2BS Blog - This is it.

Nasty weather for Friday commutes

Staff reports
Last updated: 5:11 p.m., Thursday, January 31, 2008

Friday’s morning commute will usher in a nasty bout of winter weather. That’s when a storm bringing snow, sleet and rain will hit the region, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Evan Heller.

Heller said the low pressure area is moving into this region from Texas and will bring one-tenth of an inch of ice as well.

Highs will be in the mid-30s, Heller said. The precipitation will switch to sleet by the evening, making for another messy commute.

There is a chance of snow sometime after midnight Friday, she said.

Having a warm cup off coffee at 3pm is pretty sweet.

Unsubscribe

Gee, I haven’t had a checkup in like… well…. a very very long time..

Today we go to our new doctors this afternoon.

I bet I can guess what they will tell me
1. Exercise more (don’t worry we are looking at Y memberships and we will probably start that very soon)
2. Drink less coffee (yah, i don’t think so) and more water (working on it)
3. Eat healthier (we don’t really eat all that unhealthy, we’ve gotten a lot better actually we werent really eating bad before, but it seems like a standard one they probably tell everybody. i have cut soda out almost completely.)

I don’t know I guess I can’t think of anything else. Like I said, it’s been a while.

Well not really. But we were able to get up and get ready (including making coffee, feeding animals, showering, dressing, etc) in less than 15 minutes. It’s amazing how much adrenaline and fear of being late allows you to get all of these things done in a short amount of time.

Probably would have helped if I had found my phone before going to sleep so that my alarm would have woke me up. I don’t know what happened with my clock alarm, I’m sure I just turned it off.. Same happened with her and the stupid phone alarm that asks if you want to snooze or dismiss. Look here alarms, these are confusing questions that you ask of us right after waking us up out of deep slumbers.

This week has been a pretty bad week for losing things. First on Tuesday I get to work and realize my ID badge is not attached to where it attaches. Funny, I had just attached it right before leaving the house. So all day I had to borrow an ID so that I could step out the office in order to use the facilities which was annoying. All I could think was that it was on the bus or in her car. When I got back to the car I quickly realized it was not there. So we went over to office in the parking lot and I asked the lady if any of the drivers found an ID on any of the busses. Yup, sure enough. There I am. That’s me. Now besides a couple days where I thought I lost my keys and they were in my pocket, this morning was the best. Like I had said earlier, I could not find my phone before going to bed. Well, this morning I found it when I went out to start the car. Good news was that I found it. Bad news is the where part. Yeah, it was on the ground practically encased in a snowey icy mixture. Awesome. But, it works. and the fact that it had a protective case helped so we are in good shape.

John joked yesterday that I need a checklist, its funny, but it’s pretty much true.

cell phone -check
keys -check
wallet -check
ID badge -check
iPod -check

okay, good to go.

Happy Birthday Love!

Sara,

You make our lives awesome! We live to make your life awesome. So far, so good. Let’s continue this awesome journey living our lives together!

Once a year isn’t nearly enough. You make every day a celebration.

Happy Birthday!

From all your friends,

Smart Playlists are revolutionizing my life! With the ability to add all these smartlists to iTunes, I am becoming more satisfied by my iPods ability to shuffle through my complete playlist and play more songs I want to hear when I might want to hear them. Thank you life! At the end to this is a link to a guide to get you started. I highly suggest checking that out and using that as a starting point. I’ve currently setup a whole slew of different smartlists on my iPod for experimental purposes. Once I figure out which ones work for me and which ones don’t I will share that info with you…

Why not just use the “Shuffle Songs” feature of the iPod?
The “Shuffle Songs” feature, though idiot proof, is relatively weak. Although there have been some improvements, notably the ability to set a “Skip while shuffling” flag for files you don’t want shuffled, there are still shortcomings to the “Shuffle Songs” feature that aren’t eliminated simply because you can now tell the iPod not to shuffle your mp3 audiobooks.

