okay? Okay.

The Joy of BPM Calculation

I've been slowly but surely organizing my mp3 collection to streamline the process of moving it to my iPod, which should be en route from Apple. (Again, I'm slow to jump on bandwagons. My imaginary friend Mia at Popgadget undoubtedly had a portable digital music player in oh, say, 1999. By the way, Mia is imaginary in the sense that while we've had many, many conversations over the course of a year and a half or so, we've never met in person. But I'm sure that if she fell down in a forest when no one was around, she'd make a sound. Probably a sound made by some kind of technology prototype that would automatically put her back on her feet, or something, but a sound nonetheless.)

Anyway, back to the organization of my mp3s. In the process of editing tags and such, I noticed a sad little field in the tag for "BPM" that was always blank. Then I decided that the BPM would be a useful tidbit of information on each mp3, particularly if I'm setting up a workout playlist or something. But tapping out the BPM and calculating it myself would take the rest of my natural life, plus the time I've spent procrastinating instead of writing my thesis, squared. And that's a wee bit more time than I'd like to spend on something like that.

But all is not lost! I found a free BPM calculator at Mixmeister that seems to be fairly accurate and calculates a whole batch at once. It's busily doing my 1980s folder as we speak, and I am just full of glee. Sadly.

I should mention that in order to download the free calculator, you have to give them an email address for their "newsletter". It's okay, it makes you feel like you didn't waste your time creating that free Yahoo account to use for junk mail only.

And, it's been bumfuzzled by J. Geils Band's "Centerfold". Hm.

Edited to add ... ah ha! It just doubled the "Centerfold" BPM. Apparently it does that on occasion ... calculates by the wrong beat. I can deal with that ... I'm very good at dividing by two.

What in the world? And there's a ginormous bid on it, too. Inconceivable! Something tells me that seller is not going to get paid.

Well, boo. The first link used to point to an eBay auction for a "new, unused paper clip!" with a bid of $14,999.00. See what you did by removing the item, eBay? You caused a broken link. A BROKEN LINK! Oh well.

A day off! I love labor.

I love having weekdays off. I can't enjoy weekend days off that much, because weekends make me nervous for some reason. I slept late (of course) and since it's beautiful and sunny and hot outside, I spent the day lying by the pool. I know, I know ... UV light and melanoma and wrinkles and blahdeblah. I don't worry about that, though, because I don't expect my world last all that long. I expect to either go with Christ when He returns for His church, or be blown up by a terrorist before I'm bothered by wrinkles. And as for the skin cancer thing, well, that doesn't worry me either. I know, it's illogical.

Anyway, now I'm good and toasted, and I plan to spend the rest of the evening cleaning to the tune of the Law & Order marathon on TNT. By the way, TNT, there's a gazillion episodes of Law & Order. What's with re-running the first half of the marathon for the second half of the marathon?? Why would you do that?

Usher!

Oooh, it's Usher on a SNL rerun on E! (I'm debating whether or not to put a period after "E!" because the channel name includes the exclamation point, of course, but that sentence looks a little more emphatic than I meant it to. Oh well.)

Anyway, Usher. I lurve to watch him dance. But his voice live? She is not so good. And in the middle of his "Yeah!" performance on SNL (again, I don't mean to be that emphatic. But it's the correct title, see) he does some weird interpretative dance or something. Hm.

One more Usher related comment ... I heard an interview with him earlier tonight, and he was talking about the Usher Raymond IV debit card that he's introducing. I thought it was a great idea, until I realized that it doesn't debit from his bank account. Boo! What fun is that?

The cats, the cats!!

It's possibly a side effect of being deliriously tired, but I just can not stop laughing at this string of cat video clips. (Taken of cats, not by cats.)

http://www.punchbaby.com/media/gitfakt/clips/funny/funnyCats.wmv

Right-click and "save as". It's about 2.7MB, I think. I'm kind of scaring myself, being so amused at this clip ... sometime in the future, if I start commenting on Bob Saget's refreshing wit, please call for help. Thank you.

Edit: Whoooops. The link that I posted the other day took you on a road to nowhere. Sorry about that. Anyway, the punchbaby link works and this is a great clip. Cats falling into stuff, out of stuff, and off of stuff is always funny. Particularly when they keep their heads*, and all of these do! Whee!

I am so deliriously tired. I opened one of the incubators at the lab the other night, and I am almost certain I heard something in there sneeze. I thought one of my prokaryotes had been in there clicking its heels (er ... flagella) together and reciting, "If I only had an upper respiratory system!" Or, perhaps I've been wrong and the theory of evolution is true after all ... maybe if I had left the sneezing bacterium in there long enough, I would have opened that incubator one day to find a bewildered-looking guy sitting on one of the shelves. "Who are you? Where am I? What did you do with my 70s ribosomes???"

Man, I need SLEEP!

*I should mention that the headless-cat clip I linked up there (not the punchbaby link, the other one) is horrible and cruel and every other word that means eeeeeevil. I only linked it to explain the reference that I made. The good news is, I probably won't turn into a serial killer anytime soon, because I didn't laugh like a hyena at the headless-cat clip, unlike SOME PEOPLE.