The Empty

I apparently have unusual hearing. Ever since i was a kid, I could hear a very high pitched tone in most malls, which I always assumed was just the noise of the security systems bouncing arround the rafters. I notice it less now, but it’s still there, and it still annoys me. Heck, I can tell you if a tube tv is on anywhere in the building i’m in usually, I can hear the flyback transformer or something.

Enter those media frenzy stories about kids and their secret ring tones, that adults can’t hear…. although i’m 37 and have no problem hearing them.

The times ran a graphic that shows the usual ages you can hear these frequencies, and you can test some various frequencies here. I’m getting a little older. I can’t really hear the 18hz tone any more, but I can tell you if there’s one playing or not (it’s like a pressure in my ears when it’s on). I guess that means my body is 13 years older than my calendar age?

For bloggy goodness, here’s a memegraphic.

Created by Train Horns

Under the windows cmd shell, there’s a command start that “does the right thing”. Give it a file, it’ll launch the right app and open it. Give it a directory, you get an explorer window there.

This doesn’t exist under cygwin’s shells, which is a PITA.

Here’s a zsh function to do the same thing. Put it in your .zshrc and call open FILE or open DIR.

[+]View Code ZSHopen() { if (( ${#argv} == 0 )); then targetDir="." else targetDir=$1 fi /cygdrive/c/windows/explorer.exe /e,`cygpath -w "$targetDir"` }

We hosted the family for thanksgiving, which was fun.

We did the turkey in a fryer (saf-t-fryer from lowes, it’s a little pricy but it had a lot of safety features). We learned a few things (”if your fryer has a thermal cutoff, do not run the flame too hot, or it will over-protectively shut down the flame”). It’s got a very low center of gravity, and doesn’t want to tip, which was part of why i bought this one. After dinner, while the oil was cooling, we got a first hand example of how well designed it is– a possum crawled up the side, over the top, was hanging on one edge, and lapping at the used oil. Didn’t tip. Wish we had a picture of it.

The turkey came out great. I’ll have to get the name of the butcher from Leah, they were great and very reasonably priced (about $2.70/lb). We used this marinade and it came out GREAT. Turkey was super tender, the skin was awesome, and the meat was all very tasty.

All in all, definitely a repeat, I think.

Perhaps I am the only person that this applies to, but in case not:

I store all my music, mp3s and m4us, on a network share. We do this because my wife and I share an iTunes account, the server’s backed up, etc, etc. Now we both can get to our tunes.

For some reason, though, my mac will eventually time out the SMB share to my fileserver. When iTunes starts up, it will look for the music in my library, and it won’t be there, and 99.5% of my music is unavailable, and iTunes puts an exclamation mark next to it.

I used to man up, mount the share, and tell iTunes to play every song on the share. Apparently, this is not required, and the solution is obvious–

Quit iTunes. Mount share. Start iTunes. All your music is “back”.

I’m a doofus for not thinking of that.