The Ryndex

So, after been screwed over by Free (a French ADSL company) for the last hundred days, I capitulated and sent back their expensive Freebox — a triple-play television, voice over IP and ADSL modem.

Their business model was apparently to disconnect my phone line and then ignore me as much as possible, finally promising to “escalate” my complaint and ignore it at a higher level. They weren’t billing me, just ignoring me.

The French all suggested that I call their 0.34€/minute help line and rail against their poor service. I think this is a cultural thing, and I remind myself that it is only different, not worse to naturally expect that you won’t get any service until you scream bloody murder over the phone.

I suggested in my cancellation letter that they waive the 96€ cancellation fee, seeing as they have done nothing for me, ever. I doubt they’ll go for that; there’s nothing in it for them as I will be terrible publicity regardless.

So I informed my bank (in writing) that I objected to any automatic withdrawals originating from Free Haut Débit. I fully expect that my bank will charge me for this service, while screwing it up and paying Free whatever they ask.

This is convenient because otherwise Free will pass my account to a collection agency, probably with whatever surcharges they pull out of the air.

Regardless, now I have a phone number, a phone bill (which is essential for getting my residence card) and one day soon… Internet.

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I forgot to mention my funny story about flying to Canada a couple of weeks ago.

It wasn’t a social visit. It was a nightmare obligation for work visa reasons. I just needed to pick up a piece of paper from the French consulate in Vancouver, and on Thursday night, I still didn’t know if I would be on the flight Saturday morning.

So somewhere over the Atlantic, the stewardess (can we still call them that?) spills coffee into my lap. A full cup. I fortunately managed to sluice the majority of the coffee off onto the seat, so I was only soaked instead of burned. She ran off to first class to get some “real” napkins to help soak up the mess, and came back with a can of club soda, to make sure I didn’t stain.

Because the logical next step would be to pour a can of club soda on my already coffee-stained crotch.

Those were my only pair of pants, and I had nine hours of flying left that day. Still, when she was apologising profusely, I said that it was probably my fault because I have long legs and my knees touch the dinner tray. Why do I do that? It wasn’t slightly my fault, not in the least.

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Warner Brothers has re-invented some of our beloved cartoon icons for a new series.

Set in the year 2772, the Loonatics are simply coloured, sweeping and angular, but recognizably updates of our familiar and fluffy Bugs, Daffy, Taz, Wile E., etc (now Buzz, Duck, Spaz and Slick). They also have super powers.

I, for one, say hooray. Hooray! I mean, they’re fighting EVIL. I hate evil, don’t you?

I seem to be the only one that is saying hooray. Everyone wants their children to have the same sweet childhood memories as theirs. I have to look back and say that I never really had any affection for Bugs. I enjoyed his antics, but I suspect that we just wouldn’t get along.

And it’s not like Mickey’s done any work for the last ten years, either. Let’s let slip unguarded statements: Mickey and Bugs have been empty shills for products of injection-molded plastic. Mickey’s only creative output is being Mickey.

You can see some of the Loonatics artwork and discussion online.

You know, Warner Brothers did some good stuff with their properties with Tiny Toon adventures (even with a catch theme song) and Animaniacs (even catchier). I think they’ll do just fine with this one.

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With that there “email” that kids are yammering on about, there’s this feature called Return Receipts.

That is, some email messages are specially marked as “return receipt requested”. When they arrive in your inbox, and you go to read it, a little dialog pops up to ask if you want to send a notification that you’ve read the email.

At least that’s the default behaviour. You can also configure your mail client to automatically send these notifications, or ignore them altogether.

They aren’t very widely used. And all of a sudden, I seem to be getting “return receipt requested” messages from all over. It adds up to an extra button click for each message.

I doubt that you have a good reason for turning on Return Receipts. Your messages aren’t any more important than any others, even if it strokes your ego to be assured that I’ve bothered to read them. You are likely officious, out-of-touch, and surprisingly unhelpful.

The only reason I don’t automatically ignore them is that I find a small, childish pleasure in clicking “No”. I do NOT want to inform the sender that I have read their email.

Return Receipts is entering my list of pet peeves. No hoorays for return receipts. I hate them.

Tin Foiled Technology

Hooray for everything!

That being said, here’s a practical way to create a playlist for your favourite music player. Imagine that you’ve placed a collection of MP3 tracks in a folder at “f:\Various\17 Songs About a Girl”.

1. Open a command prompt. This can be found by clicking on the Start menu, menu Programs, submenu Accessories.

2. Type the following into the scary dark window:

f:
cd \Various”17 Songs About a Girl”
dir /b /on *.mp3 > playlist.m3u

3. Now you can double click on the file playlist.m3u, or drag-and-drop it into the music player and all of the songs will be loaded in one shot.

