Mom STILL doesn’t have her own mail. I guess that explains the following conversation:

[On the phone]
Mom: What’s your email? I want to send you pictures from my boss computer email.
Me: You should really get your own mail. But okay, “v”, “i”, “t”.
Mom: Wait, wait. Capital or small letters?
Me: …….Small. Okay. Going on: “a” “l” “y” “b” at gmail…
Mom: Wait! Do is there a “space” between “y” and “b”?
Me: ………………..No, there isn’t.

I guess I should explain mom all about ^([0-9a-zA-Z]+[-._+&])*[0-9a-zA-Z]+@([-0-9a-zA-Z]+[.])+[a-zA-Z]{2,6}$ one day.

Some things you just can’t unlearn.
There is a new art form I wasn’t aware of that is called hip-opera. It is a bit hard to explain without playing the movie down miah.
You can make a will-power test with yourself just to see how long you can hold.

[3:51 PM] vitalyb1984: yes. It is so dauntinc @ twitter that it is so public
[3:51 PM] vitalyb1984: yet if it was private I prob wouldn’t write
[3:52 PM] Eli: daunting?
[3:52 PM] vitalyb1984: yes
[3:52 PM] vitalyb1984: I can’t write personal stuff
[3:52 PM] vitalyb1984: so I write about doplhins having nasal sex. E.g:
“Nasal Sex – Amazon River Dolphins perform homosexual penetration of the blowhole, the only known example of nasal sex.” 4:06 AM Nov 21st 2008
[3:52 PM] vitalyb1984: instead of what really worries me
[3:52 PM] Eli: er yeah
[3:52 PM] Eli: …
[3:52 PM] Eli: you could be ambiguous
[3:53 PM] vitalyb1984: right
[3:53 PM] vitalyb1984: I was.
[3:53 PM] vitalyb1984: It wasn’t the dolphins who had nasal sex.
[3:53 PM] vitalyb1984: BAM

Red meat linked to risk of earlier death
Eating red meat increases the chances of dying prematurely, according to a large federal study offering powerful new evidence that a diet that regularly includes steaks, burgers and pork chops is hazardous to your health.

Seems like everything causes some kind of cancer or negative effect nowdays. This reminds me a joke:

Old man comes to a doctor and says he wants to live longer.
Doctor: Do you smoke:
Old man: No
Doctor: Do you drink alcohol?
Old man: No
Doctor: Do you eat sweet or fat food?
Old man: No
Doctor: Then why would you prolong your life?!

Last two days I am plagued by White Whine nightmares.

In the first one I dream that Microsoft decides to send me AGAIN to Redmond. I vocally oppose the idea and demand to know why I should go, they wave me off with, “Oh you’ll find something to do there 2 weeks, we’re sure”. All the group goes together in the style of school trips, everyone sits together on the plane. We arrive to USA and I sit in a bus on some busy American street and refusing to go down.

Wake up and realize with huge relief I am still at Israel.

In the second dream I argue with someone that my iPhone is perfectly protected in its tiny silicon case. Then I look and to my horror there is huge crack on the glass. I try to wipe it off but it just gets bigger and bigger, eventually part of the glass falls off. I gasp.

Wake up and realize with a huge relief that my iPhone is still here, safely sleeping under the bed.

Whew.

It is really amazing how a movie like Watchmen could be so pretty, so true to the book and yet, so… Unenjoyable. In retrospect however, it isn’t as surprising.

Zack did everything he could, but it just isn’t his kind of movie. Despite the “comixie” appearance, “Watchmen” should be done by a director who excels in moving the audience, not one who excels in exciting them. Instead of Zack Snyder, Sam Raimi or Bryan Singer, this movie should’ve been directed by Todd Solondz or Darren Aronofsky.

Here is a review I found on IMDB that pretty much reflects how I feel about it:

by Kate_Dammit_Run

Watchmen is, in many ways, a faithful, even loving adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel. Zack Snyder reproduces many of the scenes, especially early in the film, almost “shot for shot” from the book. Most of the major plot points from the book, at least those involving the main characters, make it into the movie. The things which were edited from the book: longer sequences of Rorschach, Veidt, and Silk Specter’s pasts, the plot lines with supporting characters, the black freighter sequences, largely make a certain kind of sense as the things you’d cut. Snyder also does an excellent job of establishing the mood of the alternate history and the backstory of the superheroes through a great opening credits montage.

