Just received a large order from AsianMunchies.com. This is not a porn site.

No, the box contained a large stash of Tomato Pretz, Salad Pretz, Vegetable Curry Pretz, and Pocky G, flavors I can’t find at my local Albertson’s or nearby asian groceries.

I’m particularly fond of Tomato Pretz, and if I’d known how much I was going to like them, I’d have bought a lot more when I wandered into Uwajimaya in Seattle.

Great stuff, and unless you’re one of those Carb-Fearing Atkins Disciples, you’ll find that most flavors are quite compatible with a losing-or-at-least-not-gaining lifestyle.

Somehow this garbage made it past Mail.app’s generally quite effective spam filters. Once. Email addresses and paypal payment information deleted to avoid inadvertently helping this fraud (I forwarded it to Paypal first, of course…).

It’s an amusing, imaginary, tale of woe, combining equal parts bad parenting, bad storytelling, and bad English. And why does a poor father in Chile have an email address at a Russian ISP, anyway?

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Back in October, I participated in a phone survey about proposed legislation to expand gambling in California. I rather liked the structure of the survey, and made a mental note to keep an eye out for the results.

I’m guessing the results didn’t match the expectations of the group who commissioned it, because this recent news story not only fails to mention a survey, it leaves out several of the facts that were presented to me in the questions.

It doesn’t mention that the Indian Gaming Association’s arguments against allowing card parlors to install slot machines included “Larry Flynt and other pornographers will profit from this” (how? They didn’t say). It doesn’t mention the ban on opening new card parlors, a “more for me and none for thee” trick from the sponsors.

The indian casinos are right about one thing: if slot addicts can get their fix in San Jose, they won’t drive the “two hours” to Jackson Rancheria. Of course, if Jackson’s billboards mentioned the fact that alcohol is prohibited on the premises, nobody would drive there anyway.

First off, the iLife ’04 installer does not ask if you want icons for all five apps added to your Dock, it just puts them there.

Second, when you launch GarageBand for the first time (or, at least, when I do), it pops up a dialog box saying:

Can not find /Users/jgreely/Music/GarageBand
Please make sure this directory exists

Why won’t it just create it for me, or find it after I create it? Because GarageBand can’t follow aliases. iTunes is happiest if your iTunes library remains in ~/Music (although that bug might be fixed finally), but I wanted to strip down my home directory for backing up onto DVD and investigating FileVault. So I made ~/Music an alias to /Users/Shared/Music. iTunes is perfectly happy with this, although .Mac Backup is not. Add GarageBand to the list of Apple-supplied applications that are incompatible with Apple OS features.

Third, only one project can be open at a time. This would be fine, given the memory requirements, if it weren’t for the fact that the program exits when you close that project. Just as bad, it insists on opening the last active project at startup, so if you want to start a new one, you have to sit through the overhead of loading the old one, and then remember to use “New” in the menus before closing it. Blech.

Workaround: clear the “Open Recent” menu. On the next launch, you’ll get the Open/Create dialog again.

Fourth, faux wood grain and “dark brushed metal” looks silly.

Update: the overhead of loading a project is non-trivial. I created a simple 32-measure “song” with four loops, and loading it at startup added fifteen seconds to the application’s launch time (1.25GHz PowerBook G4, 1GB RAM). Oddly enough, the far more complicated demo song “Reflection” that’s included in the package added only eleven seconds.

Update: changing the length of a song does not trigger a “do you want to save?” dialog box. I thought that was interesting, especially since it’s ridiculously difficult to drag the end-of-song slider around. As far as I can tell, it has a selection area that covers approximately 3 pixels, and if you miss them, you move the playhead instead. Hello? UI designers? Make the damn triangle bigger!

Other than that, I’m having fun mixing loops and discovering just how much (or, more precisely, how little) I retain from the piano lessons I took 24 years ago. On that note, I’m glad I didn’t order one of the USB keyboards that Apple is pitching as a companion to GB. I got to try one out at an Apple Store, and while it’s a decent enough gadget that fits nicely on a desk, I grew up with an honest-to-gosh piano in the house — a spinet grand — and cheap plastic keys just feel wrong.

Then I spotted this Roland FP-5 with a USB interface…

It will be a while before I recover any kind of skill at playing, so for now I’m amusing myself with loops. Since all the other kids are doing it, here‘s a highly-repetitive background track I knocked together out of the included percussion loops. I used all the default settings for a new “song,” so it’s 6:40 long (at the default tempo, the shortest possible song is 1:02).

Mind you, it loops every four seconds, but both iTunes and my iPod insert a short delay when they loop back around, so the long version minimizes the breaks in the sound. If you don’t really feel like downloading 6 megabytes of, well, crap, here’s the 1MB version.

If you have GarageBand and Jam Pack, the really short version is “drag these loops into the timeline and tweak their volume and balance knobs”:

• Conga Groove 01
• Conga Groove 11
• Djembe 01
• Indian Tabla 01
• Motown Drummer 24
• Tambourine 01
• Shaker 11
• World Bongo 04
• World Maraca 03
• World Triangle 01

Latest Apple press release: “With Apple Loops support, future versions of Logic Pro will easily import projects from GarageBand.”

That wipes out about half a dozen common complaints about GarageBand.

I have a mortgage with CitiBank. I have a home equity loan with CitiBank. I have a Platinum MasterCard with CitiBank. Apparently, this isn’t good enough for them.

Today’s mail contained pre-approved offers for a Citi Platinum Select MasterCard, a Citi Dividend Platinum Select MasterCard, and a Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards MasterCard.

Would it surprise you to learn that the basic Platinum Select has the best interest rate of the three?

But those are just amusing. The real excitement in today’s mail was the postcard announcing my selection as an honest-to-gosh Nielsen Family. I have arrived.

Sadly, I don’t think their logbook has a space for “watched six anime DVDs and a full season of Babylon 5 over the weekend”.

Please stop doing this.

A remake of Walking Tall, starring The Rock. Kill me now.

My pictures site gets about 28,000 page requests per day (way down from the days when my bandwidth was unlimited). 87% comes from Windows and 5% comes from Mac users, which sounds about right. Less than half of one percent comes from Linux users, which narrowly beats out the “known robots” column, but loses by a factor of two to Windows 95. This also sounds about right.

WebTV comes in at just under half the size of Linux, which is a surprising showing for a product that only has about 650,000 subscribers left.

Windows XP beats out other flavors, but it’s still used by only 54% of my Windows-based viewers. 98, 2000, and ME get 22%, 15%, and 7% respectively.

One page-hit a day comes from someone claiming to run Windows 3.1. I disbelieve.