A few non-English users have been emailing me since version 1.02 of Pillage was released. They had issues with the checklist not seeing their “Pillage” playlist properly.

While trying to squash that bug, I encountered two troubling (but very fixable) problems with CDParanoia (the brains of Pillage).

Brief Backstory: I am ripping all of my CDs to a hard drive (2TB, all AIFF files). I have gotten through all the albums, and am now in CD Single land.

Ok, so the problems. CD Singles sometimes have “features” on them (Enhanced CD Singles, with a few wallpaper pictures, a poorly encoded video, and/or a buggy screen saver), and sometimes evil corporate labels decide to “Copy Control” their CDs. Both are bad tweaks of the CD format. “Enhanced CDs” and “Copy Control” CDs have two things in common: BOTH are ignored by CDParanoia. CDParanoia simply sees the discs are having a very long last audio track. The problem: that ain’t audio! What’s the second thing? Read the end of this post…

I have enabled a new feature in Pillage, which I have been using with MUCH success. If you check a box prior to clicking the “Rip The CD” button, you can basically tell CDParanoia to stop ripping the last “audio” track just before it will hit data. Seems easy, but there’s a LOT of math involved to make sure you don’t actually stop your rip early, and miss a note or two of music that you do want.

It’s a killer feature, and I am doing some last minute checks before I put the new Pillage out into the wild. Stay tuned!

Oh…and don’t even get me started on how evil “Copy Control” CDs are! Grrrr! I’m being polite even referring to them as “CDs”, since legally they can not even carry the “Compact Disc” logo. Don’t believe me? Check any “Copy Controlled” disc you own. You will not find the “Compact Disc” logo on it, since the copy control completely corrupts the format. The interesting thing is that a “Copy Controlled” disc is essentially an “Enhanced CD”, but with a few slight tweaks to make it more problematic in computer CD drives.

THIS is why people download! Honest people, who buy CDs, and who have a legal right to back their discs up onto another medium, have to jump through all sorts of bullshit hoops just to get the data that they legally bought!!! ARGH!

Ooops. Sorry. Started to get off on a rant there. I’ll save that one for later…

Pillage. The new version, coming VERY soon…

Image courtesy of Nora’s little Blackberry, since The Forum seems to be the only venue that does not allow fucking cameras? What the hell!?! They had no problems with phones. I saw hundreds of phones taking pictures all over the place! “NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY!”. Might want to tell that to all the people taking pictures all night. Geez - it’s not like I was trying to bring in a proper camcorder. All I was bringing was my little Fuji F40 (which, by the way, I saw many of INSIDE of the venue), and I never use flash!

My issue: The Forum is a good venue, but is run fucking horribly!

First, parking. Inglewood is not exactly what I would call a friendly place to park my car, so the obvious choice is to park in The Forum lot. The price? $22! Twenty two ass bleeding dollars!

Next, leaving! Good luck! Most venues within busy cities will have some police set up, for traffic control. Not Inglewood! You can leave the crowded, car-unfriendly lot, but only if the cross traffic has a red light. What? There is no light at the exit. There are just two girls, flagging you onto the street, if the cross traffic has a red light? IF!?! Where is the cop who is manually running the street signal, to ease the flow of traffic? What the hell!?!?

Lastly, a minor one, but a big annoyance. I am sure there are some people who are too fat/tired/important/lazy to actually get off of their ass, and actually go to the concession stand for an overpriced snack (the European stereotypical description of what an American is). Boy howdy, if that person is you, you will LOOOOOVE The Forum! Fucking hell! Every few minutes, some idiot kept walking up and down the stairs, shaking his water bottle. “$4! Water!” Thanks, but I already spent money to see the show. I did not spend money to hear you want to take mine, *WHILE* I am trying to watch the show. Go tell your little candy selling girl to fuck off as well! Seriously. Aren’t you happy already with my $22? I thought gluttony was a bad thing in the eyes of “God” fearing people? Why try to make me a glutton *WHILE* I am trying to enjoy a show? Now, you might be asking yourself “why bring up ‘God’”? What does religion have to do with this. Oh…read on…

While Coldplay put on a great show (see it if you can afford it - $94.50…ouch!), the whole parking situation ruined it. And then, to find out that The Forum is actually owned by a church. A church!?!? A church has a service there on Sundays, and has bands (like Nine Inch Nails) come play there in the week. Seems a bit odd. Oops…sorry. Got distracted by the hypocrisy.

$22! What, does God need a few extra dollars? My God (a stretch there, but go with me) isn’t short of cash (paraphrasing of both George Carlin, and Bono). At every event, the owners of The Forum net $77,000.00 in parking fee alone (3500 spaces, times $22 each, equal “OH MY FUCKING GOD”)! You’d think they’d actually invest that money into actually FIXING THE FUCKING PARKING LOT!

No cameras. $22 lost before I even hit the venue ($4 water, et cetera). Peddlers trying to sell their overpriced snacks DURING the show! Nightmare trying to leave.

If a band you like is playing The Forum, do yourself a HUGE favor and find another city to see that band!

Oh, and to give a big “FUCK YOU” to the “no cameras” rule, here’s over 100 video clips from The Forum shows on YouTube.

Other than those crappy videos, I have four shitty Blackberry photos as a memory of my night. Thanks a lot!

Crohn’s disease. My mom had this. Add to that I.B.S., and a new one: Kidney Stones.

Seriously?

From Wikipedia:
“Kidney stones are also more common in patients with Crohn’s disease”

That was news to me.

The doctor who helped me with my Immodium nightmare said that I might also have Kidney Stones. I forgot about that, until this morning. Wake up, go to the bathroom…la la la la CLANK la la la la.

What the hell!?!

When you wake up from a horrible night of “sleep” (3 hours is not “sleep” - that is a nap), go to the bathroom with unfocused eyes, and hear a clank, you become - well, how should we say this - alarmed.

Scratch Diet Coke off my menu from now on…dammit!

I’m off to make a little home for my painful little friend. Let’s hope he doesn’t invite any more friends.

A bit off-topic: Some of you who email me about these blog entries (thanks, by the way - I enjoy the feedback) wonder how I can be, to quote some people, “fearless” in my postings. I have no idea. I’m just very honest. If I have an opinion, or a situation, I will discuss it without any censorship (other than the button at the top of the blog for viewing at work). I don’t look at it as having “no fear”. I just talk about what is affecting me, and hope it helps other people, be it fair use of Cable TV, suggestions for living with nightmares like MySpace, or health issues.

As you can see in the post below, I had an overheating issue with a RAID I set up. That is fixed.

The new problem: The resyncing…

When you set up a RAID, and you reboot your computer (which I do every few weeks), the RAID likes to check and see that everything is ok. Seems fine, until you realize that the RAID is about to try to resync a terabyte of information.

OK…long story short: RAID is a bad idea.

Enter Carbon Copy Cloner (or “CCC” for short).

I already use CCC to clone my laptop hard drive every few days, just in case something might happen to the drive (read The Art Of Backing Up for proof of what could happen). I never thought to use it to clone my 1TB (terabyte) hard drives. I thought a RAID 1 setup would be better.

Nope.

You live. You learn. You watch your computer take another 26 hours to clone a hard drive…

UPDATE: “04:30:02 The backup operation has completed. Elapsed time: 26:50:54″