Blog Archives
Daily Update: Music and more.
A while ago I had posted my frustration about the mp3 players on my tablet. Winamp was showing between three and five of each song, Google took over my music player and forgot where all my music was even though all the music was listed twice. I had finally downloaded MixZing and had been happy with it. The main reason for my happiness was because I could select where my music folders lived instead of having everything that was an MP3 show up. Due to the large amount of music I’ve accumulated over the years (endless hours of ripping CDs) has given me a huge library of a couple thousand songs.
Some upgrade happened at some point. Now MixZing doesn’t allow me to select a specific folder, but only a “top level” folder. So it was only playing music from the core memory and not from the SD card. Now Google Music shows only one version of each song and it remembers where those songs are. I still can’t tell it where the music is and where the audio books are so that’s a minor frustration, but I’m back to where I was before. I have a working MP3 player, but I can’t easily set up and manage playlists. I’d like to just add a folder of music to a playlist and set it up rather than add one song at a time. Perhaps I’ll take some time to review playlist generators again and see what I can come up with.
I’m saddened that I cannot count on MixZing to do what it was doing so well before. *pout*
In happier news, I’m writing again. My fingers are still getting used to typing out words, but it’s happy to be back at the keyboard. My current goal is to get back to 50,000 words over my annual goal before the end of the month. I’ve got a lot of writing to do and I need to get working on it. These posts may become shorter in the coming days.
I’ll be doing some new blog posts in the coming days as well. The things I’ll be adding, Daily Duck (This will be a picture of a duck each day until I run out of photos), Daily Writing prompt (this will be a sentence or paragraph to help spur some writing creativity in others), and I’m going to do a read through of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. I’ve never read this before and before you start gasping and sucking all the air out of the room, I was more into superhero comics as a kid and kept reading them through the 90s and into the Naughties. Yes I read things like Stray Bullets and Cerebus, but my main focus was Spiderman and most of the Marvel lineup. I had heard about Neil Gaiman and Sandman, but it was too expensive at the time to pick up all the back issues. So here I am, I have a digital version of the Sandman books and I’ll be reading them and posting my thoughts on each one. Not sure how long it will take me to read through them all, but we’ll see how it goes.
Beyond that I have a short story on submission with Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. It’s a great slush pile process as you can see where you’re at in the list. I’m currently the second in the first round. If you’d like to follow along you can go here (http://www.andromedaspaceways.com/submissions/track-submissions/) and my story is 19174. I’m hopeful this one will move along in the process and we’ll see what happens from there. I’m excited about this story. I’ve submitted to them many times but I don’t think any of my previous submissions was up to the caliber of this story. I honestly think this one has a shot. If it gets rejected, it’s on to the next market.
Last night was a lot of fun as ‘the kids’ I mentioned yesterday surprised us all and came down for the week. Everyone was at the in-law’s house and there was much swimming in the pool and eating. My Favorite Daughter got her surprised returned and it was quite funny.
There is a lot to do. Not only do I have a lot of words to write during my free time, but I’m also writing a large number of technical documents for work this week. It’ll be a lot of writing that I need to do this week so I’d better get at it.
Until Tomorrow!
WOO WOO!
Daily Update: Still Tired
I managed to hit my goal again. I’m still sluggish after Tuesday. I’ll get over it. At least I’m hitting my writing goal each day. I like that. To Fall From the Sky is coming along nicely. It’s moving in a different direction, but I was prepared for this. It’s not slowing me down at all and I like this new direction. It adds some threat that was missing if the enemy stayed put. Having him on the move is a big help and by doing so it may open up the novel to a sequel should the ending call for one. It could remain a concluded story, but leave a little question in the readers mind of “what happens next?”
I’m quickly approaching the 100,000 word mark on the year. I didn’t think I’d be here so quickly. I’m excited. I didn’t plan any celebrations for hitting that first marker, but we’ll see what happens from here. Maybe I should reward myself with a trip to Fry’s just to look around and spot something I’d like when I do finally hit my goal.
I’ll do an Unorthodox Writing Tip on rewards. I think it’s good to set a goal and a reward for when you hit that goal. Otherwise what’s the point of having the goal in the first place? Let me write that down, I’ll be right back.