1. Shuffling is blind, deaf, and dumb. When you shuffle songs, the iPod simply goes through all of the audio files eligible for shuffling in a more or less random manner. Some filetypes are automatically excluded from shuffling, but these are hardcoded by Apple and barely useful. All other exclusions from shuffling must be manually flagged in iTunes. This binary yes/no to shuffling is the beginning and end of your primary control of the music mix. If you want to hear more Eminem than Mozart, too bad, what gets shuffled is at the mercy of Apple’s shuffling algorithm. Now, you can take control what gets shuffled by carefully limiting what’s available in the first place by either only shuffling within a user defined playlist or carefully controlling the ratio of what gets put on your iPod (e.g. 20% Jazz, 40% Classic Rock, 10% 1980s Pop, 30% Hip Hop & Rap). Those aren’t terrible solutions, but they are laborious to set up and maintain. The beauty of this document is it explains how to automate such a process and polish it far beyond anything you can do manually.

2. Shuffling is cognitively impaired. In spite of whatever Apple wants to claim to the contrary, shuffling is not purely random and has some sort of weighting in the algorithms for how it chooses music. This would be fine except that it lacks a persistent memory state: it resets its shuffle state back to zero after every reset or sync. The result is that you hear some songs repeatedly while never hearing others. You can wind up hearing mostly the same 400 songs in slightly different arrangements again and again while never hearing the bulk of the other 4000 songs on the iPod.

Before setting up Smart Playlists I suggest getting all your ID3 tags in order and start rating your songs. The more ratings you have the better the smarter smart playlists will work. The more time you spend doing this the happier you will be with the power of your smartlists.

I suggest reading this guide I am about to link to and going through your iTunes at your own pace and setting ratings. The more songs you rate the more likely you will hear songs that you want to hear and haven’t heard as much lately.

With the ability for your iPod and iTunes to dynamically update these smart playlists you should always be entertained by what your iPod will play next rather than getting ready to hit next.

Here is a very well written guide to help you achive Smart Playlist luxury! http://filebox.vt.edu/users/channum/files/smartlist_management_v5.1.pdf

What do you Use?

I myself prefer a decent mix between albums and shuffle. Now I’m getting a smarter shuffle!

When FOUR hours is better than ZERO. But not as good as 8!

and that much it is, exciting.

Do it.

YAH RIGHT

ITS ALL SHENANAGINS

SHANANANANANANANANAGANS!

Here is a little chart that shows you how many songs have been played during a particular hour. I think the Lunch drop off is funny!

Dog Food and Cat Litter food acquiring time.. and we even saw a little kitty that looked just like Nutmeg... I was like, sara how do you feel about a little kitty as a birthday present!! haha.. well.. we both know…Nutmeg would not allow it!.. (especially a cute ass little 1 and half year old kitty…that looked just like MEGGY).. manG! :).. but anyway, Nutmeg is a one cat cat. She’s special. Plus Sage would like eat it and stuff. or at least sniff its crotch

And That’s Okay.

Time to drop it down about 15 levels.

All this excitement just gets me so excited.

But No More.

I love life.

Live it, learn it, love it.

And I do.

All that and more.

in other news, I wrote the most awesome poem in my head before I fell asleep last night (which I promptly forgot upon waking) so in between the other projects I hope to accomplish this weekend, I need to spit some words out. NEED

Commute was fine.
Time to jam out the emails.

Looks like there may be issues with the commute tomorrow. I doubt it will be bad enough for us to go “snow day” but if it is… Also, Monday is a holiday and I could work, or I could not… so if tomorrow doesn’t work out, I will have to go in Monday, but ideally I will just work both days.. Anyway…

Ice, snow could mean nasty Friday commute
By MARC PARRY, Staff writer

The morning commute is expected to be a mess Friday.
The Capital Region will see a light overnight snowfall change to freezing rain by the morning. There may be a little sleet, too, according to the National Weather Service.

The slippery mixture will change to rain by mid-morning Friday. That’s expected to taper off by mid-afternoon.

Though it won’t be a big storm total snow accumulation 1 to 3 inches meteorologist John Quinlan called its timing a “worst-case scenario.”

“Even a very thin layer of freezing rain can cause problems on the roadways,” he said.