Pandemic III

So! The Australian Government has secured quarantine powers that they're not currently planning to use. Sample powers include distribution of bottled water, shutting down hospitals, closing land borders and burning bodies surveillance of infected people and quarantine of boats and aeroplanes.

(This is what happens when you start buying symptoms too early.)

Madagascar, on the other hand, has taken the precaution of SHUTTING. DOWN. EVERYTHING.



Also, there is absolutely no truth to the rumour that doctors in the United States are practicing drawing stars in the air to slow down time. (Some want a health bonus for every correctly-performed technique.)

MP3 Maintenance

Of my 5200 mp3s, I've so far retagged and relocated, um, 812 of them. There are two reasons for this.

The first involves the moderately-complicated tangle of software that I'm using to do it. Currently, this sprawling mess of programs is:

• MusicBrainz Picard, which is painful and bothersome. This would stop me using it, if it weren't for all the alternatives being useless. MediaMonkey, for example, tries to look up metadata from Amazon, which is like asking Guy Fawkes for renovation advice.
• MediaMonkey, which is surprisingly useful for relocating files and managing a directory structure. This is rather more like asking Guy Fawkes to store barrels in a cellar for you.
• MP3Gain, which is helpful for normalising the volumes on mp3s, but takes a while, even if you tell it to pretend it's a real-time process. This is like asking Guy Fawkes to make the kaboom appropriately earth-shattering.
• Windows Media Player, which seems to make my Zen happier to play network shares. This is like asking Sir William Stanley and Thomas Winter to recruit Guy Fawkes.
  
• Half a dozen potential candidates for use in synching tracks to my Zen with minimal human intervention. This is like asking one's minions to start upon Guy Fawkes, beginning with the 'gentler tortours'.

This, however, seems to be going fairly well. Of those 812 retagged, renormalised, relocated and rescanned mp3s, all of them now live among the 1428 mp3s in my retagged, renormalised, relocated and rescanned music library.

(The others are all new.)

The second is that my old mp3s with the damaged metadata are losing their places in the queue to new musical upstarts. Apparently, it slows down progress on an mp3 maintenance project when you start treating last.fm recommendations like pokémon*. Who knew?



* I have no Powder Treason comparison for this. It seems there are limits to how far a simile can stretch.

TGYH

Colin Lane hasn't even started yet, and I already want never to see him on the show again.

In other news, SQUEE! TGYH!