Currently listening to...

Moya Brennan (a.k.a. Máire Brennan)
Signature

1. Purple Haze
2. No One Talks
3. Merry-go-round
4. I Will Find You
5. Always
6. Tapestry
7. Black Night
8. Hear My Prayer
9. Never Stray Far Away
10. Many Faces
11. Hidden Stories
12. Gone Are The Days
13. Pill A Rún Ó

iPod Pick(s): Merry-Go Round, I Will Find You

I am not a music critic. The simplest way that I can describe the music of Moya Brennan is to say that her music is comparable to that of her sister, Enya.

AWOL

I know that is has been a long time since I have written anything here. Writers’ block can really cramp one’s style when one is trying to maintain a blog. Truth be told, I have been very busy with a massive CD ripping project that I have not had much time to devote to writing. I have exceeded my estimated time of completion by about a month . . . I have had to start over twice (don’t ask).

Not much to report: (1) A friend I have known since high school is now a father, and (2) I will forever by amused by some of the lunacy that comes from those wacky, lefty, liberal people. Case in point: some on the left are trying to blame “global warming.”

Articles of interest...

I've only got two this time, both written by John C. Dovorak regarding the proposed .xxx top-level domain (TLD) for porn sites.

"Porn and Revisiting .XXX"
by John C. Dvorak (02/06/07)

Excerpt:
". . . a substitute teacher was on a school computer and ran into a pop-up porn storm. . . . So this teacher couldn't stop the pop-ups and some kids saw it, and she got 40 years in prison as a sentence because she didn't unplug the computer immediately."

"XXX Top-Level Domain Once Again Rejected"
by John C. Dvorak (04/02/07)

Excerpt:
"There are two groups against the idea of an .xxx top-level domain. One group consists of some supposedly Christian "family values" pressure groups. The other group is the pornographers. Does anyone find this alliance a little disturbing?"

Burnin' the midnight oil...

A few months ago I made the unfortunate discovery that my MP3 archive was corrupted. I don't know how it happened. But it did. And now I am faced with the time-consuming process of archiving my CD collection . . . once again.

But this time I have decided to go "lossless." For the uninitiated, lossless compression is a compression methodology in which the result of the compression can be restored faithfully, i.e. bit-by-bit identical with the uncompressed data. In a nutshell, it is somewhat like compressing a Waveform file with ZIP or RAR.

The only downside to lossless compression is file size. As lossless compression preserves all information of the original Waveform file, audio compressed with lossless compression will unavoidably be larger than audio compressed with "lossy" compression. However, this disadvantage is more than offset by lossless' ability to be transcoded to other lossless formats without any quality degradation.

Most people take their lossless audio files and transcode them to a lossy format for use in a portable device. Lossy compression is a form of compression that significantly reduce multimedia file size by throwing away information imperceptible to humans. MP3 is the most universal of the lossy formats.

A second popular format is AAC. This is Apple's proprietary audio format (as WMA is Microsft's proprietary format). However, this is perhaps more ideal for me as my portable player is the iPod (also made by Apple).