It still whips the llama's ass

I've been searching for a windows alternative to Amarok - the linux only media player - for my windows-based media server. I wanted something with an ID3-based media library, so my first stop was the current standard - iTunes. There was just too many little things that made me hate it. I tried to like iTunes, but I just couldn't. I tried Mozilla's songbird, but uninstalled it minutes later. It may be good one day, but right now, version 0.4 is not ready for real use. I tried Media Monkey and a few others that I don't even remember what they're called.

Then it hit me. Winamp! My trusty little mp3 player that I've been using forever. I begrudgingly gave it up when I made the switch to Linux (XMMS is not the same) and hadn't thought to try out the latest version. (On my work laptop, I'm running a really old version of winamp.)

So I went to winamp.com and downloaded version 5.52. Let me tell you...it really does whip the llama's ass. For the most part, it does what every other media player does, but it has a few little extras that won me over.

At the bottom of the screen, there's a section that gives you news and links for whatever band/artist is playing. So you're sitting there listening to the Fratellis and you think, I wonder what's going on with this band. Then you look down at the bottom of your screen and see that they just finished their second album, they released a DVD, and they turned down recording a song that would serve as David Beckham's LA Galaxy anthem. (Good choice)

It plays everything. And if it doesn't, there's probably a plugin that you can download...and then it will play everything. FLAC? WMA? OGG? Yep, yep, yep. And all without having to take over and make new copies of your music a la iTunes.

Ok, ready for the best part? So you know when you load up some music in your media player and you find that you don't have ID3 tags? Oh no, all my songs are called unknown artist - track 02.mp3...crap (1). Winamp has a great feature called auto-tag. Auto-tag searches your song in the gracenote database and updates your ID3 tags accordingly. Now it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn close. I would say that it was accurate about 97% of the time. It even correctly identified obscure songs that I never expected it to know (2) . Again, it's not perfect though. Occasionally some bizarre identification comes out of left-field, so if you're going to use it, don't blindly auto-tag your entire music collection.

The other great thing about it is that it actually writes the ID3 tag to the mp3 file itself. iTunes et al tend to only write to their own .xml library file. So if you take that song somewhere else, your updated tags won't go with them.

So yeah... I'm not expecting people to give up iTunes for winamp, but if you're currently sans media player or you're looking to tag a lot of music, check out winamp.

(1) I did try Version .00001 of EM ID3 Tool, but I didn't meet the specific use requirements.
(2) Here's an example: I have an mp3 of Hellmarch from the Command and Conquer computer game. I think I got this from Kazaa or something back in the day. Thanks to auto-tag, I now know that the Hellmarch song is by a guy named Frank Klepacki. (And that it's from 1998 and has 120 BPM)

Hey, whaddaya know? It's the post office again...

Back in October, I told the sordid tale of the post office's handling of my security deposit. Well, the evil post office is back...

So a few months ago, the issue was a single piece of registered mail. The problem now is every piece of mail. It seems that we no longer receive first class mail and no one can tell us why.

We first noticed that there was a problem when we stopped receiving our weekly issue of Time Out New York. The magazine contacted us to confirm our address, which we did, and they had it correct, but the magazines stopped arriving. People sent us holiday cards using the address from our moving announcement/holiday card only to have them returned. We go days without receiving anything at all.

Obviously there's something going on, so I stopped by our local post office. I talked to postal worker Newman and was told that there was nothing that could be done from there. They gave me a phone number for my route's supervisor and told me to call any weekday between 8am and 9am. Awesome... that's a big, convenient window of time.

I called and route supervisor was fairly useless. He acted all confused and said that he would let our carrier know.

So then I called 1-800-ASK-USPS and filed a report. It was referred to customer affairs and I received a call back pretty quickly. The customer affairs guy acted all confused too. He looked us up in his computer and didn't see any forwarding orders, so he was out of ideas.

I'm supposed to call him back tomorrow morning between 7am and 10am so that he can go through the mail himself to look for anything addressed to us. I don't have high hopes.

What I've learned from these experiences is that it's nothing short of a miracle that mail ever gets delivered at all. There's no accountability and no tracking. If something goes wrong, there's nothing you can do.

Fear! Berets! Boom!!!

There are terrorists out there and they won't rest until they blow up a cute little girl with a beret. There are a few ways that you, yes you - average citizen - can help. One, be on the lookout for guys in black hooded sweatshirts. Two, tell the closest police officer if you see a close up of someone's eyes turn all red and creepy-like. Three, and most importantly, don't forget to bring your fear with you to the polls. If you don't vote properly, the terrorists will blow up that cute little girl!