A New Years Resolution

On January 4th, 2007, I wrote a note with a new years resolution, and I was a hell of a different person then.

On that day, I weighed 214 pounds, and I hoped to weigh 164 pounds by today. Well, quite frankly, it'd didn't happen.

But that's a good thing. Two years ago my doctor told me I should be at 160 pounds. Two years ago, I was two years younger, and in that time I've grown. I currently weigh between 180 and 190 pounds, I'd give you an exact number if the batteries in my scale weren't dead. And I'm perfectly happy at that weight. The unfortunate thing about diets is they're never really over, and I've been terrible with the month of December: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years = lots of food. So I guess I need to watch what I'm eating some more. But the fact of the matter is, I'm under no pressure to lose weight anymore. And that, my friends, is an awesome thing. I've lost about 50 pounds. Every pound is worth it.

I was texting one of my friends on New Years Day, and she asked me what my New Years Resolution for this year was. I froze there for a second - I didn't have one. So my first instinct was to put "exercise and get a six pack", because that is my next goal with my diet (well, at least exercise), but I'm not under the same pressure I was before. So I thought about it some more, and came up with my 2008 New Years Resolution: to keep in contact with all of my friends after I go to college.

They say that more people are alive today then have been alive in the history of the world otherwise. I'm not statistician yet, so I can't really evaluate that. But I can apply it to myself - I've made more new friends this year than I ever thought I would. So many awesome people - you know who you are. And some of them are real gems.

And of course, I've become even better friends with a lot of friends I already had, and acquaintances I'd already made. It's been a crazy year, and this new one will be the same.

So as I go into 2008, I keep my friends by my side, and my goals in mind - yes, each and every one of hundreds.

w00t

On a yearly basis Merriam-Webster, the maker of dictionaries known the country over, has a poll where readers determine what word best sums up 2007.

Imagine my surprise when I realized the word for this year is "w00t". What's this world come to? Oh, I can't forget to mention that the runner up word was the verb "facebook".

Article for further information: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071212/woot_word_071212/20071212?hub=World

I don't like clocks.

I wish we used we used military time, the 24 hour clock. Take for example 12:00 PM, Saturday, December 15th. I looked at the time and the first thought that goes through my head is "is that midnight or noon?". Then I think some more. If it's midnight, is it the midnight between December 14th and 15th or between December 15th and 16th?

Turns out that's noon on the 15th and I was thinking too much.

Military time, at least in my opinion, is easier. 12:00 on Saturday. Oh, it's noon. 0:00 on Saturday. It's midnight between Friday and Saturday. There's no 24:00 to screw with my mind. How about 17:25? Oh, that's 5:25 PM on this old system we use.

I say we just use military time. It's easier. And less confusing when hearing back from colleges is stressing me out.

Edit: Want to see military time in Windows XP? Follow these steps:
1. Go to Control Panel.
2. Double Click on "Regional and Language Options".
3. On the default tab, click the button that says "Customize..." on it.
4. Select the "Time" tab.
5. Click on the drop down box next to "Time format:" and select "H:mm:ss".
6. Click "Apply" on both open windows.

You're done!

How do you organize programs on your computer?

I recently upgraded my laptop to have a third monitor attached to it. So lets count them: three monitors, including the one built into the laptop. ASCII art time!

_______ _______ _______
| | | | | |
|______| |______| |_______|

I imagine you get the picture. It's quite nice - I have a particular layout for it. I keep AIM and foobar2000 in the center monitor (foobar2000 is a music playing program, kinda like iTunes, but better in my opinion. That's another article though...). I dedicate the monitor on the right to Firefox. The left monitor varies. Sometimes it's Microsoft Word, sometimes it's Photofiltre (An image editing program I use, check it out sometime, it's closed source but it's free.), sometimes it's Visual Studio. Sometimes I switch the roles of the middle and the left monitor - it depends on what I'm working on. If it's laid back, I'll have it the way I said. If I'm working hard on something, I'll put the word document/image/visual studio in the center monitor so it's right next to Firefox (quick glance away from anything I'm referring to), and stick less avid stuff (AIM, foobar2000) to the side.

I'm the type of person who works best by spreading stuff out. Take the desk I have at home - when I'm working on stuff, I don't have neat piles, I want to be able to see everything relevant at once. When I was working on an essay last year for Advanced Biology, I had 20 articles spread out - yes - 20 stapled 8 and a half by 11 articles - so I could see the title of each and every one whenever I needed to so I could reference it. I adopted that to three monitors - I don't want to click on the taskbar to switch between everything. Yeah, I can Alt-Tab as well as the rest of them, but it's still not as convenient as shifting my glance to the right and going "Hey! That's how you do it!" or "Oh, that's what it means."

