I ain't trying to preach, I believe I can reach But your mind ain't prepared, I'll c u when u get there. I'd be a fool to surrender when I know I can be a contender If everybody's a sinner then everybody can be a winner. I'ma scuffle and struggle until I'm breathless and weak I done strived my whole life to make it to the mountain peak. Always keep reaching sure to grab on to something I'll be there when you get there with muted sounds bumping. We prefer to keep our eyes shut 'til it's right When there's something involved that we desire. So hold your head up high if you're poor and righteous I know times seem strife and problems seem endless. But at the times of despair we gotta put ourselves together And if you feel you're out of the game. Then you need to get back in it 'Cause nothing worse than a quitter. You gotta face responsibility one day, my brother So wrap up your pity and turn it to ambition. And put your vehicle in 'Drive' and stop by my side. As we walk down the road of our destiny And the time comes to choose which shall it be The wide and crooked or the straight and narrow. We got one voice to give and one life to live. Stand up for something or lie down in your game. Listen to the song that we sing. It's up to you to make it big I guess, I'll c u when u see me. I'll c u when u get there.
Lyrics from Coolio's C U When U Get There.
--It is not what we read, but what we remember that makes us learned.
It is not what we intend but what we do that makes us useful.
And, it is not a few faint wishes but the struggle that makes us valiant.
--Henry Ward Beecher
posted at: 15:17 | path: /observations | permalink |
Ever notice how hard it is to get something when you exactly know what you want ? Especially when you had it once and lost it ? Ever notice how hard it is to settle for whatever's available and you keep looking & looking, getting more depressed about the lack of choices ?
I'm not talking about true love, as much as these things might be be applicabl,e but just about an mp3 player. My needs were simple. It had to have at least 4 gigs of space, an enqueue feature, decent battery life, a standard USB cable and for less than 150 USD. My last mp3 player had all that and looked cool while doing it - a black Creative Zen Neeon2. It survived several long walks on rainy days, had no front controllers which meant I could operate while it was still in my pocket. But one weekend I left it at my office desk and come monday it was missing.
So, four months later, I started looking for a replacement - but they don't sell Zen Neeon2 in the US anymore. And every other player I found had a proprietary adapter - the iPod, the new Sansa e2xx, even the new Creative vision stuff. Nearly after a week of crawling through specs & window shopping, I finally discovered that the Creative Zen V plus had nearly everything I wanted (looks cheaper and *is* cheaper than an equivalent iRiver).
Bought one, plugged into my laptop and zilch happened. As it turns out, it uses a crappy MSFT protocol called MTP - so much for open interfaces. But that's where Amarok came to the rescue ! Amarok incorporates libmtp5, which lets me just drag & drop between Amarok collections and the mp3 player. Except, I had to apply the following patch to make it plug'n'play (launchpad bug #132392).
But the effort is worth it. Even Album art transfer from Amarok is completely taken care of. Mtp sort of sucks because it does the file transfer in user mode (freezing amarok) rather than kernel buffering that usb-storage gives. But on the flip side is that that unlike the usb-storage players, the usb charging will work even if the player is playing (as long as it is not mounted on Amarok). I'm sort of building a hack to submit my play counts to my last.fm account from the statistics returned by the mtp-tracks commandline client, but it doesn't give last played time to sort of fake an offline update for the correct time - the spam filter in last.fm blocks a bulk update of tracks at the same time.
Now that it's working, time to play with my next new peice of hardware ...
--The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.
Was listening to Pink Floyd - Wish you were here and wondering how it applies to a programmer. Of all the things you had to give up to become good at something. The sweet innocence of childhood for the ruthless logic of professionalism. The carmaderie of friends for the competition for the top. Last night, while watching Underworld at home - I took from you, but I gave you so much . Was it a fair deal or were the scales of justice crooked ?
Running over the same old code, what have we found - the same old bugs? Wish you were here ...
Maybe I don't have a reason to be happy. My cousins have fled Bangalore to Dubai and Trivandrum - I couldn't get a ticket to go to Cochin. And it doesn't help at all when people around you, harp on how they are alone.
Let me crank up the volume and forget that the world exists.