I finally pulled my lazy finger out of an undisclosed orifice and contacted my old superannuation company to tell them I’d moved about, oh, 3 times since they last had my details. It turns out they are holding onto over 12 grand of my super, so I’ve asked for a rollover form to be sent out. I’ll roll the super from my last employer into the one fund, which gives me a total around the $20k mark. Now that I think about it, I probably should have done this three years ago.

Oh well.

Crumpet’s mum gave me some records to burn onto CDs for her as she doesn’t have a turntable anymore. I was apprehensive for several reasons:

• The albums are shite. “G’day Neighbour” - a Shirl’s Neighbourhood cash-in (”that’ll be worth something because he’s dead now,” she hopefully suggested to me), “Hey Diddle Diddle” (Play School songs), “Rolf Harris’ Greatest Hits”, the list goes on…
• The albums were eventually located, lying flat on their sides in a pile. Big no-no with vinyl and laserdiscs. They warp, you see.
• Most of the albums were missing their anti-static sleeves, with dirt, scratches, and in a couple of cases, the beginning of mould growing on them.

On the other hand, she said she’d pay me.

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Why is this man still allowed to speak?

Link.

Had a great night last night. The Crump and I trekked out to the Basin to spend time with the estimable Kymbo and Giz. Crump and Kym did some knitting or something, while Giz and I made noises, using the newly-operational Jeffrey Kennett.

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In keeping with the spirit of Report an Apple Bug Friday (it’s Saturday in Australia, but Friday in the US), I’ve just noticed that iTunes 5 ignores your preferences to remove old podcasts from your library automatically.

Paul,

Thank you for submitting this report. Apple values your time and input. While we cannot respond to every bug, please be assured that your report will be reviewed by the appropriate group.

Your tracking number for this issue is Bug ID# 4261927.

Signs are pointing towards an unrecoverable permanent change in the Arctic icecaps. Apparently we’re currently seeing the lowest amount of summer ice on record, and modelling suggests the Arctic circle will be entirely icefree during summer by 2070.

Rob says my amp works fine now, but I won’t be able to go pick it up until Thursday at the earliest. It doesn’t really matter as I managed to slice my finger open on the weekend and need a bit more healing time.

I bought my Hughes & Kettner guitar amp back in ‘94, maybe ‘95. It was in a small shop in Box Hill, in fact there was a huge stack of the same model amp being sold at a big discount. I guess the distributor was dropping the brand and cutting his losses or something. The amp sounded so great to me and my friend that we made up a stupid song about it on the way home. It was an enormous step up from the horrible Crate combo that I bought for $45 from Music Junction in Blackburn (and later sold for about $550, which is another story).

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Okay, this is really sweet. The latest version of iTunes has the ability to show lyrics for the current song, but no way to automatically download them from anywhere. I wasn’t too worried as I knew somebody would whip something together, and I wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t expecting to find something within a couple of days though!

Anyhow, the solution is Sing That iTune. It’s a widget, so Tiger is required. When iTunes is playing a song, bring up the Dashboard and within a second or so you should be looking at your song lyrics unless the song is very obscure. The widget will even automatically embed the lyrics into the MP3/AAC file itself if you wish.

A quick test succeeded with: Bonnie ‘Price’ Billy, Nirvana, Guided by Voices, the Sugarcubes, Tom Waits and R.E.M. It failed to find lyrics for a Simon and Garfunkel track and Frank Black and the Catholics. Not too bad. Looks like it’s using the searchlyrics.org database, so taking the time to add lyrics for songs the database doesn’t have helps everybody.

Something to keep in mind. I’m officially unemployed as of 5PM today. I’ll be shaving and hitting the agencies next week.