Digital Audio Woes

I think we may be the first people in history to have blown out a front speaker listening to This American Life. We have been listening to things stored on my iPod in the car by using a cassettee adapter, but it's a delicate balance getting the volume on the iPod and the stereo to balance and still have the material sound ok.

Speaking of music, my big side project at the moment is to take our music collection and FIX it. We have digitized all of the CDs we have ever owned and have other stuff from iTunes, etc. The problem is that the tags associated with the material are often wrong. Sometimes they are spelled three different ways, sometimes they are in the wrong place (artist in the title tag), sometimes they are just plain wrong. I bought a program called FixTunes and am now spending my spare time fixing the tags on our audio files so that I can actually find the material I am looking for - not a small task as the music alone is 56GB. The big problem is when I know the tags are wrong, but I have no idea what I am listening to. This program help a bit with a good guess, but not always.

Well...

I now have 3 blogs and it is difficult to know which one to post to sometimes. I have been posting mainly on our travel blog since travel is our entire life for the foreseeable future, however there are occasionally things non-travel related that I shall post here. Oh - what's the third blog you ask? The Messec family blog started by John's aunt, it's lots of fun!

I think John and I reached the point yesterday where being together 24 hours a day for weeks was too much. Of course we knew that we would get sick of each other, but in the midst of being pissed off it's hard to be philosophical about things. Finding time apart will be difficult until we are in a town for more than a day or two. With no real home base, no idea of "safe" areas, and one vehicle, we pretty much stick together. We are currently ensconced at a Starbucks trying to get some posts up and figure out our next move. We have to be in New Orleans on Feb 16th, other than that - we are free to do whatever.

Happy 2007

Happy 2007 everyone! We walked 3 blocks over to the base of the Space Needle and celebrated with a few thousand others, then came home for champagne toasts. John took some great photos!

Click on the pictures below for more....

Christmas Break

Two days before Christmas we went to our friend Patricia's house for a mass cooking event. We made ravioli and sausage from scratch - yeah - intestines and everything!

Christmas Day - we went to the movies and then hung out at an Irish pub. It was a fun low-key day. The movie we saw, "Children of Men", made for good discussion after. It would make a difference - a huge difference - if all women became infertile. There would be no more hope in the world. The question to ponder: why would we, a childless couple by choice, feel that it would make a difference? It would, it really would...anyway, this led to much discussion over beer and Shepard's pie.

The rest of my time off was to be spent in preparation for the trip. Sadly, not much preparation was made. We managed to sell John's motorcycle, my snowboard, and his snowboarding pants, but that's about it. We really need a BIG garage sale, but that's hard to do in an apartment downtown. Let us know if you need any kitchen gadgets, sofa & love seat, mattress & box springs, leather chair, dining room table, Litter Robot, or basically anything you have seen in our house.

Very good news - our apartment manager has rented our unit so we will be able to get out of our lease!! That saves us at least $3000! Hopefully we will even be able to get back the pet deposit.

Speaking of pets - on Christmas Day the report from Darwin's new home in Kansas was grim. Grandpa had been scratched, Darwin was still a hissing, growling beast, and no one was happy. Thankfully at last report Darwin is relaxing a bit and as far as I know there have no more maiming incidents.