preraphaelitepunk.com

In celebration of autumnal weather finally arriving, and in an attempt to get away from the madness that is the staff activities committee (particularly virulent this time of year), I actually took today off. I need to conserve my vacation days to some extent, but after doing a little math I realized that I did actually have a couple of days to spare, and any extra time available to recover from the weirdness that is Clutter Buster Day can only be good.*

My main project for today is clearing out my accumulated Lifehacker articles, which is quite a task: I had nearly 65 articles marked to keep new until I had time to deal with them. Slogging through the accumulation and bookmarking or otherwise implementing the ones that turned out to be of potential interest took several hours.

Some, of course, turned out to be more successful than others: so far, Pandora’s Internet radio seems possibly the most promising (you enter the name of an artist or song that you like, and it finds similar works that you can listen to and then rate; I always have trouble finding artists I like, so this is kind of cool), though after the first 10 hours you have to pay for the service. It’s not terribly expensive, though ($12 for three months, or $36 for a year), and might be something I’ll actually continue. They link to the songs on iTunes and Amazon, so you can download copies (it would be cool if they offered discounts on purchasing songs once you’ve paid for a subscription), and provide yea/nay/WTF responses to fine-tune your suggestions. You can e-mail stations to others, but I haven’t been able to find a way to export just your playlists, though; I’ll have to dig around more. So far, though, it’s been pretty decent, though variable: I entered “Loreena McKennitt” as my artist, and wound up getting some very interesting songs by Autour De Lucie, Mary Black, the Wailin’ Jennies, Secret Garden — none of whom I’d known previously. Searches for Dead Can Dance and Pet Shop Boys were also successful. Unfortunately, searches for Sisters of Mercy and Rasputina were dreadful, and London After Midnight wasn’t even recognized at all.

If nothing else, though, reading their descriptions of the musical qualities for each list is amusing. Apparently I like music with a lot of heavy vamping, whatever that might mean. o.O

Other notable goodies I finally got around to investigating are the screenshot utility Snippy, ReminderFox (FireFox-only reminder plugin), FavIcon (which may kick in sometime soon to make my URL icon a tiny version of my banner image — assuming I stuck the code in the header in the right CSS page, of course), and the unfortunately named reminder service Remember the Milk, which offers SMS reminders but I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to use.

Lifehacker backlog is now all cleared out. Happy now.

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*This year they spiced things up in the way only they can, by holding hourly contests to award company-logo goods to whoever brought a specific item to the committee member who requested it. I can only assume that someone on SAC has been watching too many episodes of “The Price Is Right.” By midafternoon, they had abandoned their plan of e-mailing contest announcements, and instead used the PA system, so that no one could escape their mandatory merriment. I mean, I know they’re trying to make things fun, but honestly, it just grates on me. I enjoy my job, I like what I do, and I just want to be left alone to do it without being pressured to participate in childish morale-building activities better suited to kindergarten classes than the office. True, their antics provide some amusement, though not really in the way they’d intended, and some people seem to enjoy the ::cough:: fun and games, so who am I to judge? I just wish they’d be quieter about it, and not bother the people who’d rather not participate. Obviously, subtlety is not their strong point.