I still use a single monitor set up (my downstairs computer, school computers) and I still manage just fine, but it's just not the same. There are plenty of set ups for single monitors that work just fine for some people - virtual desktops, extensions that minimize stuff to the system tray, but I haven't had much luck getting used to them. Of course, that's just me. How do you (the reader) organize programs on your computer? Anything interesting? Tips or suggestions? I only know one other person who has more than one monitor, so most of you are working with a single monitor set up. What do you think?

AAC-HEv2

Wow, that looks like a lot of technological psychobabble. In reality, it isn't, it's quite nice.

You know how all that music you have in iTunes gets ripped when you import from a CD to this funky format called m4a? Well, that's just a fancy name for an audio format called AAC (Advanced Audio Coding). M4A is an abreviation of MP4-Audio, and MP4 is a container format like AVI. And for those of you who didn't know, AVI's contain XVID video codecs or MPEG-2 video and who knows what audio format, could be MP3, MP2, Vorbis, etc... That's why sometimes you'll download an AVI and Windows Media Player will complain about not being able to play it. The AVI is fine, you just don't have the filter to play whatever video or audio format is in it.

Enough on that. So all this music you rip from CDs in iTunes are by default in the M4A format using AAC audio. There are multiple types of AAC. The two most common are AAC-LC (Low Complexity) and AAC-HE (High Energy, comes in v1 and v2). iTunes uses AAC-LC, and the underlying Quicktime does the same. That's what you hear when you listen to your music, audio encoded with AAC-LC.

AAC-HE is AAC-LC with some extra data thrown in that helps the audio quality. What does that mean? You can have an AAC-HE audio file and you can still play it in Quicktime, it'll just play the AAC-LC components. And it'll probably sound like crap.

Explaining why it sounds like crap requires me to go into some explanation about digital file formats. Lossy formats are encoded to a certain bitrate. In general, higher bitrate = higher quality. That's because the encoder can produce a bigger file, retaining more of the original audio data, meaning less compression. You might've seen it downloading music using Limewire. There's a column that says Bitrate, and it has numbers like 64, 128, 196, 256, and some others. 128 is standard. The default encoding quality in iTunes is 128kbps. If you've ever listened to 64kbps or 96kbps encoding, you'll most likely be able to tell a difference and agree: it sounds like crap.

So what does that mean about the LC component of an AAC-HE audio file? Yup. Low bitrate. Commonly encoded at 64kbps. Yes, it can go up to 96 or 128, and probably 160 (or down to 32 or 16), but that would defeat the purpose. But an AAC-HE audio file, when listened to in a player that supports the HE part (foobar2000, Nero's player, WMP with the right filters) it'll sound great. It's the HE part that makes that difference.

The HE part came about from new discoveries in digital music. Audio taken from a CD is sampled at 44100Hz (samples per second). That means that a number representing the audio is taken 44100 times per second. Due to the Nyquist theorem, that means the highest frequencies that can be held in it will reach 22050. That's convenient - the ear can only hear about that high anyways. And thats an ear in perfect condition - with ear damage over time that lowers to 18000. Thats one way MP3 and AAC compresses audio - gets rid of the highest frequencies. That gets rid of a good 18ish percent of all the audio data, and that goes a long way to compressing the audio.

A 64kbps audio file will push those limits and will seriously reduce the frequency, getting rid of most stuff above the half way mark - 11025. Half of the audio data. Surprisingly, even with all those frequencies gone, the audio can still be recognized. It'll even sound halfway decent! Think about it - the adult voice ranges between a frequency of 85 and 255 Hz (lower half for men, higher half for women). Children's voices don't get that much higher. So all the lyrics get preserved. And most instruments get preserved as well. The reason it won't sound as good is because a little bit overlaps into the higher frequencies, and that little bit makes a difference.

But it's only a little bit, so for LC encoding, they just get rid of that. However, it can be reasonably well reconstructed. That's the principle that AAC-HE is built off. Low frequencies will predict the higher frequencies, so they can be reconstructed from the audio data. (This concept is called Spectral Band Replication.) The small amount of extra data that HE saves is enough to make the reconstruction more precise. It's about 1 (yes, one) kbps. Maybe two. This extra data, when used to help recreate the higher frequencies, makes the LC audio sound as if it had twice the frequency. An M4A format encoded at 64kbps sounds like it was encoded at 128kbps even though it wasn't.

Wow. That's amazing. So why doesn't iTunes support that?

