Placing Your Bets

What seems like ages ago in the late 90's I started building up my digital music collection and because of my close ties with Microsoft naturally I chose Windows Media Audio as the format I would support. Who knew?

Who knew that Microsoft would do such a piss-poor job of supporting digital technology? Who knew they'd see massive churn in their hardware expertise and completely screw-up their entrée into the music player market? Who knew they'd talk so freakin' long to make even token progress in car audio, phone audio, and personal devices? More's the sucker I.

Now I find myself with a library of more than 100,000 songs and the vast majority from online retailers who supported WMA. But I can't put the audio where I want it any more. I doesn't play well with my Nano, it won't play well in the car, it's a pain to work with on my phones. In short, I'm through suffering to support a format that has been so hideously mishandled.

So know I've been struggling with the easy way to convert ten thousand albums into MP3 format without losing the substantial investment I've made in ratings, album covers, categorization, and data clean-up. I'm notoriously picky about data, and my music collection is one of those places it shows the most. But seriously, convert 100K songs automatically with back-up and verification?

First off, I went a-hunting. I tried tool after tool, widget after widget, and spent some decent coin trying out even the more high-end utilities and packages. Generally speaking, they all are fine for the little guys, but when you are talking THOUSANDS of albums, they stop being useful.

So naturally, my engineering spirit erupted in full bloom and I've had to create several utilities to manage and control this process. Hundreds of hours later, I'm still not finished with the conversion process even though it is largely automatic with only a minimal set of smooth (to my mind) human verification steps.

The moral I learned from this adventure is to place your technology bets wisely. Had I given up after the first ASF debacle I would only have 40 or 50 gigabytes of music to manage instead of 600 GB of digital audio that needs to be handled with care.

Walking and Talking

This week finds me taking a break from my normal work to rub shoulders with others in my profession, speaking geek with a passion.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
-Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

One thing that becomes readily apparent whenever there are this many technobabblers in the same space is the difference between those who can talk the walk and those who can only walk the walk.

It is easy to overlook how wide the disparity between these two camps can grow.

Engineering Lies

My current "paying-the-bills"-strategy involves working with a company that is doing offshore development.  I've been burning the candle at both ends trying to keep this engagement running smoothly.  Shortly I will have to spend a significant amount of time overseas to handle this fiasco.

Kawasaki recently posted "The Top Ten Lies of Engineers".  It was humorous but definitely struck a chord with my situation.  Specifically #8:

We can do this faster, cheaper, and better with an offshore programming team in India.
Rank and file engineers usually don't tell this lie; it's the CTO who does. Somehow we've got it in our heads that every programmer in India is good, fast, and cheap, and every programmer in the United States is lousy, slow, and expensive. My theory is that for version 1.0 of  a product, the maximum allowable distance between the engineers and marketers is thirty feet.

Once again, funny and insightful all in one go.