The Aerie
Well 2007 is off to a pleasant start. Last night we attended R's New Year's party, which was held in an art gallery. It was, in a word, "very nice." Okay, that's two.
My wife and I didn't know anybody but R, but we introduced ourselves to her friends and chatted about each other's occupations and had a "nice" time. It probably would have been different if we had known these people - we would have had history with them; we would have known who-dated-who-and-broke-up; we would have known So-and-so is an angry drunk, while Such-and-such is a flirty one.
But as it was we didn't know anyone, so the evening was a pleasant exchange of introductions and searches for mutual acquaintance.
Today we continued and completed watching the Lord of the Rings extended edition as part of D's annual ritual. She has studied the films extensively, and knows lots of background: for example in one scene Gandalf inexplicably rides out of Minas Tirith to battle Nazgul, with Pippin on his saddle. He would have had to find Pippin, first, and then bring him out into peril for no particular reason. Why? Because the scene was initially shot to take place just as Gandalf arrives at Minas Tirith with Pippin on his saddle, before having a chance to drop the hobbit off in the city. Little interesting details like that.
We watched the last two DVDs for about ten hours, interrupted by breaks and meals. During that entire time, I attended to one of my self-assigned chores: tagging all my MP3 files. Because I've found so much music lying on the ground (literally), I have a lot of songs that only come up "Track 1 - Unknown Album" if you load them into an MP3 player. Most of those songs I already went through and identified, but I didn't have a good way to put the information into the file tags - little internal labels saved right inside the file next to the music. Those tags are what things like iTunes and Windows Media Player use to manage your files, as well as the aforementioned MP3 players.
So it's important to get the tags filled out properly - otherwise its very hard to, say, avoid playing Holiday Music in July, or decide to play only Holiday Music in December. Well, it's "important" only on the very generous scale of things- that- are- important- only- to- well- fed- middle- class- Western- geeks. Starving African children do not find my MP3 tags at all important, and rightly so.
Nonetheless it's something I've wanted to do, and the LOTR seemed like a good time to do it. So for about 10 hours I tagged MP3 files.
I only got up to the "F"s
The problem is, the process is tedious, even with the very good editor I found (EasyTag). Usually you can only work on one album at a time, because different albums tend to get ripped (copied to MP3) in different formats: you put the CD in, you rip, and two weeks later you buy another CD, and you rip it a slightly different way. Maybe you use a comma here, where you used a colon there, to separate album name and song. All that makes it necessary and tedious to mass-tag the files.
So what with this and that, and the "C"s ending up containing all the "classical" music, I only got to F's. And I only got that far because I didn't have many files that started with F, otherwise I'd've only gotten to "E".
So that was a pleasant, mind-emptying way to spend the weekend and start the year. Tomorrow it's back to the slog at work. A four day week, but it will seem longer because the work is presently SO boring....
Of course, the starving African children would be happy to have a job this good. Or at least access to the cafeteria. So I oughtn't complain, and ought to keep perspective. Hm. Maybe "Keep perspective" would make for a good Resolution for 2007...
Posted by Albatross at January 1, 2007 11:47 PM | TrackBack