Car Alarms

[11:41] jamesn: I want an alarm for my car that starts blaring sirens and says "WARNING: SOME JACKASS HAS SET OFF HIS CAR ALARM! WARNING: SOME JACKASS HAS SET OFF HIS CAR ALARM!"
[11:41] jamesn: Then when I can turn it on when someone else's siren is going
[11:41] jamesn: And when I turn it off, instead of chirping, it will say "THANK YOU, JACKASS"

Audible .aa to .mp3

I checked out a few applications that claimed to be able to convert Audible's crappy DRM'd .aa files to .mp3.  All of them failed (for me at least), except one:  Total Audio Converter from coolutils.com.  For a well spent $19.99 I am now able to automatically convert my Audible downloads to a format (mp3) in which they will work on my cell phone and my mp3 player, neither of which are otherwise supported by Audible.  Woohoo!

Now if only Amazon would provide direct MP3 downloads for Audible books (where possible).

I have the output folder for Total Audio Converter set to a Live Mesh folder, so that I can have access to my books both on my laptop at home and on my desktop at work.  And my friend Eric pointed out that Total Audio Converter supports command options, so I can completely automate the whole process from the point of downloading from Audible!  All I'll have to do is start the Audible download and voila!

Technorati Tags: Total Audio Convert, Audible, .aa to .mp3

Fire Ant Bastards Bit my Butt

Mothers Day weekend I went to Charlotte to visit my mother and do some work for her around the house.  On Sunday, she asked me to transplant some things into her rose bed.  So there I am sitting on the edge of her rose bed on an old railroad tie, when OUCH, something stung!

I looked down and saw red ants all over where I was sitting, and I jumped up and started high-tailing it down the driveway towards the door to the house, blinding flailing and trying to swipe the ants off my pants.  On the way I kicked off my shoes and threw off my shirt.  I made it inside with just my pants and socks on and went bounding down the hallway, when my socks slipped on the wood floor and I went in the air cartoon-style.  I landed elbows first and howled in pain, meanwhile ants were biting and stinging me!  I got up, elbows bruised, ran to the bathroom, and realized that I'd just carried fire ants into the house!  There were at least 20 of them still on the seat of my pants, even after my swiping and my great fall.  I looked in the mirror, and there were already 4 big red welts on my butt!  For the first time in my life, someone could accurately say, "Lance did a dance with ants in his pants" (do you have any idea how many times I heard rhymes like that as a kid?).

The story gets worse.

My mom and sister, laughing at me a little at this point, pointed out that urine would stop the pain.  So what did I do?  Yep.  I peed on my own butt (ok, actually I peed in a cup and cotton ball swabbed my butt).  What a strange thing that was to do.  But, for anybody who is laughing - it worked.  I eventually found one other bite that I did not urine-swab, and that one turned out to be the only one that itched severely, even though they all blistered up that same day.

Interestingly, fire ants actually do bite and sting.  They first grab on with their bite, and then double over their bodies to deliver the sting.  They do this not once but repeatedly.  Once the first ant stings, it emits pheromones that cause the other ants to swarm and join in the fun stinging.

When people say they are done...what do they mean?

Ok, so this isn't a conversation with James...but its still funny.

(04:21) lancer: he is "done"
(04:21) lancer: if you know what I mean
(04:21) spencerb: ok so like 2 months
(04:21) spencerb: got it

Oops...Summer Injury #2

Yep, its happened again. :( That's the walking cast I'll be wearing for the next who knows how long. Of course I can't actually walk on it yet.

How did it happen? Volleyball. Some guy landed under the net on my side when he was hitting. I was blocking and came down on top of his foot, rolled mine over.

No Woman, No Cry

From the "Doh!" department:

Lots of times I only hear the tune, and maybe the main hook lyrics, and ignore the other lyrics. So...maybe I'm the only one who thought "No Woman, No Cry" meant that having no woman translated to having no tears. I thought that was pretty funny, personally. :)

Ever since I found out that it really means "No, don't cry sweetheart"...the song is not nearly as fun for me. :P

My Cuz: Best New Country

Check out my cousin, Wendy Newcomer - listed as "Best New Country" by AOL Music! The link there seems (as of 6/9/2008) to be bogus, but here is the corrected link to Wendy's feature on AOL's "The Boot".

