fling93 loves fishies

Cinequest Shorts Program 4: Animated World

If you’re in the San Jose area, hopefully you already realize that the Cinequest 15 Film Festival has started. I blogged a bit about it last year. As she did last year, Ealasaid has kindly devoted a humongous chunk of her time to create a time/location grid of the show times, which is always useful, and has her movie reviews up at her Cineblog

Anyway, I just watched Shorts Program 4: Animated World, and wow, that was an excellent collection of animated shorts. This was the first time I’ve watched the animated shorts (last year I just watched Mindbenders), so I can’t say how it compares with past years’ collections, but all I can say is that every single one of these was a gem. It plays again this Monday, March 7th, at Camera 12 at 7PM, and I highly recommend it.

Here’s a rundown of some of my reactions (and this time, I did not drag the wife along, as she had meetings all day). In my opinion, these were the best three:

I'm a troll!

I like to think of myself as being one of the more patient and reasonable people you’ll run into in the blogosphere, but I guess I was wrong. On a post by Oldman (a blogger I used to look up to) at The Blogging of the President (BOP), I wrote the following comment, which has now been deleted (thankfully, I am in the habit of writing comments and blog posts in an external editor):

Al: “…the…framework laid out by BOP is market crash, dollar crash, rich bastards on Wall Street steal our retirement money and the rest of us start hitting each other with sticks. … Are they based on deep understanding of how things work, or more of a superficial received knowledge base?”

My guess is groupthink. Similar opinions shared by a bunch of people (even intelligent and knowledgeable people) can tend to distort their perception of things, and they will act as less of a check on each other’s mistakes and inaccuracies because they still agree with the overall conclusion.

You’ll see this to some extent on all group blogs, but my impression is that it seems to be a bit more of an issue for this one. But on the upside, they have open comments and are obviously a lot more reactive to them than on most blogs. So I think the BOP readers (and writers) would be well served listening to the dissenting comments, as they serve a more important purpose on this blog than many others.

Note that first part is a quote of Al, a commenter who was in a heated debate with Oldman. I left the quote unitalicized to keep it exactly the way it was at BoP, which has HTML disabled in the comments. And this was my first comment in that thread.

Anyway, my comment is definitely quite critical of the blog, but I think it was an honest and fair assessment, and I still stand by it. Indeed, I think I presented it as constructively as you can, and it was definitely a much more charitable assessment than Al’s “superficial received knowledge base” and put a lot more delicately than other commenters who have sometimes accused BoP writers of “drinking the Kool-Aid,” which I don’t really agree with.

Well, the immediate response from Stirling Newberry indicates that I failed miserably:

The RoboDJ Weighted Shuffler for Winamp

Somebody noticed that I use the RoboDJ weighted shuffler plugin for Winamp. They also used it regularly but had lost it after a Windows reinstall. Since the robodj.org page is no longer up, they asked if I had a copy that I could send them. I responded that I did, but by that time they had found it online, albeit on a page that doesn’t turn up when you Google for it.

Since I have a somewhat decent Google PageRank for reasons that will forever be a mystery to me, let me see if I can rectify this matter by linking to Burnap’s excellent RoboDJ for Winamp plugin as many times as possible. Alas, he’s no longer maintaining RoboDJ, but he does have the source code available if anybody out there wants to take a crack at it. And of course you can still download and install RoboDJ.

Basically, RoboDJ is a weighted-shuffler plugin for the Winamp MP3 player for Windows. It’s ideal for those of you who don’t like building lots of playlists and prefer just to put your entire music collection on random shuffle. The weighted part means that if you assign a song a higher weight, RoboDJ will give it a higher probability of selection. Pretty handy for automatically listening your favorite songs and artists more often than the other songs that you have. And did I mention that it’s free (although donations are welcome)?

Yeah, I know the Mac crowd will say that iTunes already does this with the Party Shuffle, but for those of us who do our music listening at work and have to compile on our machines, the slim and trim Winamp is far preferable to iTunes. And I like that RoboDJ gives you finer control than iTunes’s four-star system, which doesn’t let you specify how much more often it plays a four-star song than a three-star song. To be sure RoboDJ’s user interface isn’t great, but it does the job. You can always change weights manually by editing a text file.

Anyway, even if you don’t weight any of your songs, RoboDJ is still indispensible because, let’s face it, the shuffle feature for most MP3 players sucks ass. Most of them are not very random at all, and some of them are just downright weird. For example, I’ve noticed that my Nomad Jukebox 3 will choose a lot of songs from artists alphabetically close to each other and then jump to somewhere else in the alphabet and stay there for a while, etc. This often results in several songs in a row of the same artist which I find quite annoying. RoboDJ’s shuffle algorithm is superior and doesn’t have that problem. Indeed, I’d even taken to creating randomized playlists with RoboDJ and loading them onto the Nomad (even though it kinda defeats the purpose of having your entire music collection on a portable player).

Anyhow, enough of my ramblings (I’d go on to talk about my other music listening habits, but then I might dilute the PageRank by linking to other sites). If you use Winamp, give RoboDJ a try!