Coffee! Yes, my girlfriend’s bought herself a decent coffee-machine. A Krups XP2000. So far it’s served us very well indeed. I bought a little grinder to with it. There is nothing quite like an espresso made from freshly ground beans. I’ve seen mixed reviews about this particular model on the intarwebs, but in my humble opinion, it is excellent value for money. It’s about R1800 at Boardmans.

Cigars! I haven’t even been at my job for three weeks, and my boss has gone and decided to resign (he’s going to where the grass is greener). On a trip to Florida, he found a little shop in Miami where they roll the cigars for you while you wait. So he went ahead and bought a whole case. Now, you can argue that a true Cuban cigar should come from Cuba, but Miami is a freakin’ stone’s throw from Cuba anyway. Anyhoo, it will apparently be too expensive to take them with him, so he’s given them to me (fifteen of them). Score! I’ve had one already, and it was pretty darn good.

Gadgets! Well, technically, just one. My landline phone has given up the ghost. I’ve always wanted a wireless handset, but never really had a reason to buy one…until now (I just moved into a two-story house). I settled for a cheapie, the Siemens Gigaset AL140. It looks more expensive than it is, and so far I’ve been quite happy with it. The only niggle I have is that the loudest earpiece volume isn’t very loud, but it doesn’t really bother me. Oh, I also got a work-supplied laptop. A 2Ghz Core Duo Dell with 4 gigs of RAM. Nice.

That’s it from me. I think I’m going to update less (don’t really have the time now that I’m a wage slave), but when I do it’ll be longish posts like this one.

Oh, and I love flexi-time. I’m at the office at 07:00 and done by 15:30. This means that I miss the rush-hour traffic, which is awesome.

I’m also just about settled in my new home. I’m very happy with the house. My room is almost as big as my previous flat!

I can sure use a holiday, though…

I also started work yesterday at PricewaterhouseCoopers‘ Global Knowledge Management department as a technical consultant for the Global Controlled Vocabularies Service. My responsibilities range from doing a bit of development, user-interface design, and some other technical stuff, to some project management, documentation authoring, QA and testing as well as facilitation and training (and a whole lot in between). At the moment this is all focused around their new CV Publishing Website.

The first two days have been interesting. I’ve been poring over loads of documentation, and have just been generally getting an idea of the processes and mindset of the department. It’s an awesome office environment. I am very lucky to have landed this job. I think I’m going to enjoy every single moment of it.

The daily commute is no fun, but I’m already getting used to it.

I’ve then got one weekend before I start working at my awesome new job. Going from a student to a white-collar slave wage in a weekend. As if that isn’t enough of a jarring change, I’m moving into a proper house next weekend. I’ve got less than two days to make the move. I can’t wait till I’m settled in.

Exciting times lie ahead.

Anyways, I looked over at my Moleskine notebook, and got an idea for my own Wordpress theme. You can only use someone else’s design for so long. Here are the mockups:

Mockup - No colour

Mockup - with colour!

Original? Nope, there have been many hand-drawn designs. I just thought I’d try my hand at it. Everything that looks like it was drawn with a black pen…I actually drew it all with a black pen (and took a photo or two - I have no scanner).

I like the one with no colour more. At the moment they’re just Photoshop mockups. I’ll probably slice them and theme them up when I have more time. Then I can start worrying about layout and such.

Other news on the music front is that thanks to me procrastinating instead of doing what I should be doing (working on my mini-thesis), I’ve started making music again. A new track will probably be up by middle next week.

Things are pretty hectic for me at the moment. I’m in the thick of putting together my mini-thesis, with the title: “Improving Information Retrieval Precision and Recall with Semantic Web Technologies”. It’s a mouthful, and it sounds like a CS paper, but it’s pretty interesting reading and seeing as my degree is not exactly hard science, a fair amount of abstraction will have to occur…and it’s supposed to be only 25 pages. Sounds worse than it is. However, this is my home stretch, the last bit of work that has to be done before I can say goodbye to my academic career. I hope it passes quickly.

