There don’t seem to be any updated pages today, so there might not be a “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/. On the other hand, I tinkered a little with the “daily entries”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/002769.html and “monthly archives”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/Archives/2004_04.html. The monthly archives use a nice calendar from “Dive Into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/06/fullscreen_calendars_in_movable_type.
I also reduced the sidebars on the individual entries here. This halved the size of the average page, and took about 17MB off my footprint. Since this site will be privately hosted soon, I’ve had to start doing things like this to minimise page size.
On a similar topic, the Rochester blog has moved into a new Movable Type home “here”:http://cif.rochester.edu/~philgrad/.
I don’t know how many votes have been submitted in the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm, because I get the votes by email, and Brown email is down again. (Or it was down again a few hours ago and email is still banked up in the system.) Either they ran out of gaffer tape over at CIS, or the computer system got so old that even gaffer tape won’t hold it together. The people in computer services at Brown do an incredible job, but it would be much nicer if we just had a better server rather than relying on miracle workers to work miracles all the time.
Don’t let that stop you voting in the “journals survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm. The votes will come through eventually.
There’s some iPod geekiness in the extended entry which is probably of very little interest to those of you without iPod’s, so I’ve left it off the main page.
I was rather pleased with the following little trick, though it was kind of obvious once I’d done it. My iPod is a little cluttered with various compilation albums, samplers, soundtracks and the like that have songs by a lot of different artists on them. That made browsing through the artists a pain, because I had to scroll past six different artists who have one song each on such discs to get to artists I might actually care to select.
What I wanted was a menu that only listed artists for which I have whole albums on the iPod. This should be an automatic selection, but I figured out how to reverse engineer it. First, remove all ‘composer’ information from all tracks. (Since I don’t have any classical music on the iPod, I wasn’t using this anyway.) Second, make the artist the composer for all songs on each album by a single artist. Third, add the ‘composers’ list to the main menu. _Voila_, a usable artists list. Unfortunately it won’t update automatically, but I think I can live with that.
While on iPod geekiness, I think it’s fun that the iPod tells you how many times you’ve listened to various songs. Well, strictly speaking it can’t tell you that. It can tell you how many times it has played various songs, but that includes times the iPod has automatically turned itself on because you left it on alarm mode, and it kept playing away until the batteries died. So there’s a margin of error in the info. Having said that, here are the ten most played songs on my iPod (since I accidentally erased everything on it last December).
Good Mornin’ – You Am I
California – Mason Jennings
Piazza, New York Catcher – Belle & Sebastian
From St. Kilda To King’s Cross – Paul Kelly
Dirty Eyes (Sex Don’t Sell) – The Raveonettes
So Says I – The Shins
If We Can’t Get It Together – You Am I
California – Josh Ritter
Step Into My Office, Baby – Belle & Sebastian
Just Like Honey – The Jesus & Mary Chain
I’m a little disappointed in retrospect there aren’t more Australian songs on the list, but that will quite likely change since I bought “The Panics”:http://thepanics.com.au/home.html CD which is currently on fairly high rotation on the iPod. </iPodGeekiness>