Darkoshi

Anyone else really dislike the sound of auto-tune? It seems like so many songs nowadays (and in the past however many years) have this sound, where it switches back and forth like a tremolo between a voice and an electronic version of the voice. That grates on my nerves*.

Yet I watched a few videos now comparing some artists singing, with and without autotune. Surprisingly, they didn't sound much different to me. In some cases the singer was made a high-pitched tremolo with their voice even without the autotune, so I guess I just don't like those songs period. In some cases, the autotune didn't bother me, and I couldn't easily say whether I prefer the songs with or without autotune. So I guess it depends on how the autotune effect is done, as well as the song in the first place.

*I'm not sure why. I've always loved the electronic voices of the cylons from the original Battlestar Galactica TV series, and similar voice effects in 80s songs (electro funk? not sure of the genre name). I guess none of them did that switching back-and-forth effect like they do nowadays.

But anyway, I came across this which is pretty neat in spite of also having that sound that grates on my nerves:
Auto-tuned Baby Cry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMNCNyn_s7E

While the user is typing a detailed message in your website's "Contact Us" form, pop up a message that they will be logged out in 2 minutes unless they click a button to stay logged in. When the user clicks the button, navigate them to another page, causing them to lose the entire message they had been writing.

If the user clicks their browser's Back button, show them a brief tantalizing glimpse of the prior page with their message still intact on it, but then immediately switch back to the other page again. Each time the user presses the Back button, switch back to the other page even faster, to make sure that they don't have enough time to select and copy the text of their message.

Just logged on to 23andme.com for the first time in months, to see if there are any updates. Got distracted into answering a bunch of the "quick questions". One of them is:

"Does the sound of other people chewing fill you with rage?"

My company is working with another company to get one of their large COBOL applications translated into java. The other company doesn't think that including white-space in the code for legibility is important. Apparently the people on my side don't think it's that important either, as we surely could have requested it be done anyway, and how difficult could it be to add spaces and line-breaks?

So a lot of the translated code that we're getting looks like this:
( cut due to width )
This peeves me.

A lot of our programmers are new to Java. So when they start working on the code and updating it, they will likely mimic the above formatting, possibly not even realizing that it's possible or preferable to put in whitespace and linebreaks.

ffs. I'm feeling as irritable and easily-angered right now as I was last year (was it a whole year ago?) when I was taking those generic Wellbutrin pills.

Not only do I have to do my own job, I have to scan in files for my mother, and have to give her instructions on how to insert jpg files into a Word document in order to save them in PDF format, but then she doesn't catch on fast enough and the VPN is too slow so I can't see her screen anymore, so I end up telling her it'll be faster to do it myself and send her the files. Except that my Word doesn't have PDF as one of the save options, so I have to send her the Word files for her to open and do a Save-as on.

One and a half fucking hours that I should have been working on my own fucking job, not hers.

Links on LiveJournal pages weren't working for me anymore, unless I right-clicked to open them in a new window. It was due to new script that LJ had added, that runs when you click on links. I'm not particularly against LJ making some extra money by adding affiliate info to links which don't already have them.

But I use NoScript to block javascript by default, and the annoying thing was that the site that I needed to unblock for the links to work, wasn't showing up in the list that NoScript provides on each page, for you to choose which sites to allow. Or at least it didn't show up on the pages I was on to begin with.. So even though I temporarily allowed all sites that were listed, the links still didn't work. Once I navigated to the LJ Homepage or somewhere, then I found a different entry in the list, and tested that allowing that site made the links work again. In the middle of this process, my laptop crashed, and gave me an even dimmer view of the link-jacking. So then I was annoyed enough that I chose to turn off the functionality as described in the above-linked page.

I just tried doing something on Win7, and it has the same infuriating inexplicable behavior as Vista.