Okay, did you miss me? Yeah, I didn’t either.
My favorite daughter had a great practice last night as did the entire team. They were mostly positive, having fun, and playing well. I’m hopeful for this weekend. Two pluses, they’re positive, and the game is close. So half the team won’t be getting up at 4am to make the game.
I haven’t posted about it in some time, but Sputtery Truck is running great. Beyond that the check engine light went off. I’ll need to see if it just burnt out or if the error code actually cleared. It’s been running smooth since the new engine was dropped in. March is marching on and soon it’ll start getting hot. I need to get the AC recharged so I won’t have to drive everywhere with the windows rolled down. The Wife and my favorite daughter can’t have their hair mussed up. 🙂 I kid, I kid.
I also haven’t posted about MixZing. I’m still using it on my tablet. I still use WinAmp on my phone. I use the tablet when at home and the phone when I’m driving. I’m mostly happy with MixZing. There are in app ads, but they’re short and I can get past them quickly enough to do what I want to do. I like the playlist feature, but it adds songs onto the playlist once you complete the songs you’ve added. Not sure if I like that or not. I’d almost rather have it either stop or go back to all songs ans shuffle. I’ll have to look and see if there is an option for that.
Next week I’m up North for some training. Work related stuff. I’m already planning in my head what I’ll do about my writing time. I will write while away. I will blog while away. I will NOT miss a day. I should probably plan on what I’m going to pack. Hmm…
Until Tomorrow!
WOO WOO!
Daily Update: I was annoyed, but now I’m happy
I spent too much time last night trying to figure out why I couldn’t play music like I should be able to. I use my Xoom tablet for almost everything and I had Winamp installed and the latest Xoom update made the generic music player become the Google Music player. Ok, that’s fine.
However when I went to play a song, I noticed that winamp skipped a couple before it played a song. I didn’t think anything of it for the first couple of days until I opened the Music player and it wouldn’t play anything.
See, I like winamp, but the Music Player would allow me to select an album an play only that album in order. I wanted to listen to Pink Floyd – The Wall. For some reason winamp doesn’t think I should be able to do this without creating a playlist.
So I tried to figure out why the Google music player wasn’t playing, got really frustrated, and went back to winamp to play Weird Al – Hardware Store (love this song) and as I’m scrolling through the songs in winamp I noticed that there were three, four, and in some cases FIVE copies of each and every song. Huh?
I have (or had) all my music on the micro SD card. That’s the only place I’ve ever put songs. At some point all the songs got copied over onto the Xoom’s main memory. Ok, fine. That’d account for two, but all the rest? They were pretty much dead songs and I had no way to remove them except to navigate one by one in winamp and remove the offending songs. I uninstalled winamp and reinstalled it thinking that would cure the problem. Well, no. It didn’t
I installed MixZing. At first, yes, it also had the same issue. All songs were listed multiple times even after deleting the duplicate music folder. Color me confused, but MixZing has an awesome feature that allowed me to say “HERE’S MY MUSIC! RIGHT THERE! ONLY THERE!” and I selected only the SD card music folder and magically I have only one of each song again. Color me a happy boy.
I still need to play with it and discover if I can play an album instead of just shuffling the songs, but at this point I think it’s pretty cool. It also downloads and displays cover art which I also think is pretty cool. I’ll keep you updated if I ever figure out what happened. I think Winamp or Google Music created the duplicate folder and/or some bizarre playlist that goofed things up. I’ll have to look deeper into it, but for now I’m a happy music listener.
In other news, Mike Plested and I have begun the plotting of Jack Kane book 2 (title pending) and we had a conversation last night. We had each other laughing which is a good sign. Hopefully we can make others laugh as well. We’re currently doing our plotting in google docs and ‘tagging’ each other as we add a line/paragraph for a given scene and we’ll keep going back and forth until we have an outline. To help with continuity we’ll be doing one chapter at a time and, again, play tag. It’ll be an interesting experience.
I’ve got to run. I’ll ramble more tomorrow.
Until Tomorrow!
WOO WOO!
J.R. Murdock 