Pablo Averbuj

Playlists

Being the lazy individual that I am, I don’t bother too much with playlists. I like them in theory, but the problem is music is rather complex. For example, my playlist for dinner music would probably be very similar to my ‘mellow’ playlist, except without all the offensive/offbeat things I enjoy (Kermit singing “It’s not easy being green”). On the other hand, there’s a lot of music to choose from, and it’s hard to think of what things might be good in a playlist.

Tonight I wanted to see if I could find some pre-engineered playlists to save some brain power, and I realized two drawbacks with most implementations: first, it’s very easy to create a playlist and many silly monkeys have done this, so there’s just as many playlists as there are songs, and second, no one has come up with a good way to search playlists. In my mind there’s two ways to search playlists, which should work in conjunction with each other. 1) Let me search by title of the playlist (“dinner” being a good thing to search for, and 2) since your concept of dinner music is probably very different from mine, let me specify some songs, and you tell me which playlists include these songs. So, for example, I want to find playlists that contain Rufus Wainwright and Penguin Cafe Orchestra. If that results in too many hits (ha!), filter it down by lists that contain ‘dinner’ in the title. That should get me somewhere near people who have similar tastes in dinner music.

If anyone is aware of a site that has something similar, feel free to inform me.

[UPDATE] I did find a single playlist with both Rufus and P.C.O. here.

Wiring Hell

I’ve had a bit of problem for the last year. I like keeping the servers in the basement of the house because it is cooler and I can’t hear their constant roar; I also like having my office upstairs because I don’t have to traverse 2 staircases to get to my desk and I like the view of the trees from the office. There was never decent connectivity between the two for various reasons; I’m convinced that my life is better if I secure my WiFi from phantom wardrivers, there was no existing wiring to the office or guest bedroom (not even telephone), and the solution I had chosen — over powerlines — wholly sucked. This caused me great consternation as the PowerLine stuff could only sustain approximately 2mbps.

Fortunately all this went away this past weekend. My brother and my father came for a visit and while he was here I roped my brother into helping me run cat5e from the basement to the office. Leigha had concerns about us making great big wholes in the wall and leaving them as an eyesore — we did make large holes, but Roger took care of patching them. Overall the project was a success although not without its hurdles, and in general I’d call it a pain in the ass. Next step is to upgrade to gigabit ethernet.