It takes a lot of processing time to restore data through Spectral Band Replication. Processing time the iPod doesn't have. If the iPod couldn't play back the audio real time, it would sound choppy, and listeners would get pissed. Not good.

Seems like a dead end. But as the standard gets better, and programmers keep optimizing the code, realtime playback on the iPod could be a real thing, and when that comes push for support for iTunes to include it. And if/when it does, don't let the 64kbps sounds terrible mentality fool you. It'll sound just fine.

For those of you who want to try out AAC-HE files, an alternative audio player called foobar2000 supports them. Anything that is based off a remotely recent version of FAAD (an open sourced AAC decoder) will playback AAC-HE. Don't try playing them in iTunes. All that'll play will be the 64kbps terrible sounding LC audio.

Selling Short on VSE

This post is for all of you that want to learn how to sell short on the virtual stock market game we have going, and also for those who want to understand it.

Basically, you want to sell a stock short. You do what you normally do when you want to buy a stock. Go to Make a Trade, enter the stock symbol, hit Go. Then enter how many stocks you want to buy. After that, you'll see a drop down box that defaults to "Buy". Click that, and select "Sell Short". Then make the trade.

Now I know what you're thinking. How the hell does selling something constitute buying it!? We'll get back to that in a second.

When you want to "sell" the stock, you do what you'd normally do to sell it. When you see the drop down box that defaults to "Sell", select that and instead choose "Buy To Cover". This essentially sells the stock, but instead of losing money by the stock going down, you make money (and visa-versa).

So how does this really work?

When you sell short a stock, you in reality are selling it. What really happens is you borrow the amount of stock from your brokerage firm, and then you sell it to someone for that price while reserving the right to buy it back whenever you feel. When the stock goes down, you buy it back, or as it's called "Buy To Cover", for the new market price, and then you give back the borrowed stock to your brokerage firm.

A few examples to help explain this. We'll assume no commission rate to make the calculations simple.

Stock A is worth $10. I sell short 10 stocks of it, making $100.
Stock A goes down to $9. I buy to cover, losing $90.
Net gain: $10.

Stock B is worth $10. I sell short 10 stocks of it, making $100.
Stock B goes up to $12. I buy to cover, losing $120.
Net loss: $20.


I know what you're thinking: why would I ever buy the stock back? Well, you have to, it's not even your stock to begin with. You just reserved the right to sell it, and if you lose that right to sell it, you can be forced to buy it back. So you have to, at some point, get the stock back.

There you go: Selling Short in a nutshell.

Song Remakes

I recently "obtained" a copy of every song from the top 500 songs as decided by Rolling Stone magazine. To my surprise, the song "Walk This Way" was on the list twice. Is it really that good? Yes, Aerosmith is an awesome band, but awesome enough to be in there twice? And if it's so good, why not stick it once somewhere higher?
Turns out one version was a cover done by Run Dmc with Aerosmith also singing some parts (the chorus). For some annoying reason, the cover (Ranked 287) was ranked higher than the original song (Ranked somewhere in the 300s contrary to my personal opinion). Why? If the cover was better, so much better than it can replace the original, why include the original at all?
The industry seems to have an obsession with remaking songs, and I don't have much of a problem with that. Some remakes are quite good. But a remake shouldn't be a band's claim to fame unless that's all they do. With Run DMC, that's not the case. If Run DMC's best song is a remake, what does it say about their music? They can't do much. Other bands that have good songs (and no, what the industry says is the best song this week isn't really the best song this week. It's advertisement bull.), some even hits that are awesome, can also have some pretty sweet covers. But they aren't known for it, and it's not all they do! I found about their covers because I found their original music was good.
The industry has this tendency to control so much about music. Is Plain White T's "Hey There Delilah" all that good? It has it's positive attributes. It's a bit depressing, it expresses feeling, and it tells a story. ish. But when I hear it on FM 93.1, realize I don't want to listen to it, switch to FM 94.7, and hear that same song, I ask myself: is this song that good? NO! No song is that amazing in the eyes of everyone that it deserves that much obscene playtime. Especially not this one.
The radio is biased as is. I know that if I say ska is awesome it's purely subjective opinion, but is it so bad in the public eye that it doesn't deserve to be heard? Or does the industry just have a problem with bands that don't want to be tied into a restrictive contract? Guess what guys: no one who really cares about music wants to be restricted this way. I legally download free indie music, and it's some of the best stuff around. Hell, I'm even listening to French Indie music. What does that say?
So where was I? Ah, yes. Song remakes. Yeah, some are good. Some are awesome. But none are defining. Get some original music then give me a call.