The 70s Come to Korea

I just stumbled across the song and music video “Gangnam Style” by South Korean rapper Psy. I enjoy watching Japanese music videos because some of them are quite... creative. And Korean stuff can come close. I watched this video several times, not only because I found the song catchy, but because I got a good laugh from both his dance moves and the suits he wore in the video.

Once suit in particular seemed very familiar. Well what do you know, that appears to be almost identical to the tuxes that my dad and his wedding party wore. Back in the mid-70s. I guess it's true what they say about fashion, how everything comes back in style eventually.

Run, run, as slow as you can...

I have gotten quite out of shape over the years. While I was never into sports or other physical activities beyond walking, I did get a fair amount of walking done while I was in school. And then during the times while living in Surrey that I didn't own a car I had to walk to and from the bus when I went to work each day. For a while after the office and I moved to Abbotsford, I even walked or biked to work, which was a good 40 minute walk each way.

After I finally got another car, that stopped but I still made a point of walking to the stores or mall, which are a 20-30 minute walk away, and had the occasional walk at the park or around the neighborhood. Eventually, though, that all seemed to fade away and the extent of my real physical activity became just occasionally moving around boxes and containers at work and any chores I did around the house. But my fingers certainly still got a good workout from all those video games!

But that has to change. I'm certain that most of my health concerns would fade if I took better care of myself. Part of that involves eating better, which is always a struggle for a single person who doesn't often enjoy taking too much time cooking. Another part would be making sure I get any medical assistance that would help improve my quality of life.

But I think the main thing is to finally start getting more active and getting back into shape. Fortunately, it's much easier when it's such nice weather out like we've had here lately, and I find myself looking for any excuse to be outside (for example, I'm even sitting out on my patio as I write this). I started out by taking a good 20 minute walk around the neighborhood each night this week. But even when walking at a faster pace and for that amount of time, it didn't feel like my heart was getting that good a workout. That's when I remembered a nice outdoor track I've seen that I heard was open to the public.

So I swung by this evening to check it out and see what I could do. Well if I didn't know it before, I know now that I'm definitely out of shape. Each lap appears to be 500m, and I decided I'd had enough and switched down to a walking pace before completely finishing two laps (the RunKeeper app I have indicated my "almost-2-laps" was 0.83km and took 5½ minutes). But it certainly gave my heart a good workout! I might have been able to keep jogging a little longer, but I didn't want to overdo it on my first try. Plus I probably would have been completely out of breath before being anywhere near finished the third lap anyway.

So my challenge to myself is to go back to the track every evening between now and my vacation in just under two weeks. And hopefully while on vacation I'll have a chance to do some jogging too, or at least I'm sure there will be a fair number of walks. And playing with my two young nephews is bound to give me quite the workout too.

But since the weather is supposed to continue being really nice for the next couple weeks it shouldn't be too hard to make sure I do it every evening. I'll hopefully see a decent improvement in just that short time. And who knows, maybe if I keep this up, by the end of the summer I'll be able to do 10 laps rather than almost two.

Honey, I Shrunk My iPod (and the price tag)

April 21, 2001. I bought my first portable MP3 player, a Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox. It was only slightly more bulky than a typical portable CD player, and had 6GB of storage space. The total cost including tax worked out to $93.86/GB.

6GB seemed like a lot of space, but as I ripped my music library to my computer over the next while I found I had close to 18GB of music. So, I took my library of 192kbps MP3s and had them batch re-compressed to 64kpbs WMA files. Cutting it down to ⅓ the size let it fit my Jukebox just perfectly. But let me tell you, even with Windows Media Audio files having better quality than MP3 at low bit rates, I could still clearly notice the difference in audio quality but I just lived with it. Until...

Backin Up

I apologise in advance... but thinking about backups has brought this song back into my head.

Backups Are Your Friend

If I were to provide one piece of advice to computer users, it would be to always have a backup of your data. I can't speak for Windows, but on Macs anyway, it's super easy and convenient. Just buy and plug in an empty external hard drive and Time Machine will automatically do periodic backups of your data. With Time Machine, it even does hourly backups for the past day (then after a day, it only keeps one a day for the past week and then one a week). It's easy to think that you'll be fine and never need a backup, but you'll never know when something will happen and you'll be extra glad that you have that backup, and happy you spent the money on that extra hard drive.

Like if you accidentally delete every album in your music library that starts with the letter "T". Which just happened to me. And yes, that includes "The" as well. One click in the wrong place and it was gone. All gone. Not just the entries in the iTunes library but the actual audio files on the hard drive themselves, too. That's over 60 albums total.

After a moment of panic and frustration that I could have done something so stupid I remembered my backup and began the restoration process. It was 7:40 and my last backup was at 7:06. I'd lose about half an hour's worth of the library cleanup and updating that I had been doing, but it sure beats the considerable effort of rebuilding that part my library that would have been required had I not had a backup handy. Sure, iTunes now lets you re-download old purchases, but not all my music came from iTunes. A significant amount of it is still from old CDs that I would have had to take the time re-ripping (not to mention digging through the boxes in my closet to find them all first), and a bunch came from other digital music stores that I couldn't re-download them from. Plus, I'd lose all the play counts and last played dates. I really like having statistics like that.

And the really crazy thing is that I recently signed up for iTunes Match so I could have re-downloaded every one of those albums (most of which I was going to re-download anyway, so I could get them in higher quality that way) except that, when I deleted it all, I had also checked off the “Also delete these items from iCloud” box. That wasn't an error, since I had intended to check that. The problem was that instead of having one song selected, somehow the entire playlist got selected.

So, to restore my library there were two places I had to go using Time Machine. First was the Music\iTunes folder under my home directory. There were a number of iTunes Library files there that needed restoring. Fortunately, those were small and restored quickly. But then I needed to restore my audio files. I decided the simplest thing would be to restore the entire Music folder. Sure, it meant 65GB of data and 40 minutes of time, but it was far easier, and probably quicker as well, to restore everything than to go through each individual artist subfolder to see if there were albums missing, and restoring just those albums.

After waiting for everything to get restored, I was very glad to see that the process worked perfectly, and all my "T" albums were back and the handful of tracks I played at random did indeed play. Three cheers for backups! Now tomorrow I had better remember to bring home my “off-site backup” hard drive from work so I can update that one too.

Chicken Head Tracking

Chicken Week Day 5 - To close out the week, here's something a little educational for you...