I’m quite looking forward to actually start work. Nineteen more days…

I never had the BSOD problem with version eight. I have another problem entirely. Syncing music to my iPod from iTunes is like playing Russian roulette. Sometimes, while syncing, some Apple service would quietly keel over and die in the background…”terminating” the sync prematurely, leaving the iTunesDB on my iPod corrupted. Now, if my iPod wasn’t jailbroken, I would have to restore it every time this happened. Lucky for me, it’s as easy as SSHing to the thing (or simply opening up MobileTerminal) and typing

rm /var/mobile/Media/com.apple.itunes.lock_sync [Return]
rm -rf /var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control [Return]

and then simply restoring my last backup from iTunes. This is still a schlep. So, I started looking around for an alternative…and found MediaMonkey.

If you happen to be running firmware 2.0 or later, though, you have to get your hands on the latest beta. MediaMonkey’s syncing is pure heaven, compared to iTunes. It’s as easy as selecting the tracks you want to sync, right clicking, and selecting “Send to > iPod”. Whereas iTunes would freeze for a bit before and after syncing (making it a chore), with the possibility of breaking things, MediaMonkey quietly syncs in the background with no slowdown at all.

So if you’re on Windows Vista, ditch iTunes (actually, don’t, MediaMonkey requires that it be installed..so simply stop using it) and install the latest MediaMonkey beta. You’ll be glad you did.

I’m going to try and figure out how to sync in Linux with gtkpod (wirelessly!) and maybe do a writeup…

It’s an interesting album, called “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today“, and one I’ve come to enjoy very much. Byrne describes it as gospel-folk-electro. Don’t let that gospel part throw you, though. It’s more about the heart of gospel than the message, in this case. Eno took care of the music, and Byrne did the lyrics.

It’s definitely not for everyone, but give it a listen…you may be pleasantly surprised.

Along comes MPoD from Katoemba Software, available now in the AppStore, for free! It gives you full control of MPD, from your iPhone, or iPod Touch. Awesome stuff.

I’ve been looking for a way to seamlessly integrate my iPod and car radio for a while now. You would think that an FM transmitter like the iTrip would do the job just fine, but you’d be wrong. I had the problem of the darn thing simply switching off if it detected a stronger broadcast on the same frequency. Very irritating.

Then I started shopping around for a head unit that would allow me to directly connect the iPod. I was overeager and purchased a 2007 Pioneer head unit from Hi-Fi Corp. What I didn’t know was that back in ‘07 it was still a novelty to be able to connect your iPod to your head unit, and an extra cable was needed (at about R750, if you could even find it in SA). In my defense, the salesman did assure me that the cable was included. Luckily I got my refund from a bitter, lambasted salesman.

Then I found something much more promising. The Pioneer DEH-600UB. which I went ahead an ordered from Autostyle online.

They’re selling it for R2200 (only R200 more than the crappy model HiFi Corp is selling) and offer free shipping as well. I had it installed shortly after I received it (damn idiots didn’t connect the dimming control, which dims the screen when the headlights are switched on - small thing, still irritating) and I’ve been using it for about two weeks.

My verdict? Awesome head unit. Direct iPod control? Check. Displays song info? Check. Doesn’t need a proprietary cable? Check! It has a regular USB port. It also has some other cool features, like being able to navigate your iPod music library exactly as you would on the iPod itself. Oh, and the OEL screen is gorgeous. It even sounds better than my previous head unit after tweaking a few settings. So yes, it works perfectly with the iPod Touch. Apparently it even works perfectly with the iPhone 3G.

In short, if you’re looking for a super-effective 3rd party solution to integrate your iPod Touch with your car audio, you can’t go wrong with this unit.

Tip: If you’re using your stock standard speakers like I am, getting balanced sound from compressed formats can be tricky. Here’s what I did. Set the Bass to 1 or 2, depending on your preference, but no higher. Set the Sound Retriever to 1, and the Loud option to High. Then just tweak the equalizer to your taste. This should give you an even spread of lows, mids and highs.