DOOD.CA: Guy Stuff

Yes, he is endorsing wine. The wine company is called “The Cool Wine”, which I suppose makes wine cool to drink, rather than something only stick-up-the-butt old folks drink. Its all a part of the new dont-wanna-grow-up culture that us 20 and 30 somethings are living in.

The wine is a mid-priced product, with US Street prices around $22.99 a bottle. Not really sure how it tastes, as its relatively new, and no one has really said anyhting about it. One thing is for certain though, the packaging is 100% Christian Audigier, and looks killer. Check it:

Is it a gimmick? Yes. Is it too much? Yes. Is it Cool? Not Really.

I love Christian Audigier’s designs, and I love the bottles, but this kind of Cross-Promotion just makes me gag. I’m not a wine-drinker, and these cool bottles won’t make me one. However, if I ever see it available in Canada, I would probably buy a couple bottles for decoration.

The website: http://www.thecoolwine.com

Nikkie Reed has been acting since 2003, when she co-wrote the script for the autobiographical movie “Thirteen” which is about the misadventures and other exploits of a small group of 13 year old girls. The movie was controversial and eventually led to her dropping out of public school and taking up home schooling.

She would have been 15 years old when she shot the movie, and younger when she wrote it. She also played a role in the movie Lords of Dogtown and has been subsequently cast in many small roles since. She has an upcoming movie called Twilight, which sounds interesting. Either way, she is very sexy, and absolutely gorgeous. Enjoy.

See Part Two.

In part 3 of this series of articles, I’m going to show you the process I used to create a Songbook using the files generated by the software we used in Part 2. Additionally you will need a Spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel, and a fairly sophisticated text editor such as Ultraedit. The Text Editor is useful for doing block editing that you will need to insert the song numbers back into the files. This isn’t really needed the first time you make songs, but if you are adding songs after your first batch, this may become useful – though there are ways around it. The Spreadsheet program (Microsoft Excel) is useful because it will allow you to order the songs in any way you would like: By artist, by song title, or by song number.

Parsing the Raw Text File
Once you’ve converted all the MP3+G files into MCG’s, there should be a text file that was created. It will share the same name as the folder that you that you created the files in. This will be your alphabetical song list. In your subfolder where the MCG files were created, there will be a Juke.txt file, which will give you the song numbers that you will need in order to create your songbook. These files need to be merged in order to create your song book.

You will need to grab the column of song numbers from the Juke.txt file using a block or column editing mode in your text editor, and insert it in the beginning of the text file generated by MP3+G Toolz. Now you will have all your songs in a list with the corresponding song numbers. After this, you need to use search/replace to try and insert commas between each of the three elements: Song Number, Song Name, and Artist Name. The only commas that should exist in this text file are the ones separating these elements on each line. Each line should look something like this:

“1234,Summer of 69,Bryan Adams”

Where:
1234 = The Song Number
Summer of 69 = The Song Name
Bryan Adams = The Artist

Creating and Organizing the Song Book
Once you have done all that, change the file extension on the text document to .CSV and open the file in Microsoft Excel. Changing the file extension to .CSV identifies the file as a Comma Separated Values file, and will allow Microsoft Excel to recognize it. Each of your elements should now be in their own column. You can use Excel to alphebetize or organize it however you like, and then print it to create your songbook.

Excel uses very simply column organizing commands that will let you order all the data based on any of the columns. You simply click on the column you with to organize by, and the select-all (CTRL-A) and the choose “order by” and the method you wish to order it by.

If you are adding additional songs you will also need to recreate your INX file so that your CAVS player can read the song list as well, and the process is somewhat more complicated, but still manageable so long as you have all the programs here.

In Part 4, I’ll start talking abou gear again. I’ll go over the Microphones and Mixers you can use.

Maybe it’s because I just moved back to Vancouver and am a bit naive about how some of these big parking corporations handle their business, but ImPark is an very dishonest company as far as how they list their parking rates. It’s deceiving and meant to get you busted for a parking ticket.

READ YOUR TICKETS CAREFULLY!!

I parked at 1400 W.10th and Granville, to have an early dinner at Joey’s restaurant on broadway. I park in this lot regularly because it’s easy to get a spot and at $6 for 2 hours the parking is relatively cheap. The evening rate after 6pm is only $6 for all night parking too.

I pulled in around 5:45pm, and paid for my parking. I figured I would get 2 hours of parking for my $6, since I had parked there before 6pm. Turns out, this is not the case. If you park there ANY time before 6pm, you will only be able to park until 6pm for $6! So if I were to pull up at 5:59pm, and pay for parking, my $6 would get me exactly 1 minute of parking. Now, if I had looked at my receipt, I would have realized that my ticket only covered me until 6pm, but I was more concerned with reading the sign.

When I got the parking ticket I was perplexed, and so I called ImPark over the phone. The wait time was not too ridiculous, only about 13 minutes to get an operator. Her name was Janelle(sp?). She had that typical attitude that all operators that deal with disputes have. They are sarcastic, and talk down to you because they have to in order to stay alive in that type of work. Does that make it right? Maybe, maybe not. All I know is I paid $6 to park in a lot IN GOOD FAITH, expecting to get 2 hours of parking, but I did not. I got 15 minutes instead.

Janelle went on to tell me that this is typical of all parking lots and if you push the time button again, you can get extended time into the after-hours parking. So I would have had to pay $12 to say past 6pm! Maybe I should have just sat in the car and waited til 6pm came.

She alternated between being pleasant and talking down to me like I was an idiot and that I should not be calling, however she did reduce my ticket down to $10, which means I paid $16 to park there. She said that a lot manager was the one that decided how the rates were charged in any particular lot. Impark doesn’t give a lot of ways to complain aside from phoning. They don’t really have a compaint line or anything for this sort of thing, but what will my call do? Nothing. They need to make money, even if it means deceiving people to make that few hundred extra every week per lot. I’m sure ImPark makes hundreds of thousands a year through this deceitful method of charging parking.

Janelle was okay, but definately jaded from dealing with assholes all day would likely didn’t even pay for parking and wanted to dispute. Anyway, I tried to be pleasant, she was not. Complaining to ImPark would be pointless, as I’m sure their system was designed this way to make them more money. The most I can do is hope that more people vandalize ImPark’s stuff and the parking manager loses his job in this economic recession. But even that would mean that parking prices would go up.

All in all, $10 taugh me a valuable lesson today. ImPark really are assholes, and don’t trust a word they say. Also, never park in ImPark again if you can help it. I’m sure they lost more than $10 business from me. Screw ’em.

As evidenced by the number posts on various Blackberry forums, RIM’s design of the new blackberry software has some glaring faults. The phone is built in with a Line 1 and Line 2 system so you can have two phone numbers attached to your account. They also made it really easy to switch between the two. So easy, in fact, that most users that don’t have a Line 2 accidently switch it to line 2 while the phone is in their pockets, making their phone essentially disconnect from the network and act as if it is off. Incoming phone calls and email are disabled, and you can’t even dial out!

This is a huge problem for me as it tends to happen about twice a day! I can’t receive calls when this happens and it drives me nuts. They really need to make a feature that allows you to disable the Line 2 because it makes the phone useless 50% of my day if this happens.

RIM, Fix this problem! If you want us to use this Phone as a business device instead of an iPhone!