I had downloaded a zip file to a shared (read-only) folder on my XP machine. I connected the Win7 machine to the shared folder, and tried to unzip the file to a local folder. I got the message "Access to the compressed (zipped) folder is denied. Before you can extract files, you must change the permissions for this compressed (zipped) folder." When I open the Properties window for the file, the Security tab says "You do not have permission to view or edit this object's permission settings."

I am able to unzip the file fine on the XP machine, but not from the Win7 machine.

So then, on the Win7 machine, I tried copying the file from the shared folder to a local folder. I am able to copy other files from that folder, but not this one. This one gives an error: "You do not have permission to perform this action. You require permission from the computer's administrator to make changes to this folder". If I try copying it from a command prompt, I get "Access is denied". The computer only has one user set up on it, and the user has administrator privileges.

I am able to download the same zip file from the internet to the Win7 machine, and am able to unzip that version fine. So it seems that any file I downloaded to the XP machine (I'm assuming that is what is "special" about the files that give me errors), I am not able to copy directly over to a Vista or Win7 machine.
HOWEVER, if on the XP machine, I move or copy the downloaded zip file to another folder (such as a subfolder of the shared folder), then on the Win7 machine I can view the file's Property - Settings tab, and I **AM** able to copy it directly from that XP folder to the Win7 machine without even having changed any permission settings.

So basically, if I want to copy all my files from my XP machine to a Vista or Win7 machine, I'll have to first copy them to some intermediate location.

Tests of different file types:
Downloaded a different zip file to XP machine; am NOT able to copy it directly from Win7 machine.
Downloaded a jpg file to XP machine; was able to copy it directly from Win7 machine.
Saved internet HTML files (with and without Java) to XP machine (File - Save); was able to copy them directly from Win7 machine.
Downloaded HTML pages (with and without Java) to XP machine (right-click link, Save Link As...); am NOT able to copy them directly to Win7 machine.
Renamed downloaded HTML page on XP machine; still am NOT able to copy it directly to Win7 machine.
Downloaded a .doc file to XP machine; was able to copy it directly from Win7 machine.
Downloaded a .rtf file to XP machine; was able to copy it directly from Win7 machine.
(But on the Vista machine, there had been an RTF file I WASN'T able to copy... there is one RTF file on the XP machine which I'm not able to copy over, but I am able to copy over other downloaded RTF files... so maybe there are other things that factor into the problem, not just that a file has been downloaded.)

Created a shared read-write folder on the Win7 machine and tried connecting to it from the XP machine.... wasn't able to. Even though I turned on Public Folder sharing on the Win7 machine, and gave Everyone read-write access to the shared folder, it still doesn't let me connect to the shared folder from the XP machine without a userid/password. Setting up userids and passwords might work, but it would defeat the purpose of what I was going to test.

Ow. Apparently, screaming at full force gives me a headache.

one thing i just can't stand is baby-noises in songs. it totally gets on my nerve. and it doesn't sound good, so why do they do it?

at work today, i think i saw a guy wearing an earring. he walked by too fast for me to be totally certain. but, cool.
i don't remember having seen any earring-wearing guys at work before. and i even know this guy slightly, though i didn't recall his name till several hours later.

and we had a little work-celebration today too - got to watch a movie. Finding Nemo. So now I've seen it. I even figured out on my own that it was Ellen DeGeneres doing the voice of that one fish... After realizing that, the fish even seemed to look a lot like her. How an animated fish can have such a resemblance to a real human person is rather amazing.
And it's curious how much of an effect someone's voice can have on how you perceive their personality. do people's voices reflect their personalities that much? does my voice reflect my personality?
or can one get misimpressions from basing one's perception of a person on their voice... their speech, their manner... hmm.

i'm going to get a cell-phone. yep, much easier than the other idea currently on my list of things to do. and my mom thinks its a wonderful idea, since she'll be able to use the phone while i'm on the internet.

and Taboo's closing on Feb 8. which is too soon for me and still too wintry so i won't get to see it. sigh. too bad. but i've got other things to do than go all the way to NYC just to watch something interesting yet not emotionally impacting... but, boy george... yeah, well. but. it's just a show.