Saturday, 10 March 2007

It seems that after having had a social security number for 12 months, and presumably 12 months worth of non-heinous financial activity, we're now on the pre-screened credit card offer bandwagon.

We're getting multiple offers from all sorts of credit card companies on a near-daily basis. Some are so insistent that they continue to send us offers after we've elected to take them up on them.

It certainly pays to read the fine print for the offers. Take today's gem (reformatted for clarity):

That $198 is what you get charged to your card in the first month, if you choose to get two cards, leaving you with a whopping $52 available credit.

I'm absolutely gobsmacked by how expensive this card is. There's also a pile of other fees for use, that I can't be bothered reproducing here. This isn't a credit card offer, it's an invitation to have your pocket gouged. It has a deceptively low interest rate of 9.9%, but it's quite obvious how that's compensated for.

No thanks, First PREMIER "Bank". From looking at your website, all you are is a credit card provider fee generator.

When I first moved to Canberra to work at Asia Online, I was staying at the Waldorf, and working in Braddon, so it was a really nice short skate to work. I think skating around after work in the summer time (with daylight saving) was one of the things that made Canberra really grow on me.

I managed to destroy the (fairly cheap) blades in an incident in Commonwealth Park, and then lashed out on a more expensive pair of Bauer skates, which I subsequently hated. The original pair were simple, had a good hard shell, and three ski-strap style buckles, so they provided pretty good ankle support. The Bauers, on the other hand, had to be bought in a women's size because apparently my feet were too small for the men's sizes, were lace up, and had two Velcro straps that went around the top of the laces.

I really made a terrible purchasing decision in getting them, because I found I could never get them tight enough around my ankles, and they were too tight around my toes, and were generally quite uncomfortable.

Anyway, fast forward something like seven years to today, and I've been meaning to try skating to work to see how long it took. This morning, Sarah felt like some Vegemite, and I've got two bottles at work, and we seem to have run out at home. Sarah proposed that we cycle into work to get one of the bottles, and I thought this would be the perfect time to try out the skates again with no time constraints.

So, I pulled them out, got to try out the new safety gear that I think Sarah got me for my birthday 2 years ago, and we headed off down the Stevens Creek trail.

Things started out okay (as they always tended to do) but by the time we got to the La Avenida exit from the trail, I was feeling like a quick break to give my feet a breather, and I realised that the back left wheel had pretty much shredded itself. Seems the wheels don't have a fantastic shelf life.

So Sarah cycled back home and got the car, and we aborted that adventure.

I think rather than persisting with a pair of skates that I totally hate, I'll replace the wheels and give them away to Good Will, and look at getting a new pair that suck less. I think after waiting six or seven years between pairs is long enough get over the few hundred I spent on this pair.

We're going to stay in San Francisco next Friday night after a party, so I think I'll go check out this store on Saturday. Hopefully I can make a better purchasing decision this time around.

Now that I've got MythStream working very nicely, it's reminded me of my other wish: to be able to play music from the iTunes library on Sarah's laptop through MythTV somehow.

This leads one to an excursion into the slightly documented Digital Audio Access Protocol.

Life seemed fairly good until iTunes 7.0 came out with a new version of the protocol, which seems to have broken the hell out of anything that isn't >= iTunes 7.0, which is a bit of a shame, since I only learned of DAAP at around this time, so I've never been able to experiment with using a third party DAAP client.

www.opendaap.org sounds all promising, but it's really just a bunch of links to projects that don't seem to have done much for years, or only implement the iTunes 4.0 version of the protocol, which is reasonably well documented. There's a few implementations of DAAP servers that will talk the pre-iTunes 7.0 version of the protocol (which I believe that iTunes 7.0+ will work with fine), but that's not what I want. All of our music is already in iTunes, and I believe DAAP doesn't give you write-access, so it's not like we could stick all of our music on Linux and play it through iTunes the other way, because we'd still be wanting to buy music from the iTunes Store, and it'd all get very messy.

So I'm trying to find out if anyone's doing any work on reverse-engineering DAAP 7.0. So far, my searching hasn't turned up anything interesting.

Update

A bit more searching turned up this, which suggests that even legitimate DAAP protocol licensees were caught with their pants down by this change, and so products like this one have a disclaimer about what versions of iTunes they'll work with.

Sad.