But… the film lacks any real soul. None of the performances stand out. Matthew Goode manages to make Ozymandias more human than he is in the book, at least until the end. Jackie Earle Haley has a moment of snarling greatness near the end, but that’s about it. Patrick Wilson brings nothing to the role of Night Owl, and Billy Crudup’s tepid delivery harms the portrayal of Dr Manhattan. Snyder’s editing out of the secondary characters, while making sense in regards to running time, ultimately blunts the impact of the films climax. Furthermore, Snyder is obviously of rather juvenile sensibilities when it comes to storytelling. While he’s cut out many moments of character development he actually INCREASES the time allotted to violence. The book is not actually that violent and most of the more gruesome acts happen off camera. In Snyder’s Watchmen we’re treated to extremely gory disintegrations and extended slow-mo fight scenes which serve to show off his cool camera technology but do nothing to advance the film. There’s also two instances where Snyder takes lines from the book and rather than having them delivered by the actual character, has them delivered as heresay by another one. In the final case this dramatically blunts one of the central messages of the film, ultimately making the line just an offhanded quip. Oddly, given the apocalyptic ending, the film really has no emotional payoff.

When I am using my iPod choosing a song or an album is quite a task – I have a moderate collection of 220+ albums (1600+ songs). Browsing through all of them to decide which song/album I want to hear now can be rather time consuming. I’d much prefer if I could just turn it on and let it play.

In theory I could just add all my songs and set the iPod on shuffle. However, there are a few issues there:

1) I don’t want to hear songs that I heard recently, which means a song that was played yesterday shouldn’t be played again.
2) I’d like the number of stars that I give to a song to effect how often the iPod plays it (e.g play a 5 starred song every 14 days but a 3 starred song every 30 days).
3) When I listen to a new album I want to listen to it more than anything else to get acquainted to it.
4) I also hear very different kind of music (Metal and Progressive rock) and I wouldn’t like them to mix.
5) I need an easy way to manage this system; adding new albums should be quick and easy.

To make these goals come true I’ll use the smart playlist feature in iTunes (auto-playlist in Windows Media Player).

Note: This isn’t a tutorial as your goals might be different than mine. Feel free to tweak the system in any way you feel fit. I’d be very happy if you go ahead and share your way with everyone in the comments.

What is a smart playlist
In iTunes a smart playlist is a playlist that updates automatically based on a certain set of rules. E.g. “show songs that have more than 4 stars”. For about smart playlists refer this site.

Step 1 – Creating genre/mood/style playlists
Since I’d like to have several “stations” each for a specific mood/genre, I need to create specific playlists to hold these songs.

1. Create a folder in iTunes and call it “Playlist sources”
2. Create playlist of varying moods/genres as you see fit. In my example, I created: “zRock (Quiet)”, “zRock (Loud)”, “zElectronic (Dark)”, “zElectronic (Energetic)”. Notice: I added a “z” prefix in front of ever playlist. It is done so that in the iPod these playlists will appear at the end.
3. Next assign each of your songs to one (or more) playlists. It can be rather annoying to do at first, however, if your songs have genre information in them, you can start by quickly putting all the genres into a specific playlist. For example, I started by putting all “Progressive rock” songs into “zRock (Quiet)” and then manually moved the loud ones to “zRock (Loud)”.
4. Note: If your iPod can’t hold all the music in your library, add to the source playlists only as many songs as your iPod can hold. E.g if your iPod can hold only 4gb and you have 9gb of music, make sure that all the source playlists combined hold no more than 4gb.

Step 2 – Creating star-based rating smart playlists
As described in the first section, I want the amount of stars to affect how often I will hear a song:

1 star:  Every 80 days.
2 stars: Every 40 days.
3 stars: Every 21 days.
4 stars: Every 14 days.
5 stars: Every 12 days.

