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Reading Recommendations

Jamie Phelps — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:41:47 +0000

Yesterday, I requested recommendations from folks about what RSS feeds they enjoy reading. I was intentional about not mentioning any specific topics or anything like that so I could get the most raw recommendations. In accordance with Twitter Bylaws Section C, Paragraph 2, here are the recommendations:

Patrick recommended http://randymurrayonline.com/ and concurred with Garrick’s recommendation of Garfield minus Garfield. Garrick also recommended http://mjperry.blogspot.com/. @drdrang recommended Clark’s Tech Blog. Finally, Chris Very2to2otlsren recommended Scouting NY.

I will be checking these out over the next few days. Much appreciation to everyone for the recommendations.

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Chord as cloud, harmony as spirit

Jamie Phelps — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:30:47 +0000

Is it possible, at least in our human language of music to express those ineffable and still beyond words concepts and sentiments of the inner self and its relation to the divine? I do not know if I could successfully answer this, or even more, draw a fine line between these concepts. What I know for certain is that it is inspiring to look for harmony in music that reverberates with the spirit of our existence.

via nagymusic.com

I love hearing Zvonimir’s thoughts on music and spirituality. Zvonimir is one of the most deeply thoughtful people I know and I consider it a privilege to count him as a friend. Keep an eye out (especially you Chicago-land and Texas people) for chances to hear him perform and/or lecture live. Until you can hear him live, you can also listen to some of his performances on his website as well.

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Down 35 Pounds and Counting

Jamie Phelps — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:02:48 +0000

Earlier today I posted an entry about my awesome new Troy Polamalu jersey. The birthday is a great time to reflect on my weight loss goals as well. I’m really happy with my progress thus far. This is me today:

And this was me at WWDC in June:

So far, I’ve lost 37 pounds, down to 228 from 265. I started tracking my calorie intake and output pretty aggressively (or neurotically depending on your point of view) in August using Lose It! for iPhone. Lose It! tells me that I weighed 257 pounds on August 10, so I’ve lost nearly 30 pounds in 3 months.

I’ve got a ways to go before I make my goal weight of 200 pounds, but six months after my worst state, I am in the best shape I’ve been in since I got married and I’m well on my way to being in the best shape of my life. I’m feeling great and looking forward to whatever life has in store going forward.

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Great Birthdays Are Made by Friends and Family

Jamie Phelps — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:58:45 +0000

My birthday is awesome because I’m surrounded by excellent friends and loving family. Ann Margaret got me a Troy Polamalu jersey and gave it to me first thing today so that I can wear it for the game. (Never mind that he’s not playing today.) Huge amounts of win.

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Taking Sean for a Walk

Jamie Phelps — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:50:18 +0000

          
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       IMG_0227_30s.mov (13403 KB)       
      This video is a little mundane to be sure, but normally Sean does not go for walks. When we lived in our apartment a few years ago, he would walk about half way to the mail room with Ann Margaret and then tire out. So, when Ann Margaret was harnessing up Momo for a walk, it was a big surprise that he wanted to go. He grabbed Momo’s harness and wouldn’t let go. So, we leashed him up and took him with us. He want two long blocks, which is pretty good for him! Sometimes I am amazed at how much I love the little shit.  
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10 Geeky Laws That Should Exist, But Don’t | GeekDad | Wired.com

Jamie Phelps — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:27:42 +0000

If you’ve ever been involved in a discussion on Usenet, or have been following politics in the past decade or so, you’ve probably encountered Godwin’s Law. While Godwin’s Law is, alas, as true today as it was then, it seems unfortunate that there aren’t more widely accepted axioms to help us geeks define the characteristics of our world.

To that end, then, here are 10 geeky laws (axioms) that should exist, but don’t … at least, they didn’t until now:

via wired.com

Love this list. Everything better with bacon? You betcha!

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The Balvenie Whisky Tasting at Trinity Hall

Jamie Phelps — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:12:08 +0000

Last night was another fantastic evening of whisky at Trinity Hall. Great time with great friends: Bill, Riggs, Jim, and Christie. The pictures are a bit crap because I took them with my iPhone in low lighting. Need to consider getting a proper camera…

I won a sample bottle of the 21 year old (pictured) for telling a Scottish joke. All told, we tasted seven (!) different Balvenie whiskies:

It sounds cliché and obvious, but the Thirty was simply amazing. (I don’t usually like really old scotches.) The Single Barrel and Madeira were my two non-obscenely-priced expressions of the night. I’m fairly certain that if Marius Donnelly and all the fine folks at Trinity Hall continue to host such great tastings I’m going to go broke. Cheers to Marius and all the Trinity Hall staff as well as Andy Weir of The Balvenie for leading a great tasting.

Jim and Christie

Riggs with Jim

Bill

The bottle of the 21 year old PortWood I won.

The “golf ball” at night from Union Station on the way home.

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Alice Samples

Jamie Phelps — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:40:23 +0000

We were pleasantly surprised when we received our last order from alice.com and discovered a small, stylish brown paper bag with some free samples of some new Tide detergent packs and some hand towelettes as well. We’ve used them all and we definitely plan to purchase some of the products that were included. If you haven’t yet, you should definitely give it a try. It’s a big time-saver for us.

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@slb and Maria after their 5k

Jamie Phelps — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:24:56 +0000

Ann Margaret finished in 34:20 and Maria finished in 46:10. Proud of them both!

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Sometimes, You Can’t Wait for Apple to Fix It

Jamie Phelps — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:54:24 +0000

          
       Click here to download:
       KillComputedRatings.scpt (1 KB)       
      I’ve been wailing about this silly bug in iTunes for a while. Basically, iTunes tries to be cute and calculate a rating for unrated tracks based on the album rating or an album rating for unrated albums by the rating of individual tracks. If you use smart playlists that have rating or album rating in the criteria, iTunes can’t actually exclude any of those calculated ratings from the predicate that creates the smart playlist. So, if you rated an album a **** overall but you haven’t yet rated the individual tracks in the album, all of the tracks that are unrated will have a **** calculated rating. Create a smart playlist with rating at least **** and you’ll end up with those unrated tracks in your playlist. Awesome, huh? 
 I was sincerely hoping that iTunes 9 would fix this stupid bug. (To prove how stupid it is, you can look at the Applescript dictionary for iTunes. There’s already a flag for whether the rating or album rating is calculated.) Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case. According to Apple, the engineers are aware of the bug and will fix it… well, whenever they get around to adding that little BOOL check I guess. 
 In the mean time, I got tired of waiting. Since the problem is that the ratings are calculated rather than actually set, I ran a dumb Applescript to set the rating and album rating to every track that had a calculated rating for either of those items to 1 rather than 0. (Ratings are on a 0-100 scale.) The tracks still show as a zero star rating or album rating but now they don’t pollute my smart playlists because they’re no longer calculated. Here’s the script: 
 
 
tell application "iTunes" 
 repeat with t from 1 to count of every file track of library playlist 1 
      set thisTrack to (file track t of library playlist 1) 
        if rating kind of thisTrack is computed then 
         set rating of thisTrack to 1 
     end if 
       if album rating kind of thisTrack is computed then 
           set album rating of thisTrack to 1 
       end if 
   end repeat 
end tell 
  It’s pretty stupid really to have to do this and have to do this for new tracks, but it’s fast enough for me on my paltry 25GB collection until Apple decides they want to fix it.      
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