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ml_ipod & winamp 5.2+

Saturday, June 24, 2006

So my computer at work has been acting quite sluggish lately, so on Wednesday I had the hardware guy format and re-image my machine for me. Usually starting with a freshly installed Windows is kinda nice. You get to set everything back up again, re-creating all of the tweaks that make your computer peculiar to you. It wasn't quite so fun this time.

One thing I did decide to do different was to finally update winamp. I knew that newer versions of winamp used in conjunction with ml_ipod (Media Library - Ipod) had this tendency to wreak havoc with ipods, so i just stayed with my old copy. It basically comes down to a conflict between winamp's new native Portable Media Player support and the ml_ipod plugin. My hope was that by now the bug had been alleviated. As it turns out, i was partly right-- and i screwed up my ipod.



I think my biggest mistake was that i was going through the process of re-installing winamp and the ipod plugin with the ipod still attached. Apparently, he newest version of the ipod plugin warns you about the conflict and asks permission to remove winamp's built-in support. I said "sure, i don't need it!" But I think that in the short amount of time that i had the ipod hooked up with both plugins present things went drastically wrong. First, 3/4 of my songs disappeared from the Artists menu, though the files were all still there. Next, I started getting the folder icon with the exclamation point, refering me to www.apple.com/support/ipod, which i didn't take as a good sign, but at least it wasn't the sick ipod icon adny got. If i hooked it up to the pc, it'd act normal, but then on disconnect, it'd get all screwy again.

I started running diagnostics on it, but all of the tests were coming back fine. (To get into diagnostics mode, btw, hold the Select and |<<> Harddrive there are a few scans you can run to make sure your hard drive isn't borked.) I formatted the ipod with windows, i formatted it with winamp... i even installed iTunes (ugh) and tried formatting it and setting it back up that way, but still no go. I started thinking that, if it worked alright hooked up to the computer but not on its own, it was probably a firmware problem on the ipod itself. I finally managed to find an ipodSetup program on Apple's website that returns your ipod back to it's factory state. That did the trick, letting me completely reset the ipod itself, then set everything back up using an older version of winamp.

But then today it came to me that i'd had the ipod connected the entire time i'd had the newer winamp installed. There must've been a point when both ipod plugins were present in winamp at the same time. I realized that if i started with the latest version of winamp, got a new install of ml_ipod (1.4 or higher), and made sure to remove winamp's native support, i could safely run the newest versions without worrying about it ruining the file system again. So far so good.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

Charles M. Schulz

Thursday, June 15, 2006

I put down Moby Dick for a little while to re-read my Peanuts Treasury. Toward the end i started thinking about Charles Schulz' artwork, sparked by this first image of Linus trying to choose a book:



I was contemplating what it is about certain frames that really make them stand out. Obviously some are composed to be more graphically rich than others, but i don't even think that's what it is. Even the simplest frames from his strips have this potential to really stand out. Being a comic strip, the primary objective is always about telling a story or anecdote or whatever, but what i realized was that Charles Schulz had a knack for being concise.

Perhaps its obvious in the last few paintings and illustrator drawings that I've done that I'm particularly interested in minimalism, not for the sake of being bare, but more in reducing things to their integral parts. That is something that i think really comes through in frames from the Peanuts, not only in the aspect of every line being in the right place, but also in the subtlety of the expressions.




I was a big Peanuts fan as a child. I must've had 20 - 30 peanuts books that I'd read over and over. Reading them again now, I can really tell the influence that they had on my philosophically and aesthetically. Perhaps it's just because he was from a more innocent time, or because his subject matter was always children, but Charles Schulz always managed to keep the Peanuts high-brow and good natured. So much of his work is about anxieties and self reflection, but with resilience and a sense of peace that i think most people could stand to learn a bit from.




I've always been a big fan of Linus. I think we share temperaments as well as last names.




More than any other character, i think Snoopy has this iconic potential-- not so much in his popularity and mass appeal, but simply from a graphical nature. I didn't do a good job representing this idea with these images, but in all of the different ways that Snoopy is drawn and every character he plays, the image of Snoopy always seems so perfectly composed and descriptive.







Every frame tells a story.







Recognize the similarities between this and Calvin and Hobbes?



Click for a larger version.

The Milwaukee Art Museum is showing an exhibition of comic book art, Masters of American Comics, right now, which I assumed would mean heroes and villains type stuff. But apparently, according to The Chet, it culminates in a bunch of work by Charles Schulz. I wasn't aware that he was in it at all when i was looking through the Peanuts Treasury and considering his art, but it sure does make me that much more inclined to spend WAY TOO MUCH MONEY to go see the exhibition.

A couple links for you:
Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center
The Official Peanuts Website
Charles M. Schulz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(For what it's worth, I just went through Linus' page on Wikipedia and changed all of the "van Pelt"s to Van Pelt.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

'Dada' at MoMA:

I've never really liked the Dada movement, but you have to love a quote like this:

"Dada, which arose in the poisoned climate of World War I, when governments were lying, and soldiers were dying, and society looked like it was going bananas. Not unreasonably the Dadaists figured that art's only sane option, in its impotence, was to go nuts too."

From NYTime's article 'Dada' at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum

(Those marionettes by Sophie Taeuber, whose work i've never seen before, are pretty cool.)

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otis redding

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

It's much too late to be up writing anything, so I'll keep this short, but I've been meaning to post a few things lately and this is one of them. My older brother was in town recently. While he, Kim and i sat around one night Kim started requesting that i find songs for her, one of which was Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long." I've been on an Otis Redding kick since.

When i was 19 my older brother worked at Racketeers, the pool hall in New Orleans. I'd often go and hang out, playing free pool for hours on end. There was an Otis Redding album in the juke box, most likely a Best Of album, that seemed to play constantly. I knew the songs from growing up with them and I liked them, but I had never really sought them out. But I got curious what the rest of his albums sounded like. It's one thing to have a bunch of popular singles, it's something else to have consistently good albums. But I've been pretty pleased with just how good his albums are! He's from Georgia, so his sound is very Southern, which is an obvious draw for me. His sound is pretty minimal, but there's this great mix of r&b, soul and funk that sounds like home.

It's funny, I grew up hearing the lyrics Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, but seeing the Mississippi River in my mind. That image of his music still sticks in my mind. I kid my wife about her experience growing up in New Orleans, telling her she grew up an Ohio kid in Louisiana. But the other day i realized that she and i are doing now what her parents did then--bringing home here with us.

So of all of the new songs I've been discovering by Otis Redding, this is one of my favorites, a track called You've Made A Man Out Of Me. It's short, upbeat and funky.

One last thing-- you know how Otis Redding sounds like this 60 year old man with a raspy voice, telling you how it is? Turns out that he died at 26. I was completely surprised by that.

posted by j. Permanent Link 3 comments

Nine Months Post-Katrina

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Nine Months Post-Katrina

A video of a guy talking about the state of his neighborhood. The strip mall he's refering to is on the corner of Carrollton and Beinville. Mind you, Carrollton is a major street going from Riverbend to City Park, connecting uptown to mid-city and, by extension, gentilly. I used to eat at China Imperial, it was one of the better chinese restaurants in the city.

It strikes me every so often that many of the places that i think of when i think of home are no longer there or useable. I realized today that none of the houses that i grew up in in nola are habitable right now. None of them were destroyed, but they were all damaged and the neighborhoods are empty.

posted by j. Permanent Link 1 comments