4. Advanced You can edit the file playlist.m3u in any text editor, including Notepad (or something more civilized). This is a good way to exclude or add songs, or change their order.

If it doesn’t work, try rebooting twice and call me in the morning.

Tin Foiled Technology

The Inaccurate Tourist was a quick little title that I made up for my travel log when I moved to France. It was only meant to stay there at the top for a couple of weeks until I thought of a new and clever name.

I never did.

The Irrelevant Tourist was a little take-off of the original Inaccurate Tourist. I dunno. I don’t really like it that much.

The Inqualified Scientist made a couple of guest appearances. I hoped he would show up with some diagrams. He was also going to explain the framework for a millennium of Western music, but he got boring. Plus he cut his thumb, and most of his best work was done on a thumb keyboard.

However, I haven’t grown attached to the names. At all.

I hate them. They are irrelevant, inaccurate and inqualified.

Any suggestions? Anything that doesn’t suck? Something that suggests everything about me, Tin Foiled?

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I’ve mentioned the fascinating world of syndication more than once.

You may not have believed me at the time. Here are some interesting things that I’ve been doing with syndicated feeds, however:

1. I have an account at last.fm. You can normally see the last tracks to which I have listened.

2. I use flickr.com to store photos that I want to have available on the web. You can see my photostream here (all the photos that I’ve uploaded appear here).

3. I’m a megalomaniac, endlessly fascinated by myself. I’m also insanely jealous of others that call themselves by my name. I keep tabs on photos of them.

4. On the same lines, I’m curious who is dropping my name these days. I use feedster.com to keep track of that.

5. I use gmail.google.com as my main webmail provider at the moment. I can be notified of new messages using a feed. (Note that this only works if I’m logged into gmail on your computer).

So, are any of you using syndicated feeds for anything?

If you are using Firefox, you can take advantage of Sage. It literally takes three seconds to install. I’m not kidding. Then all you need to do is restart your browser, click on Tools/Sage and start adding feeds.

If you are not using Firefox at this point, well… just don’t let me know.

Tin Foiled Technology

It’s not like I have super powers, and perhaps some of the credit should go to the French pharmacies and their recommended antiseptic sprays, but it looks like I’m not going to lose the tip of my thumb.

On Saturday, I gave a dinner party to ensure that Antonio and Anna finally received their wedding gift — an album of photos from the last three years. I still haven’t given them the card yet, because I haven’t written it yet.

I like to cook Mexican or Tex-Mex because it’s fun to prepare, delicious, and because it’s far enough removed from French cuisine that I don’t feel like I’m trying to compete with them on their own ground. I chose vegetarian enchiladas with a green sauce, but then I replaced some of the excessive cheese with chicken. I finally found canned refried beans (which I prefer to my home-made refried beans) and served rice and corn. I also made home-made salsa and guacamole.

The fun bit about salsa is cutting everything into tiny, consistent cubes. You may want to skip the two paragraphs is you’re a bit squeamish.

Anyway, Saturday night at about 18h00, I happen to slice my extra sharp knife into my thumb — right across and through the centre of my nail. Fortunately, the bone stopped the progress of the knife, but unfortunately, I was cutting so quickly and effectively that the thumb continued to rotate and I neatly severed three quarters of the “meat” off. My first reaction was “dammit, I don’t have time for this”. My second reaction was to put my thumb in my mouth. My third reaction was the correct one — blood tastes funny, so apply a clean towel with pressure and elevate. Thanks, Boy Scouts!

Alright, technically I didn’t hit any bone or slice clean around my left thumb. I just cut off an oval about five millimetres by eight millimetres from the tip, still connected by a chunk of skin and nail. Even a big chunk like that takes a couple of seconds to start seriously bleeding, and I doubt that I bled more than a millilitre or two (although it goes without saying that a millilitre of blood can colour quite a bit of paper towel). I realigned the amputated bit carefully and gauzed it from the first aid kit, and went down to the pharmacy to buy bandages and antiseptic spray. I needed to go fetch the baguettes anyway (to go with the salad).

The squeamish can rejoin the tale here.

At the end of the night, I peeked under the bandage and the oval was all white and puffy. White blood cells rushing to the scene to do their work, of course, or perhaps gangrene setting in

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m not even wearing bandages any more. I still can’t type with the thumb, but it looks like I’m not even going to lose the nail. It looks like everything has sealed itself up and knitting back together. Hooray for my left thumb!

The moral of this story is to always pay attention when you’re using a knife, use antiseptic spray on cuts and make sure that your mi-cuit chocolate cakes are cooked at mid-oven level to ensure a solid cake around a gooey center.

Tin Foiled BlahBlahBlah

This is a follow-up to my previous post.

