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Serendipity always fascinates me. It is amazing how many times one thinks about something, only to have it appear out of no where when you least expect it! That’s what happened to me a couple of days ago when I went looking for a utility to normalize a bunch of MP3s!

A long time ago, in another universe by now, I had written myself a neat little program that allowed me to do a bulk rename or renumber of a list of files in a directory. It was a command line tool to help fix an ongoing problem that I had at the time. It was great. I could give it a prefix to replace. Give it a number to start at and a range to number with and it worked flawlessly. Unfortunately over the years, across computer crashes and replacements and hard-drive failures it disappeared.

I’ve often lamented my loss and thought many times of sitting down and building a new one, but there were always other priorities. Yesterday my wife received two separate discs of photos of an outing she and her friends took. She wanted them put on the computer, so she could use them in her screen-saver (and by default into the same folder). Unfortunately both sets of pictures used the same file naming scheme AND even the same file names. This required me to once again manually rename half of the pictures before copying them into the same directory and once again I lamented my loss of my utility…

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So as I mentioned in my article the other day, I found a treasure trove of really great sites with literally tons of old radio shows in MP3 formats. I downloaded about 30 half hour shows (which only filled up about a fifth of the disk) and put them in my DVD player to test before my wife got home with the car (most DVD’s today can play MP3 audios). Right away a major problem jumped out at me.

Even though I had downloaded all the recordings from just one sight, they played back at different levels! So if you had to turn the volume down for one show because it was too loud, then the next one was too quiet and you had to turn the volume back up. Having to do this every 30 minutes or so might not be a major problem. However if you were driving, the blare from a loud recording coming in after a quiet one could be enough to cause you to drive off the road!

This is a normal problem when mixing different pieces of music and I normally tackle it before I record any CD. Matter of fact I think my Nero CD burning software actually has this utility built in. Unfortunately, I had nothing that worked on MP3s.

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So we did a little dash down to Toronto last weekend to see our daughter and if we had been thinking we would have packed some of the audio CD’s that we have in our collection. Our car stereo holds 5 CD’s of great music that we have listened to ever since we got the car, but we could have replaced them with some of the great Radio Mystery CD’s or better yet our Wingfield Farm collection. But instead we spent most of the 5 hours there and the 5 hours back playing Geography… Which is fine when you’re kids are in school – it keeps them occupied, but by about the 10th country ending in “A” I was ready to pack it all in – except there was nothing else to do. I searched desperately for a good station playing a mystery, but no…. Geography, both ways, was my lot…

For those who aren’t familiar with the game… Someone starts by naming any geographical location or place in the world – for example New York. Then the next person has to name a location that begins with the last letter of that location – so for New York the next person could say “Kentucky.” Whoever goes next needs a place that starts with an ‘Y’ because that’s the last letter of Kentucky. You can’t use the same geographical name twice in a game.

Great with young kids, but I was rather worried by the number of places that I was popping out that either a) no longer existed b) were renamed or c) I had used them already…two hours ago!

So last night I decided… Our car stereo plays MP3 disks, so why not copy a lot of songs on to one disk so that at least we would have a lot more variety in our CD player. So I took our Kingston Trio collection and started converting them to MP3 using a great little free utility that I found a while back called Audio Grabber.

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I was helping my daughter design her blog the other day and recommended that she put up an RSS feed for people to subscribe to. Both her and her girlfriend looked at me like I had two heads!

Yeah, I know that I get carried away with “geek-speak”, but hey they are both in their twenties and quite comfortable with modern technology and the web. I was amazed that they didn’t know what it was! This my attempt to simplify and hopefully explain it in such a way that it will make sense to them and everyone else.

First things first, what do the initials RSS (which I am using throughout this article) stand for? The most accepted answer is “Really Simple Syndication” and it is actually a family of different products…

It has been around since about 1995 and is now exploding on the internet. The main reason that RSS is growing so fast is that you get timely information that “you” choose, without having to divulge any personal information (including your email address) or having to create yet another account and remember yet another password… and no spam…

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So I was trying to decide today, whether I had writers block, or if I was just feeling indifferent to everything. Maybe it’s a hangover from yesterdays provincial election.

So I dabbled at all sorts of things. One of those was to drop into Facebook to see if there was anything new. I’ve had a Facebook account for a while now, and it’s really interesting to see how it has changed already.

When I first started with Facebook, I told someone in my age group (remember I’m retired) that I had an account and they gave me the oddest look. As far as they were concerned Facebook was for “kids” (meaning anyone in their 20’s or younger).

To be truthful, my initial reason to get on Facebook was to be able to see my daughters pictures of my grandkids. That is all. Having been raised that you don’t peek in people diaries (thanks to an older sisters “advice” – with strong support from mom & dad). I wasn’t even thinking of doing anything else.

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