Given that every darn CD out seems to be wound all the way to the top on the loudness meter, it’s both surprising and annoying when I find ones that aren’t. When I try to play them on shuffle, I have to turn the volume up, then back down again at the end for the next song, at least on Amarok. I have an automatic adjuster on Winamp at work…In any case, the most recent one is Veruca Salt’s cd IV.

Not just for books anymore! I just looked back at my journal and found it’s been 3 months since I posted anything about books and such… So here goes.#5 Witches of Karres. Very amusing mix of magic and science fiction. Witches with a magic spacedrive basically force a guy to rescue them from slavery, then make him into a fugitive. Ultimately they travel all over the galaxy and end up fighting a race of transdimensional worms… This is the sort of thing Schmitz is known for, though even more magicy than his Telzey Amberdon series.

Last.fm… They pick their artist pictures via a democratic process where you can vote them up or down. The other major issue with last.fm is that they have no solution for disambiguation of artists, so when you get down into the small indie bands there’s a great deal of overlap in names with different bands songs getting intermixed as well as the tags related to them. In this case, both problems are cropping up at the same time.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=al89RU9gWof8&refer=homehttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a5326d50-332a-11de-9316-00144feabdc0.htmlThe government owns 50% of GM now. The UAW owns 39%. The UAW will own 55% of Chrysler, and the government gets 10%. There’s really no point in buying a GM or a Chrysler car anymore. The companies are going to go one of two ways. They’ll either make crappy cars and go under, or they’ll make crappy cars and be continuously propped up by the government. Either way, there’s no possible way they’re going to make good cars in the future.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/24/geocities_bye/One might think that because Geocities is shutting down, the era of teenagers making gaudy, amateurish, and plain old ugly webpages would be over and forgotten… But those who fail to learn from history or never studied it are doomed to repeat it. They’ve just all gone over to Myspace where it’s not only easier to make gaudy webpages, but you can be even more amateurish while making webpages that look ever so slightly better, but still horribly ugly.

(Link Dead)They forced some banks to accept TARP funds, and now they’re refusing to take them back. Then they start dictating to the banks what they can and can’t do now that they have the funds. This is freaking totalitarianism in the flesh right here. It’s almost like the controllers of the government want the whole thing to fail.And not in a good way, the Demon Overlord Laharl taking control of our country would probably be better than what we have now.

I’ve long been a fan of the idea of Futurism. It seems that Futurism and Modernism have started to fade away from the public consciousness and are often ridiculed and insulted by many Post-modern “thinkers.” They claim that Modern society has failed to provide the gains that it promised and thus we should abandon the whole futurism concept.(Link Dead)This article gives me another good reason why this isn’t true. In particular,

Does anyone know how to set a post to be hidden until the date that it is listed as being posted?This post started as a debate in my mind on the way home when I recalled the Gulliver’s Travels stories about Big Endian and Little Endian lilliputians fighting a war over which end they should crack open the soft-boiled egg. I didn’t imagine I’d have a story to attach it to when I got home.

Why is it that all of the online video rental places are doing the normal competition thing in reverse? Instead of competing with each other to add new features, they’re competing in how many they can take away!Back when I signed up for blockbuster (Primarily because they had Bluray,) they allowed you to get unlimited rentals in the store by trading in videos in envelopes. Unfortunately they first dropped this down to 5 in-store rentals per month, then started charging extra even for those 5!

Retro Review: Breath of FireBy just about any standard this is an old game. It first came out in 1993, and the version that I played for the GBA is from all the way back in 2001. It’s age is definitely showing.The storyline is fair, but not really above par on anything. Typical of late NES and early SNES rpgs. There are some brief mostly static cutscenes. Most of the storyline is told through text and setting.