Listen to Wendy at Amazon:

Wendy Newcomer

Technorati Tags: "Wendy Newcomer", "AOL Music", Music, Country

A Letter to Audible about DRM

I still haven't found a very convenient way to listen to Audible books. I don't want to go out and buy a new phone or a new mp3 player just so that it will work with Audible's unnecessary restrictions. Burning to CD's is a bad option because at a minimum of 14+ cd's per book, its just wasteful. CDRW's are out because the cd player in my car can't read them. Audible's software players are decent, but they are only supported on the desktop (I don't want to listen to books on my desktop) and specific devices. I tried it for a while on a Pocket PC device that I had access to through work, and while it was fine for in the car it was too large and bulky to take running with me. So finally I started burning the books to a set of CDRW's (which I repeatedly use just for this purpose), then I rip each of those cd's one by one, and finally I move the resulting mp3's onto my phone (for in the car) or my mp3 player (for when I go running). Pain. In. The. Butt.

So recently I tried Audible Air, Audible's java player app for mobile phones. It isn't supported on my phone, unfortunately. So I emailed them and got a very detailed and polite response about why Audible Air won't work on my phone (the device manufacturer has to update the firmware so that it can understand the DRM blah blah blah). BS!

Then I saw a post on Boing Boing about how Amazon (Amazon purchased Audible early this year) said that it would not remove the DRM from Audible's audio books unless customers complained enough. So, if you're an Audible customer (or might be in the future), I hope you'll take a moment to email them and share your frustration about DRM. Here is the email I sent to audible@custhelp.com:

I hope you'll also pass along these comments about your DRM, so that things can change. I read that Amazon plans to keep the Audible DRM unless customers complain enough. Well, here is my argument against DRM:

You said - "The encryption is required by the publishers to insure the security of their book files..." While this may have been true at one time, I believe this statement is now incorrect. Random House nows allows its online retailers to sell audio books without DRM (see the following letter from Random House: http://craphound.com/DRMLetter22108.pdf). According to one well known author/blogger (Cory Doctorow, http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/21/random-house-audio-a.html) who ran into this problem, it is Audible itself who is placing this restriction. Even authors who WANT their books to be without DRM cannot do so if they desire to distribute their books through Audible (there is a well known author/blogger who has had this problem in the past).

Random House is smart enough to know that pirated copies of audio books, just like music, will exist no matter what. Amazon and Audible are smart enough to know this as well, or at least they should be. Right now, even with your DRM, I could (if I wanted to, which I don't) burn a copy of a book to a CDRW, rip the cd's to mp3's, and distribute those mp3s illegally. I could even merge them together into one large mp3 if I wanted. DRM doesn't stop the kind of people who do this - all it does it inconvenience good customers who just want to listen to good audio books on their devices or in their cars without having to burn 22 cds. As it is now, in order to listen to books the way I want to, I have to burn to a CDRW, rip the cd's to mp3's and manually copy those mp3's onto my SD card for my mobile device. Talk about a painful process. All so that Audible and publishers can accomplish what? Nothing.

Then there's the issue of Audible wasting time and money struggling to keep ahead of software applications that can convert from .aa to .mp3. Even more time and money is wasted trying to "support" x device. You would already support my device if you just gave me mp3s instead of a DRM mess.
What keeps me from buying more audio books from Audible? What keeps me from buying a Kindle from Amazon? DRM, and only DRM. I already canceled my Audible membership once out of frustration over this. I signed up again after Amazon bought Audible hoping that things would change. I hope I'm not wrong, and I hope it happens sooner than later.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Audible, DRM, .aa, .mp3

Diet Coke Bandit

A long time ago I wrote about the diet coke bandit of my office. Sometime between then and now I cut back on my diet beverage intake drastically. Then I probably drank 4 or 5 a day, now I might drink 2 a week. Instead I drink mostly water. Sometimes I put lemon juice in my water - enter the re-emergence of the Diet Coke Bandit, now known as the fridge bandit.

The fridge bandit used the last of my lemon juice, and then put the container right back in the fridge - empty. Can you believe that? Shameless.

The fridge bandit also seems to be too busy to pay attention to what he or she is doing. Either that or they're just plain dumb. They cannot seem to figure out the engineering marvel that is known as the fridge pack. Instead, they open 12 packs of sodas on the end of the box. Even worse, after they open the box in this way, they put the box into the fridge in such a way that the sodas will roll out of the box (on its side instead of on the top or bottom). I wish this person would give me a break.