The Beginning of Fall

It is truly a new season when I notice that my popsicles are thawing out, and I have to punch the back wall of the fridge a few times to break up the thawed/refrozen ice, and then knee the door real hard to get the compressor to kick back on.

Tub Cat

be stealin' my bucket.

Stupid iTunes 8.0

Look at this thing. LOOK AT THIS THING.

First, the boring, "List View" - that I never had to use before - with Windows Task Manager open for resource-viewing purposes:

Here's a closeup of the memory usage (click to enlarge, for best results - Stupid narrow blog layout):

A little over 72 megabytes of RAM being used. Kinda large, but nothing out of the ordinary, in today's world of giant-ass computers.

Now, here's the thing. "Cover Flow" view, which is the easiest way to get around, and the way I always did things before, is basically broken in the new version. Here's what I've been able to use my powers of deductive reasoning to figure out: The way it works now, every album cover you scroll past goes into your computer's memory and stays there as long as iTunes is open. Even if it's long since scrolled off the screen. And these are big files, too. Sure, they only show up as little pictures at the top of the screen, but clicking on the "Now Playing" thumbnail that comes up usually reveals them to be massive, taking up a good chunk of the screen. And if you've downloaded legally purchased as much music as I have and put it all on your computer, that's a ton of album cover images. A "fucking shit-ton," as some scholars would say. And there are a lot of people out there whose stuff absolutely dwarfs my own. I know this because they're the people I ended up downloading stuff from comparing online music collections with. Anyway, a shit-ton of giant images uses up a shit-ton of memory. How much? Take a look:


Wait, what?


You are not reading that wrong. One billion, three-hundred forty-two million, eight hundred and forty thousand bytes of memory being used by one program. OVER ONE POINT THREE GIGS OF RAM IS BEING USED, PEOPLE. JESUS. Hell, the last computer I had before this one couldn't even be upgraded to hold that much, and it's not like iTunes is some intense, professionals-only program, so it's not out of the question for computers of that scope to be trying to run this monstrosity. And note that I had only scrolled up to the letter S by this point, meaning that it might even hit 2 gigs if I went all the way to the letter Z. So it's no more visible album covers in the navigation for me until they fix that crap.

It's just too bad that Windows Media Player and WinAmp both blow dicks, or I'd switch back to one of those.

So the new Metallica album leaked

...And it's like St. Anger with Reload's production. It's like taking a huge dump and then peeing in the pile. But the songs are all eight minutes and have fast parts, so I'm sure everyone will be saying those turds are "back" now.

They should have just quit years ago.

Updates regarding websitery

• As you may have noticed, stuff looks different around here. I'm still working on changing things around, which means that this place is more than likely going to look exactly the same for like eight more years.
• Scheduling being the way it is, I'm now back up to one day a week with nothing to do but lay around being idle and worthless. So updates might happen more than one a year eventually. I'm actually thinking of doing some sort of once-a-week update schedule, which isn't likely to actually happen, because I'm lazy.
• When I do update things, it's going to be a lot less of a Chicago Bears only blog. Mainly because I got recruited to go clog up someone else's blog with that sort of thing. I'm "LB" on there, and it's a pretty major coincidence that those are my initials. Huh.
• I was going to do one of those "check out my fish tank" posts, but I'm pretty sure I killed the one really cool plant in the 2-gallon betta tank today, so I'm all pissed and not in the mood to take pictures of my failures. Here's an old picture of Picasso, though:
  
  I'll get pictures of Larry, Darrell, Darrell #2, and Algae Crumpler in the ten-gallon up here someday.
• I'm seriously going to finish that "Ten Things I'm Going to Make Illegal" thing someday. Actually typed about half of a second entry. Someday.
• After recently viewing the entire Maniac Cop trilogy, I'm in the mood to bring back the Discount Rack Video Review. Or maybe just erase the entire site and replace it with a video clip of the scene from Maniac Cop 3 where Maniac Cop manages to take part in an entire car chase while completely on fire.
• I just noticed that my text and link colors are too close for anyone to be able to tell the difference. Since I'm not in the mood to fix that right now, I'm just making links larger.