CleverBlogName

Uber Cakes.

Toward the southern end of Cuba Street, Coco looked quite promising as a lunch venue; the menu was interesting and not unreasonably priced.

There are, indeed, some strong points: the food is delicious, and reasonable for the price. My crumbed chicken and bacon burger was delicious, Maire’s fajitas likewise.

But there endith the good part of the tale. First, a 45 minute wait for food on a lunch menu is clearly for people who aren’t, you know, working or anything during the day. Screwing up the order is never that flash either. And the waitstaff getting snippy when one points out they haven’t actually brought what you ordered doesn’t add to the experience.

We won’t be bothering again.

I expect a few readers to be especially fond of this article.

Time to replace my worn-out Iron Maiden tshirt, obviously.

Andy Warhol’s lost Amiga art discovered on discarded floppies, recovered and presented to the public.

Fab@HOME: Build your own world, for a very reasonable price. I’m living in the future!

So, Ada is on to solid food this week, if you can call puree apple and pear ‘solid’. It is a fairly loose application of the language.

Feeding is thus far fun. It starts out with a screwed up face and “Daddy, what the hell is that on your finger? What are you sticking in my mouth?” It rapidly progresses to “Holy shit, that’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted! It’s a party in my mouth, and your finger’s attendance is not optional!”. From there, spirited attempts to grab the bowl begin.

Next, we reach the angry drunk stage: “Whaddaya mean I’ve had enough? I ain’t had enough! I can handle my food! Don’t you dare cut me off, ya bum!” Followed shortly thereafter by the sugar-pulsing-through-me-Warp-Factor-9-Captain stage.

I like this.

…is in your bus, taking taking your seat.

So what happens if one of the world’s finest violinists goes busking. Does anyone notice?

In my quest to get my music library both more accessible and higher quality than MP3s (but slightly more storage-friendly than raw WAV files), I’ve been thinking about re-reripping stuff into FLACs (amusingly enough, so has Stephen; great minds and all).

Random wrangling over at a PublicAddress discussion was my tipping point; one thing that quickly irritated me was discovering that my favourite ripper (grip) had a bunch of stupid defaults that encoded FLACs with no track or artist metadata, ID3 or otherwise.

Happily it turns out there is an answer, although I needed to modify it a little:

MP3 command-line: -V -T TITLE=’%n’ -T ALBUM=’%d’ -T TRACKNUMBER=%t -T ARTIST=’%a -T GENRE=’%G’ -T CDDB=%i’ -T DATE=%y -o %m %w

…becomes:

MP3 command-line: -V -T TITLE=%n -T ALBUM=%d -T TRACKNUMBER=%t -T ARTIST=%a -T GENRE=%G -T CDDB=%i -T DATE=%y -o %m %w

…or you end up with single quotes scattered amidst your metadata.

OK, so I’m reading this after it was made into “a major motion picture”; blame Unity, my main supplier of crack^HH^HH^Hbooks for not having Christopher Priest’s most recent effort on the shelves until it now.

I’m very fond of Priest; I started reading his early stuff like _Real Time World. and _Fugue for a Darkening Island; a signatue of his work is that he’s fond of presenting narratives about worlds that differ markedly from our own; they start out seemless, solid, with the reader seeking to understand the alternative universe. Even as you do, you begin to see chinks and cracks which are the keys to deciphering the puzzle of what’s really going on.

In that sense, Priest’s favour of sci-fi is rather whodunnit flavoured, or perhaps more accruately, howdunnit.

Something I have noticed is that his earlier work tends to be embedded in more orthodox science fiction; his two most recent books, The Separation and Prestige are more concerned with the mystery and the story than the devices used to enable them; indeed, I read one short review of the movie of Prestige that suggested it was more fantasy than sci-fi, since the mechanism of one of the mysteries might as well be magic as science. Certainly it’s the classic soft sci-fi where we are not meant to worry too much about the mechnisms, but more their effects.

I enjoyed the way Prestige plays with multiple views of the same incidents, starting with contemporary perspectives and then segueing into diaries to tell the events of the past. We’re treated the points of view of each of the protagonists in turn, and as we see through their eyes, our views of the characters shifts; one account will leave us in sympathy with one character, the next will lead us to hold him in contempt. It’s a well executed example of the technique, and kept me on my toes.

It is a well-known fact I can’t be trusted to go shopping on my own. Moore Wilson’s in the weekend alone can endanger finances. This is doubly, nay, triply true when there are things I can buy for Maire—and now, Ada. As evidence of this I present the following:

The child-sized armchairs are available from the Best Childrens’ Furniture Store In Wellington, or, as it’s more commonly known, Inhabit. They’ll even upholster it in an arbitrary fabric. I may be immune to—nay, contemptuous of—baby Nikes, but against perfect child-size furniture I have no defence.

Of course, it’ll be a while before Ada can really use her new chair. In the meantime the cats are more than happy to help out.