Nine Inch Nails once again proved that they (he?) are the coolest people (person?)* on the planet. The latest album, Ghosts I-IV (a 36-track series) is sold online for $5. So, last night I picked it up in FLAC lossless. For $5. No DRM, no quality degradation, just 600 megs of pure above-CD sound.

And then, to play it and get it onto my iPod.

Crap.

For those who don't know, FLAC is a sound/music file format that is perfect, and well-compressed. Handy to have for your master-copies - you can make degraded versions from there. MP3 has better compatibility and is much smaller per-file, but if you convert from a high-quality MP3 into another format, it will degrade. FLAC will not. I figured "I'm a nerd, I should get the FLAC and transcode a copy into MP3 for my ipod and other players".

Seemed easy enough.

Until I found out that none of the mainstream apps have 1st-party support for FLAC, despite it being the standard for lossless. Then I went looking for opensource tools (my typical second-choice after free MS products). Double-crap. The OSS tools are little command-line Perl scripts that were designed for Linux and seem to complain about various missing dependancies on Windows XP - I even went to the trouble of installing ActiveState Perl onto my machine to run them.

So, I ended up fetching Foobar2000 - a decent freeware app. Still, I wince at using freeware, because you always worry about getting what you paid for, and since it's closed-source, you don't know what's inside.

Foobar2000 is actually surprisingly nice - it feels like a stripped-down iTunes using the Windows native interface, with far more power-user-friendly features. It's happily grinding away at converting my unreadable (but archive-quality) FLAC files into MP3s.

* NIN is a band... but it's a band of hired guns run by the owner, composer, lead performer, etc. that is Trent Reznor. So I often think it's kinda silly to refer to it as a band when he does more than most singer-songwriters.

It's late at night and I got up early this morning, and I'm not even tired. Usually this is frustrating. Tonight, it's not.

Three subjects today.

First, my job. I'm currently working in Stratford. My employer has contracted me away from the normal in-house developing to work there. The commute is hard - Stratford is 1.5 hours away at best. If I were paying for my own gas this would be horrific - the Altima guzzles $20 per day with that trip. Something is wrong with that car. The time out of my day is hard, but it's okay since I know it's temporary and then I get to go back to biking to work.  But either way, the time in the car is giving me plenty of time to think, and to listen to music.

Second, music. Benjamin Gibbard is Jesus.  I listen to The Postal Service and suddenly I'm 5 years old again, sitting on my bunkbed playing C64 games with my brother.  I went through Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism album like five times today in the car - every song boils away my nerdly cynicism into pathetic romanticism.

Third, Hyperion.  I just finished the fourth (and final) volume of Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. 

• Hyperion (1989)
• The Fall of Hyperion (1990)
• Endymion (1996)
• The Rise of Endymion (1997)

Good, good books.  Simmons has a gift for Tolkienesque "this sword is a thousand years old and forged by the hand of Olsindrul before he slew Orthoth at Ugluk'num" sort of thing, and making it believable.  Everything is catastrophic, final, and spectacular.  It's all about poetry and death.  The only catch is that he started at the top - Hyperion is a wonderful science-fiction version of The Canterbury tales, which tells each story in a unique, distinct style.  It's the closest thing I've read to science-fiction poetry.  The Fall of Hyperion ends the short-story approach and puts the whole thing together into The Big Epic Story of Epicness, and does it well.  It has a good, solid ending, as it was meant as an end to the series... so you can stop reading there if you like.

The latter pair, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, are the perfect classical messianic epic... but it loses a lot.  It's heavily laden with 20th-century references, repetitious long-winded speeches on the metaphysics of the setting, and near-constant retconning.  Still, this is the story everyone desperately wanted Herbert's Dune series to be (instead of accepting the Dune series for what it is).  Where Dune became a terrifying morality play about ecology and religious stagnation, Endymion remains a high-flying space opera soaked in philosphy, poetry, and romance - complete with the kind of perfect tragically sappy ending that only a sci-fi concurrently peddling human salvation and anti-entropic-force-fields can provide.

So in short, I'm thoroughly buzzed in that way that you can only get by absorbing piles and piles of romantic, maudlin culture can give you.

So, in short, good night and feel the love.  Choose again.

Last night wifey and I drove to Toronto and saw Wicked. Very good show.

On Wicked

Wicked is a very fun musical. For those who don't know, it's the story of The Wizard of Oz, told from the point of view of the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch. The musical has a bit of everything - some drama, some witty banter, some very clever special effects, some good musical numbers, and some very clever backwards tie-ins to the original story. Part of the musical involves turning the plot to The Wizard of Oz upside-down, so a recent viewing of the original movie helps to ensure it makes sense. It's incredibly good fun - the back-and-forth between Elpheba's sarcasm and Galinda's blondness is priceless.

The effects were very nice - lots of clever lighting, lots of clockwork stuff, and lots flying things.

Not to say that it's perfect. The musical numbers themselves are very traditional - this isn't Andrew Lloyd Weber or anything else earthshattering here. It's the humour and the dramatic pacing that makes the songs work. The other flaw that the storlyline feels so jarringly modern when shown with the backdrop of the classic fantasy. Issues of political racism, college life, and disability just seem so out-of-place in Oz... but perhaps I'm over analyzing.

I'm still confused why a woman with green skin (spoiler: caused by Fetal Absynthe Syndrome, apparently) is so out-of-place in Oz, after all those Ozzians are pretty freaky-looking themselves.

On Getting To The Canon Theatre

It was a little tricky - parking in downtown TO on a Friday night wasn't actually as bad as I expected, the nasty part is the traffic. This was my first experience in big-city-driving. Had to get used to the tricks of following cars very closely without following them into the intersection and getting stuck in it, blocking traffic when the light turns (happened to me once, had to be careful after that).

The big thing that I've learned: you can't turn left in Toronto. Ever. You will get stuck, or honked-at, or otherwise generally frustrated. As a result, I have since decided that the ideal urban layout is small blocks with consistently alternating one-way-streets. I mean, I don't understand why people don't like one-way-streets... it's not like you can turn around on a busy two-way-street anyways. I mean, look at the things we get from one-way-traffic: you can turn left easily, you can phase the traffic lights with the flow of traffic, and it's safer - no oncoming traffic. The catch, of course, is that you can't turn around, only go around the block again.... but the fact is you do that anyways in any respectably busy 2-way traffic.

The frustration with one-way-traffic happen when trying to find X if you know it's on street Y, but you're coming from the other way - you have to guess-and-loop, unless you've directions telling you what the next street after your destination going your way is. That, and if, like Hamilton, you have your one-way traffic occasionally giving way to two-way traffic or doing very weird things at the edges to handle stuff like the mountain cuts. That leaves you guessing which is the next 2-way-street you can take.

Unfortunately, it seems that most of the people in charge of the development of the City of Hamilton disagree with me.

Oh, and the Canon Theatre is neat-O. It's smaller than I thought, so we got a much better view than I expected when I bought the tickets. Kind of funny how it's got Trump-ish opulence even though it's not very big.