Posts by TracyMac
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Hard News: The New New News, in reply to Deborah,
I am not quite sure what medium.com's model is - "prestigious blog platform"? - or how they get revenue, but they do have some excellent writers.
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And yet our whole rental system is still based on the notion that it's a "temporary" lifestyle, rather than moving towards a more European-style model (where most people rent, often for decades, prices are much more stable, and you don't need to go cap-in-hand to the landlord if you want to paint a wall or nail up a picture).
Oh, other than the fact that landlords increasingly want to lock you into fixed-term leases, with little discernable benefit to lessees. (wanting a minimum term is understandable).
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Mark Thomas,
If you're using Mediamonkey Gold, it'll be using the latest LAME codec, which is a good thing.
Yes, I am using MM Gold, but I thought LAME was MP3s only? Damn it, I am tempted to switch to MP3 with VBR 320 kbps. I was already getting the hump with Vorbis not being able to embed album art (apparently it's available in the specification, but no encoder's implemented it yet).
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And that’s interesting stuff about the encoder quality. I used to download the reference OGG (vorbis) encoder and use that when I was using CDex to rip my audio, but of late I’ve been using whatever’s bundled into Media Monkey, which I suspect is FFmpeg. Might explain why I’ve felt it necessary to bump up the OGG “quality level” when ripping lately – I just thought my ears were being fussier.
More reading to be done!
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Russell Brown,
There’s a theory that brostep was invented because weeny laptop speakers couldn’t play the bass in proper dubstep.
I love it.
...And I went and stocked up with proper-like UK dubstep CDs when I was last in Auckland. I rip those into OGG for carting around, but I should really stash them somewhere as FLAC.
As for this whole digital to analog conversion stuff, I must investigate more. I currently play my music through the stereo from the headphone jack in my laptop or PMP, but it does sound like pants, even at the higher bitrates. Good to know I'm not imagining it.
I somehow didn't think that it needs to become analog before it hits the amp and was muttering to myself that a digital signal shouldn't be that degraded when it exits my machine... well, it ain't digital in the headphone jack, innit, duh.
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I love PAS, but it's times like this, with one person relentlessly banging a drum on and on and on, that I wish there were a "block" feature.
Since most of it was tl/dr to me, I'll just respond to the last part: diversity can be about other things than race. Culture is about more than national or ethnic origins. A lot of people leave rural areas FOR the diversity of cities. Forget being trans in a small country town (still amazed by Georgina Beyer in Carterton, though). If you want to be a gay man and something other than the town hairdresser, ditto.
All those gay men who went in search of (arts-related) culture in Europe in the 50s and 60s. The gay men who went to Australia in the 70s.
For making the oddments in your own society feel a little less odd, (liberal-type) diversity is a good thing. As far as I'm concerned, it was no golden paradise when NZ was a junior Britain, with rugby, racing and beer, short back and sides, and whaddaraya "mate".
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Phil Wallington,
Which all summarises nicely why Australian politics are not the same as NZ politics, and the issues with coalition-forming between the Greens and Labo(u)r parties in each country are quite different.
I could conceivably see myself voting for NZ Labour - Australian Labor's arse-kissing of heavily-polluting industries such as mining and coal and complete lack of interest in developing sustainable industries puts them beyond the pale for me.
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Love that Son Lux collaboration. Love it. A lot more than any offering of Bruce Springsteen's, to be honest, although certainly not quibbling with the dude's influence. And general "good guy" nature.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
UGH, I can't express how much I dislike most of that women's opinions. I am thankful she seems to have given up on being the Voice of Queerdom in light of her one(?) female affair umpteen squillion years ago.
But for the narcissism and jumping on every other bandwagon with the big mouth blaring... nothing much changed there. And still somehow considered to be representative of all (most, average?) feminist views, as the UK media seems to continue paint her...? No words.
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Hard News: Let's do some commerce, in reply to Kirk Alexander,
Unfortunately this doesn't much help those of us who wouldn't touch Bitcoin with the blunt end of a rusty 100 m pole.
I like the idea of services like Gittip, but since their top earner gets @US$600, it's not good enough to rely on paying bills with yet.