And, as always, life continues miscellaneous

Egypt miscellany, part 1: Michael Atherton's Ankh: The Sound of Ancient Egypt arrived today. This is an attempt to reconstruct Egyptian music and instruments; it's about 10% Egyptian archaeology, 10% comparison with things that are better known in other archaeological records, and 80% complete guesswork. It's also pretty cool.

Egypt miscellany, part 2: Someone over in kemet posted some links to various hieroglyphic fonts, which I have cheerfully installed on my machine. Wheeee! I can type M and get an owl! (Those of us who are easily amused have more fun.)

Parcel miscellany: autumnesquirrel, your box arrived, and will get opened when I can find something to get through the tape other than explosives. ;)

College miscellany: Have written a note to Boston University admissions. Now, I don't do phone calls in part because I freeze up massively in a stage-fright sort of way when trying to; it's not often I get the same problem with email. It did, however, lead to some amusing conversation with the gang:

I say "Argh. How do I start this thing?"
Tesla (oneironaut) says "You pull the cord?"
Whitney (me) breaks into a million tiny pieces.
Eastman (annwyd) says "Whoops."
Eastman sweeps them up into a hopefully Whitney-sized pile.
Tesla says "It's always the completely offhand comments that you seem to find funniest."
I say "Think of that as very carefully and delicately smacking the overtaut mass of stress with a hammer. SPANG!"
Eastman, as opposed to being an overtaut mass of stress, is an out-of-tune harp constructed of styrofoam and rubber bands, with every rubber band vibrating frantically.
Whitney tries to come up with a way of plucking Eastman that isn't obscene.
Lavoisier (erispope) says "With tweezers?"

Also, thanks to oneironaut and tiassa for helping me tweak the letter for maximum usefulness.

I don't think I'm going to get work done today, but I'll keep trying. And going, "Agh! Talking to strange humans! Agh! Agh!" even though I've sent that email.

Addendum:

Whitney gets an autoresponse from BU.
Tiassa says "Thank you for writing BU. Your email is very important to us. Please hold."
I say "Basically, yeah."

Discordian Programming Techniques

So teinedreugan got me an MP3 player for my birthday, which I haven't gotten around to setting up despite wanting to have it set up before I go to Cali.

Then thastygliax mentions he'd like to have a listen to the Egyptian reconstructed music disc I posted about yesterday. So I say, "Hm, I ripped that to MP3, I'm going away soon, he may be at games night, I'll get the MP3 widget thing set up and bring it and be efficient about all this." Hooray for motivation to get up off the ass.

So I spent a half hour attempting to extract the thing from its packaging, only to have it all fall out suddenly in a shower of little bits into my lap, much to the amusement of Arthur, who I managed to persuade not to attack any of it. (Sigh.)

And then I downloaded stuff into the thing, and discovered that it had no generic library playlist, and getting it to just play the library is a pain in the tail. Setting up an 'add everything to this playlist' habit when I rip new stuff just isn't going to work, and so I was trying to figure out how to get a smart playlist (automatically updating) that would include my entire library.

I have one now.

It consists of everything except music put out by any artist called Fnord.

Hail Eris. :)