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UPDATED 2008-03-07: Removed genre from tagging since the one supplied by FreeDB is usually wrong anyway.
These are the LAME settings I’m using in EAC, configured to use LAME as a custom encoder. See this Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase page for further info.
This is the best news since I found out I hadn’t lost my hat, which is another story I’ll get to later. Gracing the pages of the NZ Herald and other major newspapers this morning was the headline: “NZ dollar in free fall”. The USD/NZD pair has dropped 5 and half cents in the last few days, as investors unwind carry trades big time and this months profits [for me] are looking decidedly better—Made my weekend 
Loving the new Chemical Brothers album, below is the video for the first single. The U2 one reminds me of running around the lake near my house at sunrise—sun reflecting of the water, mist and that early morning chill in the air. Stay Positive also rates highly, a track I often listen to when I’m feeling a little too worn out by the world outside.
The Chemical Brothers
Do It Again
UPDATE: This appears to have been a bug in Firefox, and has been corrected in v2.0.0.5. There should *not* be a space between the selector, colon and pseudo class name. Please disregard the rest of this post 
Recently I’ve started using more CSS2 & 3 selectors and properties, including :first-child and :last-child. It’s important to remember to include the space before the colon when specifying these.
If you forget the space the css will still work, but only 90% of the time and without any consistency in Firefox 2, which of course makes it interesting trying to figure out why the page looks fine on first load but breaks after pressing F5! :-S
That film is a little too Dark Crystal and not enough Labyrinth.
Included with Windows Vista and Office 2007 are the first new web/screen fonts since Windows 95. These fonts have exceptional readably on LCD screens due to being optimised for ClearType (the font rendering technology in XP & Vista), and are a nice change to the standard Arial, Tahoma, Verdana’s we’ve been using on the web for the last 10 years.
However, if you don’t have Vista or Office 2007 it is still possible to get these fonts [legally] by downloading either the Office 2007 file format compatibility pack if you have a previous version of Office, or the Power Point 2007 viewer if you don’t have Office.
If you have a Mac or Unix machine, it should be possible to extract the font files from the .cab file in either installer and use them directly. The 7-zip File Manager on Windows can open both files, but you didn’t hear that from me
What the?! This is getting old fast, this is my second winter this year after catching the tail end of the European one while in Italy, and what do I wake up to this morning? Six degree weather and no hot water!! Now you may remember this happened when I first arrived in Italy, also in freezing weather. The ironic part is, in both cases the houses had continuous mains gas hot water that isn’t meant to run out!! A towel and I are heading to my Dad’s place after work where he has good old reliable electric hot water and thank goodness for that!
These are the first things that come to mind when you mention Switzerland, well that and blonde girls in a platted pigtails. One of the draw backs I’ve found of training a lot, while having very little body fat in summer is great, in winter you freeze your arse off! At least when you’re not out going for a run that is.
One the things that really annoys me is waking up in the middle of the night with a cold back, something the Swiss in their eternal wisdom (and being surrounded by snow capped mountains probably helps) have come up with the solution for. The pyjamas pictured to the right are the most comfortable and warmest I’ve ever owned, and they are 100% cotton as well The company is called Gaggohaas, they speak Swiss German over there but the site and staff also speak English. They also seem to do an Amazon with shipping times, delivering in 4 days to New Zealand (rather than the listed 20).
Synthetic fabrics are horrible if you have eczema like I do (from food allergies), and pretty much everything these days is a polyester/cotton mix. This does help the fabric to wash and dry faster but far from ideal for itchy skin.
Winter seems to be the worst, the cold weather and lack of sunlight don’t seem to be so good for the skin. And as an added advantage I’ve found their long pyjamas also help stop you tearing your skin to bits at night (very easy to do) when you have a bad allergy.
On the same topic, one of the things I’ve heard that helps winter eczema is sunbeds. Apparently the root of the problem is the lack UV exposure. So while it might increase my risk of skin cancer, I’m going to give it a whirl. I’ve found a gym across town that’s just opened, figuring a new machine is probably safer than an old one, and am going in this weekend. Hopefully it helps and a bit of tan wouldn’t be bad either!
Interesting this… when I signed up to eMusic I created an unique email address on one of my domains for the account. The only place I used this address was on the eMusic.com sign up form. Now I’m starting to receive spam on that address, and only on that address. After checking on the net, it appears they share their user database with anyone and everyone. Thank goodness I can just drop the address…
UPDATE: Oh and I just got another spam e-mail, and the To address just happened to contain the 2 unique addresses I had used to sign up to Emusic with (I cancelled and tried it again about 18 months later). Coincidence I think not!!
You are currently browsing the Uncle Travelling Matt blog archives for July, 2007.
