Something about sunscreen.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008 · 05:00 · 0 comments

I started thinking about a time when a friend and I had one of those discussions about life. I often think back to prior discussions or events when I can't sleep. This is one of those nights. We ended up talking about high school, and how ignorant we were. How we thought we knew everything. How we were at the cusp of a world much larger than the little city we grew up in. We also talked about how we would smack ourselves for being so naive.

I also remember a question, one that gets asked whenever high school is mentioned. I was asked if I could, would I change anything. I find it a bit silly to ask that because none of us have flux capacitors hooked up to our cars, but I answered it anyways.

I would take more photos.

I think that's the one regret I have. I didn't take enough photos. I realized this early on. When asked by a friend, who was beginning their senior year (this was shortly after I graduated), if I had any advice, I told them that no matter how dumb it may seem, take a photo. Take a lot of photos.

This is a lot easier to do now since we live in the age of the cheap digital camera. Back in my day, taking photos seemed like a bit of a chore. Now the cameras are in our cell phones, and the quality isn't as bad as it use to be.

Anyone who is checking out my flickr account will see that I posted a few photos of my friends and I hanging out. It's nothing breathtaking. I recently rediscovered my old motto, and I hope I don't forget it again.

How I export iTunes playlists.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008 · 19:16 · 0 comments

Lately, I've been playing around with different Operating Systems on the new PC I built back in April. At first, I installed Mac OS X Leopard. I then tried to set up the machine to triple boot to either Vista or Ubuntu. That didn't work out all too well, and now I'm back on Vista. Since I'm now running the sucker on, "Next-Gen," hardware (PCI Express, Core 2 Duo, SATA, and RAM that isn't old) it's not slow like it was on the Pentium 4 machine. Leopard ran like a fluid dream on my set-up, though.

Anyways, the problem I've been running into is re creating all of those playlists I've made in iTunes. If there is a way to export all of that data, back it up, and import it later, I'm not sure. Color me stupid.

My music collection is small. It's roughly 23GB, and it's centralized onto a back-up drive. Meaning that, I update my library on the main computer, then back it up to the external drive nightly. When I transfer to a new computer or repair an old one, the music that resides on the machine gets trashed and replaced with the constantly backed-up/updated library from the external hard drive. It's easier to transfer tunes to other machines without having to deal with networking.

My solution around the playlist problem is to add the title of the playlist to the song's information in the, "Grouping," text field.

An example would be, say, I have a small playlist (which most of mine are) made up of songs that I have put together to go with a story I'm writing. Let's call this story, "Giants." So, in each song that I have in the playlist, I add the word, "Giants," into the Grouping text field. When I transfer my tunes to a new or repaired PC, I create a smart playlist in iTunes that goes like this, "Grouping contains Giants," and a new playlist is made of those songs that have been tagged.

Since my playlists are small, and the track order has been the same for years, it's easy to remember what song goes where. This small solutions prevents the need to re add all the songs to a new playlist.

Now, this isn't the best solution. It might be the stupidest. This is something I started doing recently, and it prevents me from having to Google playlist exporters.

Archive: