Category Archives: Miscellany & Minutiæ

I think I finally “get” the Microsoft Seinfeld ads

The blogosphere has been all… atwitter (oh, I went there [“there” being a new level of punster stupidity])… over the past week or so concerning the inexplicably terrible Microsoft Seinfeld commercials. And now, abruptly, they’ve killed off those ads and switched to a new campaign, entitled “I’m a PC,” intended to change the image of what a PC (and, by extension, a PC user) looks like. Sorry, Mac-using John Hodgman, you’re no longer the human embodiment of lowered technological expectations.

But a mystery remains… what the hell was the deal with Those Stupid Seinfeld Ads™? And did Microsoft really intend to kill them off so soon? To the latter question, I’d have to say “Probably not.” But I think I may at last have discovered an answer to the former.

I saw one of the new ads last night during The Daily Show and I thought it was, surprisingly, pretty good. But it makes no sense that they did Those Stupid Seinfeld Ads™ and then jumped to this.

The only explanation I can muster is that Those Stupid Seinfeld Ads™ were like a palate cleanser. When you go to the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta (as I did a few times when I lived there), there’s a room where they have fountain dispensers of every flavor of soda the company produces worldwide. There’s one called Beverly that they produce only for the Italian market that is clear and extremely bitter tasting. And it’s used solely to cleanse the palate when you’re doing wine tastings and such (at least, that’s how I understand it). It’s godawful, but that’s the point.

Maybe that’s the case with Those Stupid Seinfeld Ads™ too.

Addendum/Full Disclosure: After I wrote this I lingered a while on The Daily Show website, and got lured into an “I’m a PC” banner ad at the top… which lured me to Microsoft’s ad site… which lured me into finally watching the second Seinfeld ad, “The Family.” And I actually found moments of it kind of funny. I even (*gasp*) laughed out loud a couple of times. Oops. But still… there’s an extremely feeble thread woven into the very last moments of it, tenuously tying it to the new “I’m a PC” ads (Seinfeld’s mention of Gates having connected over a billion people). So they’ve almost managed to present this as a cohesive marketing strategy. Almost.

Know the difference between BPM and kbps

And it’s not just type case.

As I’ve mentioned, I have taken a shine to Amazon MP3 as my primary source for music downloads now. Sorry, Apple. You know I love you, but Amazon’s just doing it better. Better selection, better prices, and usually better quality. Plus everything’s MP3, not AAC. And no DRM, ever.

And while I don’t anticipate ever switching media players (the iPod and iPhone have served me well, even if you’ve been stumbling a bit lately). My new car’s CD player supports MP3 (and, ugh, WMA) CDs, but not AAC. And yes, I keep an iPod nano in the car (note to potential thieves: no I don’t), but it’s still convenient to load up several albums’ worth of music onto a single CD and pop it in. No annoying cords or dangerous behind-the-wheel iPod fiddling.

So anyway… yeah, Amazon MP3. And MP3s in general.

I’ve ripped my entire CD collection multiple times. First, back in 2001 or so, I ripped it all as 128 kbps MP3s. Then I got to the jazz CDs and noticed how bad 128 kbps actually sounded on some music. So I re-ripped the whole collection as 192 kbps MP3s. That was the smallest size where I didn’t really notice bad audio artifacts.

Then in 2004 Apple introduced the iTunes Store, and with it everything was 128 kbps AAC, Apple’s own, semi-proprietary format. Better compression-to-quality ratio, so 128 kbps AACs sounded as good (to me) as 192 kbps MP3s, at 2/3 the size. So I went back through and started ripping my CDs again, this time as 128 kbps AAC format.

Then last year Apple introduced iTunes Plus, with 256 kbps AAC format. Sure, they’re twice the size, but now I really can tell almost no difference between the compressed versions and uncompressed CD quality. So I started ripping again, but honestly I could not tell the difference between 256 kbps AAC and 160 kbps AAC, but I could tell the difference between 128 and 160. So 160 was my new standard. I only made it through about a quarter of my CDs at this new level though.

Then this year we had the release of my own music on some download sites, and I went with 256 kbps MP3 for those. Combine that with my new embrace of Amazon and their use of 256 kbps MP3 as well, and that pretty much sealed it. 256 kbps MP3 is my new format of choice, and I’m going through my entire CD collection and ripping it yet again in this format.

Which brings me to the whole point of this post. When you put a CD in your computer, iTunes (or whatever ripping software you’re using) grabs CD track information from CDDB. This data is submitted by users. Sometimes if you insert a new release or a really obscure album into your computer, it will tell you that track info could not be found, and it presents you with the opportunity to submit information you’ve entered. Which means any typos or other idiosyncrasies in your own personal way of entering this information will now become what anyone else who inserts the same CD into their computer will see, provided they’re lazy enough not to fix your dumbass mistakes. I’ve grown accustomed to fixing band names, correcting spelling, normalizing title cases (You Don’t Capitalize Articles, Conjunctions or Prepositions in Titles, but It Is Correct to Capitalize Pronouns and Verbs, Even If They’re Only Two Letters Long, Thank You Very Much), etc.

But something I’ve noticed from time to time, and never quite got, really bothers me. First off, I think the BPM field is pretty much useless. Unless you’re a DJ and you actually know the tempo of the songs you’re working with, you have absolutely no need for this field. But sometimes I see it filled in, and with the same value for every track on an album. Highly unlikely. It’s just finally dawned on me over the past few days why this is, though, and it’s because I’ve only ever seen two values in that field: 128 or 192. The same idiots who can’t spell also can’t tell the difference between BPM and kbps.

So, let’s have a little acronym lesson, shall we?

BPM (Beats Per Minute): The “tempo” or, if your musical knowledge is severely lacking, “speed” of a piece of music. How many beats (you know, the part of the music that helps you dance) there are in a minute.

kbps (kilobits per second): This is the amount of data in the compressed (MP3, AAC, WMA or whatever) file per second of music. In other words, it’s the compression quality of the audio file, quantified.

And now you know… the rest of the story.

A double take I shouldn’t have taken

This morning while driving home from dropping off my son at kindergarten and SLP at work, I glanced at a pile of limestone blocks in a neighbor’s yard, part of some new landscaping they just put in this summer. At that first sidelong look, I thought I saw water dribbling down the rocks, and was surprised that it was actually a working fountain.

However, when I took a second look, I discovered it was not, in fact, a fountain. It was a cat sitting amongst the rocks. Vomiting profusely.

I’m just so glad I bothered to look more closely.

Oww, it hurts!

Seriously, I may have a joking tone but I really do not think I could sit through Sarah Palin’s interview with Charles Gibson. As it is described in the New York Times, it is painful enough. I’m starting to have a visceral discomfort over the prospect of her winning the vice presidency. She is so obviously grossly unprepared for the job that it turns my stomach. Again I just have to ask, how can this even be close? If enough people choose to be willfully ignorant or just don’t care enough to pay attention, well then, they get what they deserve. But that leaves the rest of us with little option besides emigrating to Canada. Too bad I didn’t get my passport renewed already.

I think I may need to gouge my eyes out

So I stop reading crap like this or this.

My God people, come on! How is this even a contest? What the hell is wrong here? AAAAARRRGGH!!!!

I never would have made it on the debate team.

But as long as we’re on the topic, I just wanted to give a shout out to Jw and suggest that if you’re considering making a donation to the Obama campaign, you do so by saying “Make Mine Barack.” I would have, but I just made a donation directly to the campaign yesterday hours before he tipped me off to this.