My New Girl

Posted on May 16, 2012 Comments

Her

So, everyone say Hi to my new girlfriend.

I feel like this is kind of like taking her home for the first time to meet the parents.

Her name is Rebecca, a name which she prefers not to be called, instead she likes Becky. Becky is a short natural blonde who prefers to colour her hair red, not to be mistaken for her personality or her intelligence she is one of the smartest,  sweetest and coolest people I know.

She is also one of the most beautiful and completely girly people I know, she loves clothes and jewelry and all of the other traditional girly things. But she also likes video games, good literature and comics, good music, good movies and even good TV shows. Don’t get me wrong she still watches “Sex Around The City”, “Girls” and “The O.C” or whatever the ladies are into these days.

She is a beautiful girl with a bisexuals taste in media and a young woman’s sexuality, and she rarely notices when people are hitting on her instead assuming they are being friendly.

Us

We became real friends over Christmas in 2010 and continued to do so all of 2011. Even though I was hitting on her a bit near the end of 2010, “why don’t you sit down and watch it with me?” I would say as we talked and exchanged TV shows – Becky just thinking I was being polite.

In 2011 we became best friends and are still, until one night she drunkenly texts me instead of our mutual friend, David:

“Yeah but I don’t even know if he likes me. I don’t deserve save.”

Heh, Save.

Soon after I checked my phone as Becky was sitting on my lap, and to her horror there was her message to David. Screaming a little bit she ran into her room and closed the door, completely frightened. Soon after I followed her in and sat with her on the bed, then we kissed and got walked in on by our close friends who had NO idea this was coming.

The Beginning.

Foobar 2000 is a god

Posted on April 25, 2012 Comments

For a nerd like myself who loves music more than anything else, including my friends and family, Foobar 2000 has been my staple music player for many many years. Since the release of windows xp, or maybe the release of foobar? I am not sure. It was long, long ago.

The VERY short list of features includes (from the foobar 2000 website):

  • Supported audio formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND… and more with additional components.
  • Gapless playback.
  • Full unicode support.
  • Easily customizable user interface layout.
  • Advanced tagging capabilities.
  • Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component.
  • Full ReplayGain support.
  • Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
  • Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

I could rant for years about the feature set of this very powerful music player. One of the best features is the last one, the ability to expand it to what you want or need, and nothing more. Two of the additional plugins i have installed by default are the Channel Mixer and UpNp support.

The channel mixer makes for a formidable, customisable surround sound listening experience as long as you have 5.1 or better speakers, or for a widened listening experience with a good pair of head or earphones. While i wish i could be rocking some audioengine A5+’s and a A8 to go with them, instead i have some Sennheiser CX 55′s i picked up new for about $13. I cannot praise these enough, they are the best ear or headphones i have ever heard, even better than some of Sennheiser’s more aggressively priced headphones.

How does foobar improve the listening experience with headphones you ask? Through some intricate trickery and witchcraft foobar does this:

  1. Skip any silence in a song longer than 5 seconds (aka before bonus/ hidden tracks).
  2. Crossfade the end of one song and the beginning of the next.
  3. Re-sample all audio to 44100 Hz.
  4. Pass audio through a channel mixer which makes the audio 6 channel, with voices front and center and surrounds the listener with the band.
  5. Makes this audio stereo (two channel) again.

Then it feeds it out to your headphones having the same effect as Dolby approved headphone filter software for many paid products. The bonus being this method is configurable and free.

To make this a little bit more appealing to nerds like myself, using the upnp plugin allows us to stream this “fixed” stereo straight to other devices such as our mobiles, other computers and tablets.