August 27, 2008 at 11:36 am · Filed under Politics
There’s a lot of talk about an early election this fall in Vancouver. Harper says the current government is unworkable and ineffective, and therefore an election is needed. While this is probably true, I can’t see how these problems will be fixed by an election at this time. It is my understanding that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives would win a majority government. I haven’t read or heard too many opinions on a possible election but my uninformed opinion is that it is a bad idea. My hunch is that Harper would like to play another round of the blame game. He is very good at this. He’ll stand in front of a microphone and dourly exclaim that Canada’s troubles are purely a product of the Federal Liberal Party. Of course he won’t let facts get in his way, that hasn’t been a problem in the past. So it goes with this upcoming election… It’s not Harper’s fault that the government doesn’t work, it’s the fault of everyone else that is in his way. Once another minority government is in place, that will also be the fault of others.
One thing that bothers me across the board is how political parties manage their opposing views. If the Conservatives say left, the Liberals will say right, no matter what the facts are. Everyone always denounces the other. And while the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP of course have differing opinions on issues, their decisive stand on issues is often predicated on purely being different from the other. With attitudes like this it is no wonder that a minority government isn’t working in Canada.
August 12, 2008 at 2:45 pm · Filed under Technology
Today is a monumental day for me in many ways. Well, actually only one way. I finally finished recording and archiving all of my vinyl records. The final count is 1687 tracks which is about 100MB of .wav files. I guess it’s about 560 albums/EPs. Most of it is house from late nineties to 2001, along with a good collection (IMO) of techno. I have a smattering of atmospheric dnb and downtemp for good measure.
I think I started this project in 2002. I distinctly recall doing it at my last apartment before we moved to the house in Feb 2003. I used to wish that I was rich so that I could hire a summer student to do all of the recording for me. It was pretty good listening to all the tracks again though because a lot of it had slipped my memory for several years. As well, I came across some kick-ass b-sides that I previously had not noticed their brilliance.
There’s still some work to do on the files. I want to convert them all to FLAC format. The main reason for this is that .wav files don’t really support tagging, whereas FLAC does. This means each track can get tagged by label, genre, artist, etc. FLAC is a lossless compression format, similar to how winzip works. For example, with winzip you compress and decompress the file without any loss in data. On the other hand, mp3 is a lossy compression format. When you compress audio with mp3 some of the information is lost in order to shrink the file size down. The audio loses some of its dynamic range and can sound a bit digitized. FLAC can’t compress as much as mp3 but the sound quality does not change. In fact, you can re-convert FLAC back to .wav and it will be exactly like the original (the same as how winzip works). Many audio programs play FLAC. However I’m not sure iPod will playback FLAC files. I have to check on this. For a good comparison of different lossless compression methods, check out this page from Hydrogenaudio.
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