Random Musings

I’ve been home since the 9th of August, but I was working six days a week from the 11th of August to the 9th of October, so I barely had any time to rest and recuperate. For the past three weeks, however, I’ve been doing nothing.

Doing nothing is really boring, however, so I keep myself amused in various ways. Yesterday, I was crouched on a small ledge, ten feet above the ground, with a pipe wrench in hand, determined to fix the damn geysers.

I’ve also been fiddling about with Hyper-V 2008 R2 and VMWare ESXi. I spent some cash on upgrading the RAM in my desktop to 4 GB, cause DDR2 RAM is going to get pricier and pricier now. 4 GB should be enough for this box. The next one I get will have at least 8 GB of DDR3, and probably much more.

All this is fun, but the downside is that sitting at home is unfortunately not very lucrative. Financially, I’m up the creek. I’m not worried though, since I have one more month of idleness, and then I start working again, so it’s all good. Two months off are enough for anybody, especially when you can get cheese sandwiches made to order and delivered to your bedside (no, I’m not making my poor old mother run around, we have help).

I will fix some more things around the house before I leave. Windows Home Server is already running happily on my old machine, backing up my desktop and Mom’s laptop (she uses a Thinkpad T series.. she knows her hardware).

So that’s what I’m up to. What are all you corporate minions doing?

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I’ve been home for a couple of months now. It’s all good, especially the fact that I have lots of time to get stuff fixed. I’m getting the car fixed, the computer fixed, and pretty much everything else fixed. I even bought TuneUp and cleaned my music collection, all 15,000+ songs.

TuneUP is quite fantastic. It’s not free, but at $16 (it’s $20, but I found a coupon), for a years subscription, it won’t break the bank either. And it works very well—just drag a bunch of songs over to the interface, and watch as it magically gets all the info.

TuneUp cleans up messy media.

It’s not all great—sometimes, it just seems to inexplicably hang, and I have to restart iTunes to get it to work. It works only with iTunes, not as a stand-alone program, so if you prefer another music player, you’re going to have to install iTunes, use TuneUp to clean the media, and then import those songs into the other player. Still, these are fairly minor issues, and I just got an update that seems to have fixed the hanging issue. If you have a lot of songs labeled Track 01.mp3, give TuneUp a go. They have a free version, which has some limitations, but it’s enough to let you know if you need to pay for the full version.

It took me about a week to clean up my collection, but it was worth it. Now I have neatly categorized songs, with proper album art and genres, and this makes it a lot easier to pick songs that I like to listen to.

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