1/20/05: Geeked

About once a week, maybe more, probably less, I am going to post a windows shortcut of some kind on here.  'Cause I got nothing else to do. Some of them are quite well known, so you may already have 'em down pat.  Others are kind of obscure and they may make you crap your pants a little they're so good.

Today, let's talk about control + shift + comma and control + shift + period.

When you highlight some text in one of the Microsoft programs and you want to increase or decrease the text size, you can use these two shortcuts to do it. Or if you just want to change the text size as you're about to start typing, works for that too.

Pretty slick, right?  Keep pressing it until you get the size you want.

Yeah.

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I have a question about MP3's that may reveal my complete lack of computer knowledge, but I don't care.  Say I am ripping my CD's to my hard drive so I can put them in my iPod. As I ingest the CD's, I have set up iTunes to convert the songs from CD files (.wav? not sure, but whatever lossless format CD's come in to begin with) into MP3's (I know, there are probably better compressed formats than MP3, but it is so popular that I can be sure my songs will play in almost any player they encounter).  MP3's, from what I understand, compress an audio file from about 40-50 MB to about 4-5 MB. This is what allows us to walk around with 1000 albums in our iPods. The idea behind MP3's is that they remove all sorts of information that lies outside the human hearing range, so the songs sound basically the same but take up a fraction of the space. Many people claim to be able to hear the difference between MP3's and the original CD files, but I am not one of 'em (not that I've ever actually done a test).

Now say I want to burn you a CD --  "Thank God I'm Not Making Rock Videos: The Very Best of Richard Marx." There are a number of ways I could do this. If this was a pre-existing CD, I could just make an exact copy on my computer, without any audio loss. If it was a compilation of songs from all of my dozens of Richard Marx CD's (which I have already ripped to my hard drive as MP3's), I could still do this without any loss, by re-ingesting the songs individually as .wav files (or whatever they are when they are originally on the CD), then burning them all to CD.

But say I have already ingested all 51 Marx CD's, including all the bootlegs and outtakes I have collected over the years. And it would really be a pain for me to re-ingest all those songs, just to make a CD for some joker like you who probably wouldn't even appreciate it.  So say I want to burn you a CD from the MP3's that already exist as MP3's on my hard drive. I could make you an MP3 CD, which could hold like a hundred and some odd songs, but most old CD players won't recognize MP3 CD's. So I choose to burn you an old-fashioned CD by "uncompressing" the MP3's into CD audio files (.wav? whatever).  I can only assume that when I uncompress the MP3's, whatever info was lost during compression remains lost.  Yet the files become as large as regular ol' CD files.

So what I am getting at is:

What occupies all that extra space in the new CD files? Silence? And if you take this Marx CD I have burned you, and you want to rip it to your hard drive as MP3's so you can play it in your iPod, is there further loss when you re-compress the files? Or is the information that is removed during re-compression simply the placeholding silence that was added during the un-compression process?  Meaning, if people burn CD's in this manner for each other, will we eventually see over time the kind of multi-generational degradation that we used to see when we made analog tapes for each other?

Do you get what I'm asking? Good, Step up and answer, you whizzes.

***

I ain't the first to use it, but the analogy between a bad job and a bad relationship is an apt one.  Surely you've been in at least one of each. I was thinking about my job (not my relationship, nor any previous relationship in particular) the other day, and I was like, Yeah the job is easy, it's comfortable, it doesn't throw me any curve balls, but it's not going anywhere. It doesn't stimulate my mind or arouse my passion. I've been in it so long I don't really know how to do anything else. And I'm fairly certain it's going to end badly.

These are not good reasons to stay in a bad job, I know. But you just get crippled by the reassuring sameness and the fear of change.  So you duke it out, year in year out.  If you're me. If you're somebody else, you go out and do something about it.

Goal: to do something about it.

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There are going to be some changes at the verbungle.com compound which will be announced soon.  Exciting stuff.  Life should be getting more interesting.

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Speaking of changes, we have made an adjustment to the lyric stumpah game. From now on, please do not answer until noon eastern, the way we used to do it with the GISG.  Answers received before noon eastern will be ignored and/or deleted. This should make it fair for our readers on both coasts (and overseas!), and we always want to be fair.  If we can't be good, at least we can be fair.  If anyone has no access to a computer or is sleeping at noon, you can email our judging panel and request an exemption.

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Finally, we have another Wheredat, above right. Wheredat?