I described how sound can be digitized and put on an audio CD. In short, the numbers on the CD exactly describe the motion a speaker membrane needs to vibrate in order to reproduce the sound. Theses numbers are physically stored as miniscule pits burned along a spiral track around the CD, and 1,411,200 of these pits need to be read every second in order to reproduce CD quality sound.

This is also known as the bitrate, usually expressed for music in thousands of bits per second (kbps). Thus, the raw audio data on a CD supplies about 1,400 kbps.

The audio CD standard uses raw data (which means uncompressed and untreated) because when the standard was being developed, it was less expensive to create consumer devices without powerful processor to decode compressed audio data.

Today, the cost of microprocessors have decreased sufficiently that my discman can read compressed (MP3) music — but still at a price. It consumes three times the power compared to reading standard audio CDs.

So why do we compress music? Simply for storage reasons — instead or requiring 1,400 kbps, we can get reasonably equivalent results in a tenth of the bitrate. This means that for every uncompressed album that you store on your hard drive or MP3 player, you could have stored ten compressed albums.

So how do we compress music? First, we’ll visit another mindblowing concept — the frequency domain.

Phillip Glass’ famously composed a four minute song with nothing but silence. If you put this song on a CD, your stereo will continue to read 1,400 kbps from the disk, for a total of 46 megabytes. All of those numbers will, however, be zero. Zero, zero, zero.

You could recreate the entire track exactly with the following statement: 274 seconds of silence. I’ve compressed the song from 46 megabytes to two dozen letters without losing any information at all.

That’s a trivial example, and here’s another. I’ve composed a song that started an infinitely long time ago and will continue forever. It’s just a single pure tone, a wave that oscillates 440 times a second and never stops. I call it Fonzie.

Fonzie can’t be stored on an audio CD because it would take an infinitely large CD. You couldn’t use the graphing device from my first post because it would take an infinite amount of paper. You could excerpt it of course, but then it’s no longer Fonzie.

On the other hand, you can graph it another way. Instead of describing the sound wave with respect to time (and wasting paper), you can put all the possible tones that we can hear along the X axis, with the waves that oscillate slowly on the left (low frequency or bass tones) going to high frequency waves (treble tones) on the right. At exact 440 Hz, place a single dot at the volume you hear Fonzie. (440 Hertz is another way of saying 440 times a second).

Here we’ve taken an infinitely long song that goes on forever in the time domain and compressed it down to a tiny graph in the frequency domain, without losing a speck of information.

You’ve seen this type of graph before, in the equalizer of your stereo. The bars dance, showing the distribution of energy along the audible frequencies — a song with heavy base shows big bars on the left. If you were to play a morcel of Fonzie on your stereo, there would be a single, unmoving bar where 440 Hz is.

Obviously, my song Fonzie is very simple, regardless of the representation. However, changing your point of view of sound to the frequency domain is one of the most important concepts in analyzing and treating sound.

My song, Fonzie, is trivial to decompose into a single sinusoidal wave. Real noises, however, are much more complicated. Imagine that a special acoustic performance of Fonzie (abridged) is performed at Carnagie Hall, interpreted by the celebrated flautist, Henry Winkler.

When Henry plays the note on his flute, the sound he makes isn’t going to be a perfect wave. The graph of his performance in the frequency domain isn’t going to be a single point, but a steep hill centered around 440 Hz. This shape defines the characteristics of the flute sound. We can also expect little hills at 880 Hz, 1320 Hz and other multiples of 440. These are “harmonics” and are characteristic of most analog musical instruments.

My belch in the frequency domain won’t have nice and tidy spikes, which are characteristic of lovely tonal instruments. I imagine that it will be large and flat with a bit of energy in most of the audible range. This is characteristic of atonal instruments, such as percussion and distorted electric guitars.

One mathematical way to turn a signal in the time domain (such as the raw data coming off an audio CD) into a representation in the frequency domain (such as the display in the equalizer on your stereo) is to use the Fourier Transform. This formula provides a method to decompose any signal into sinusoidal waves and vice versa.

Mathematically, any signal or sound can be expressed as the sum of these pure waves. It’s somewhat of a paradox, however, since the sine wave is infinitely long and repetitive, and most sounds aren’t.

A newer branch of signal analysis proposes the decomposition of the time domain function into “wavelets” instead of sine waves. Where a sine function is like an constant wave along a long stretch of ocean, a wavelet is like ripples spreading out from a thrown rock — higher in the centre and gradually fading to nothing.

While wavelets have many interesting properties, the most important thing to take from this post is that a sound signal can be converted into another representation, and converted back without losing any information.

The fun comes from manipulating the signal in the frequency domain and seeing or hearing the changes in the time domain!

Should I go on?

Tin Foiled Technology