As you see, the higher the star rating the more often you will hear the song. Let’s consider what the final playlist of a certain station will look like:

FinalPlaylist

• (Rating = 1 AND LastPlayDate not in last 80 days) OR
• (Rating = 2 AND LastPlayDate not in last 40 days) OR
• etc

Now the problem here is that iTunes smart playlist does not let you mix the AND/OR operators. To get around this issue we need to split each logical group into a different playlist. Follow the following the steps:

1. Create a folder in iTunes and call it “Smart filtering”.
2. Create a new smart playlist and call it “z1 Stars” and define the following set of rules for the playlist:

• a. Set it to match ALL of the following rules (also known as AND).
• b. Last Played is not in the last 80 days.
• c. Rating is 1Star.
• d. Make sure that Live Updating is marked

3. Create the other new smart playlists and call them “z2-5 Stars” and set their rules accordingly.
4. You should now have 5 playlists under Smart Filtering, if you look inside each, you’ll only see the songs that match the last-played rule and the star rating.
5. Create a new smart playlist and call it “zNot recently heard” and define the following set of rules for the playlist:

• a. Set it to match ANY of the following rules (also known as OR).
• b. Playlist is z1 Stars.
• c. Playlist is z2 Stars.
• d. And so on for all the other Star playlists
• e. Make sure that Live Updating is marked

6. If you look inside this playlist you’ll notice now that it holds ALL the songs that should be played according to the rules you’ve defined previously.

Step 3 – Handling new albums/unrated songs
Obviously when you add a new album to your library, it isn’t rated in anyway. We’ll use it to our advantage to identify new songs. However, it also means that all the other, not new, songs in your library should be rated. If they aren’t, I suggest you to choose all the current unrated songs and give them a single rating of 3 stars.
Now let’s add handling for unrated (new) songs:
1. Create a new smart playlist and call it “z0 Stars (Unrated)” and define the following set of rules for the playlist:

• a. Set it to match ALL of the following rules (also known as AND).
• b. Last Played is not in the last 5 days.
• c. Rating is 0Star.
• d. Make sure that Live Updating is marked

2. Notice that this new playlist of unrated songs will play a LOT more often than any other song in your library.
3. Now update your “zNot recently heard” playlist with the “z0 Stars”. Merely add to its set of rules this new playlist.
Now as long as song is unrated you will hear it a lot more until you decide if you’re keeping it and how many stars you’re giving to it.

Step 4 – Combining the efforts – Smart mood playlists
Now that we have both the smart, rating based playlists and the mood playlists, it is time to combine them. Do the following:
1. Create a new smart playlist that matches by name to your original mood playlist, e.g: “+Rock (Quiet)”. Notice the “+” prefix, this time it is added so that this playlist will appear FIRST in the iPod playlists. Define the following set of rules:

• a. Set it to match ALL of the following rules (also known as AND).
• b. Playlist is zRock (Quiet).
• c. Playlist is zNot recently heard.
• d. Make sure that Live Updating is marked

2. For each of your mood playlists create a new smart playlist as it was described above.
3. You should have several smart playlists, each containing a list of songs based on certain mood/genre and each holding only the songs that weren’t heard recently, based on their star rating.

Final tweaking – Adding a limit and sorting
After a while with this system I started to notice that there is a problem – Since I listen daily to 10-20 songs, and each “ratio station” holds around 500 songs, I usually only listen to the older songs. And even though the new songs were available every 3 days, the probability of playing them among the other 500 songs was pretty slim.
To handle this situation I added the following rule to each final playlist (e.g “zRock (Quiet)”):

• Limit to 50 items selected by least often played.

With this rule, each radio station will by default hold only 50 items and most of them will the items you didn’t listen enough to.

Problems and issues
To be able to use this system you must be syncing ALL your music to the iPod

• If your iPod can’t hold all your music, you can set to sync only certain playlists, but these playlists MUST include all playlists the take place in the system: Sources, stars, and final stations. That means that the “Sources” playlists can’t hold all your music collection – Add to the sources playlists only the music you currently listen to.
• There is a second way that lets you use the system for all your music, even if your iPod can’t hold it all. However it is complex and requires a more technical approach. If anyone will be interested I’ll post it.

System preference of music – As you might’ve noticed, the system prefers songs that were played least AND that weren’t listened to long enough. Basically it means that songs that were listened less than others (e.g songs with low rating) will be pushed to the playlist as soon as they weren’t heard long enough. You can handle this issue by making the waited time on low-rated songs, longer.

I visited a toy shop Friday to buy a birthday present for my nephew (4 years old) and stumbled upon Choke-A-Duck. It is great and friendly toy for every age that lets you choke a duck and hear authentic choking sounds:

I did some googling and found the following product page with the demo of the toy. Be sure to watch the video on this one:

http://www.gadgets.co.uk/item/CHOKE/Choke-a-Duck.html

P.S CAPTCHA: SexualEuphemisms.