The other day while I was at work “The Andy Griffith Show” was on and Barney delivered a line so wise, so insightful, that it made me stop what I was doing and grab a pen and paper:
A slender high-spirited person needs a sugar pick-me-up late in the day.
Were truer words ever spoken?
This year it was the sweet potatoes. After baking them, mom turned the broiler on to brown the obligatory marshmallow topping. Then she got distracted with something else until she smelled smoke. She opened the oven door and the sweet potatoes were literally in flames!
Sadly, I didn’t get a photo of the conflagration (I was too busy staring stupidly and being of absolutely no assistance). I did, however, get a photo of the aftermath. Thank goodness my mother has a sense of humor about things (as evidenced by the fact that she didn’t smother me with a pillow when I was a child).
I was talking to my best friend earlier and he was exhorting me to get a Facebook account. I explained that I’m not a big fan of the “social networking” sites and related the story that follows to illustrate my point. He seemed to enjoy the tale and said, somewhat derisively, that I should write about it on my blog, so that’s exactly what I’m doing.
Every year my town holds a real old-fashioned ice cream social at the park by my house. Big Band music, ice cream, the whole shebangabang.
Several years ago, overcome by curiosity, I attended said event with my (at that time) girlfriend. After the music, as I was enjoying my ice cream a sweet elderly lady came up and engaged me in conversation. I played along and chatted for a bit, but the voice in my head was saying:
I don’t know you, why are you talking to me? What the fuck is wrong with you?
Apparently some of us just aren’t ice cream social material. I still chuckle at my grumpy antisocial attitude (at an ice cream social no less!) to this day. Don’t even get me started on the people at the hardware store!
Evidently I would feel right at home at the ‘Grumpy Old Bastard Days’ festival.
Last night I spent an inordinate amount of time equalizing the volume of the (1500+) mp3’s on my Sansa. If they all lived together in one directory, I could have knocked it out in no time and just let the software do its thing. However, being the obsessive/compulsive neurotic that I am, they all live in separate directories, sorted by artist, then by album. Anyway, I finally got it done and I’m thrilled with the results. No more wild fluctuations in volume level from song to song. The software I used to accomplish this is MP3Gain. It’s freeware and it:
does not just do peak normalization, as many normalizers do. Instead, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear.
Also, the changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless. There is no quality lost in the change because the program adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding.
MP3Gain most definitely earns:
