Leave your Sharpies and 8x10 glossies at home, trekkies, because The Royal Shakespeare Company just released a statement regarding the production of "Hamlet" starring "Star Trek: The Next Generation’s" Patrick Stewart and "Doctor Who’s" David Tennant today, stating that fans will not be allowed to bring any Dr. Who or Star Trek memorabilia to be autographed.

"Due to the huge amount of interest in the RSC’s current production of Hamlet, only Royal Shakespeare Company or production related memorabilia will be signed by members of the company. It is very flattering that there is so much interest in this production, but the sheer volume of requests means that we need to set some limits which will be as fair as possible for everyone. We apologize if this causes any disappointment."

This news will no doubt break the hearts of trekkies and "Doctor Who" fans making it out to this year's performance of "Hamlet," but let's examine the facts. There is a time and a place to dress in your finest Starfleet uniforms; classical theater is not that time. I’m sure the performers would prefer fans to go and appreciate their new roles and enjoy Shakespeare, rather than just be there to see a character they’ve played in the past.

On the flip side, I am not entirely sure that RSC handled the heartbreak in the classiest of manners.

It is one thing to ban autograph requests entirely for logistical reasons. The same as it makes sense to limit autograph requests to 1 per person. Or if the actors themselves choose not to sign the memorabilia for whatever reason.

But the facts are, there's no real difference between autographing a play brochure or signing a Star Trek TNG Picard as Locutus action figure, so the statement is more insulting than it ever should have been. How about you just say you want to keep the focus on actors and get your action figures signed at San Diego's Comic-Con?

-- Christie St. Martin of Funny Pages 2.0

Photo Credits: "Doctor Who," BBC; "Star Trek: Enterprise," CBS Studios Inc.

Here's the best method I found so far. It involves a couple of programs, the process is kinda tedious, but since iTunes insists on being a piece of sh...

Tags:

The best tagger that I've found is Musicbrainz Picard. It tags and fixes file automatically by either scanning the metadata and tries to find the metadata in its databases with the closes match, or it scans the content of the file and tries to find a set of metadata with a similar content signature. I think. It's easy to use and finds almost all the right metadata.

As a sidenote, metadata lookup fails more often than scanning, and the metadata is not consistent with that of the Amazon. There are minor variations. For excample, in the Picard database the individual artists' names would come up for High School Musical, where as in the Amazon database, it only comes up as "various artists".

This might be a problem is you use Picard in conjunction with a program that searches the Amazon database, such a MediaMonkey. I used MediaMonkey to get the album art before I didn't notice is that if the metadata does not match the Amazon metadata, MediaMonkey changes it along with downloading the album art, problem is that the Amazon databases had less information and craps up the metadata.

Loading Album Art:

As I mentioned above, you can use MediaMonkey to to fix the album art and tags, but it doesn't do this very well, and the album art search occasionally comes up empty or searches for the wrong terms.

A better alternative that I found was Album Art Downloader. You have to install the Microsoft .NET framework if you don't have it, the program runs on that. This program requires you to search manually for the album art by typing in the name of the artist and the album, which isn't too bad, since the searches always turn up album art. Album Art Downloader searches databases of various album art websites, Google Images and Amazon among them, so you'll get a wide choice. Album art around 300x300 can be found for album released in the last few years, older albums tend to have smaller album art. Getting album art will take a while if you have heaps of singles.

Also check the comments field in your metadata, people tend to leave website URLs and stuff like "enjoy" in there. I have no idea why people do that, and would like to give people who do that a sincere "screw you" for wasting my time by making me delete all the useless comments.

"Die EU-Kommission wird das Unterstützungsnetzwerk für Innovation und das Enterprise Network nutzen, um sicherzustellen das die gemeinschaftlichen politischen Aufgaben und Initiativen der Gemeinschaft den Bedürfnissen der kleinen und mittleren Unternhemen entsprechen und keinen bürokratischen Aufwand verursachen, der ihr Innovationspotential beeiträchtigen könnte."

Hört sich langweilig und nach doofem EU-Bla an?
Ist es ja auch.

Trotzdem hört man gerne zu, wenn Willem Noe, dem Vertreter der EU-Kommission in Berlin, sowas sagt.

Warum? Weil er sich, wenn man die Augen schliesst oder woanders hinguckt, so anhört wie James Patrick Stewart bzw. Captain Picard aus "Next Generation".
Von Weitem sieht er auch ein wenig so aus. Wenn man die Augen aufhat und nicht woandes hinguckt.

Im bilateralen Gespräch hört man dann einen schwachen niederländischen Akzent raus.

Und jetzt stellen wir uns alle Picard auf der Brücke der Enterprise vor wie er sagt:

"Maken Sie es sö. Seyen Sie Innövatif! Es geyht um Gemeynschaftöufgaben!"

Aye, Captain!

This blog is so boring compared to that one, hahaha.. I guess it's because that's what I have to do to FUND MY DOG'S EXPENSIVE TREATS. And my clothes and shoes and bags. And my parents miscellaneous bills. And my Viagra. Man, life is all about $$$ sometimes. It's ridiculous! It's never-ending!

I wonder what it'll be like to be in this Star Trek-like utopia, where we've reached a point in civilization so advanced that money will no longer be the currency of economy. In Star Trek, they have like matter replicators so you will always have your basic needs like food and clothes. I'm assuming they have found renewable or unlimited sources of energy to power up the world's living needs and more, like technological advances. So with those sort of resources on hand, everyone on Earth will be well provided for. No poverty, suffering, pollution (because you no longer have to burn fossil fuels, and people are sufficiently smart and evolved enough to know not to smoke) and whatever crap we have now in the 21st century. Man, with all these improvements... money would be the last concern on anyone's mind.

 Em yea, and Picard rocks my world.

iTunes makes this a massive pain in the ass. As in, fucking yourself up the ass with a spiked pike painful.

There's no option to get iTunes to auto-tag your music, well actually I don't know, but you definitely need an iTunes account to get the album art working. I assume the function tags You'll also need a credit card because to get a iTunes account you need to provide credit card details. Faking the credit card number is hard, trust me, and probably illegal too.

I googled "itunes tagging utility" and the best link I found was to a Lifehacker post, The 23 Best iTunes Add-ons.

Whilst the list had some useful utilities. The only one relevant to me and runs on a PC was moreTunes. Which turned out to be completely useless, it couldn't find any of the artists I was playing. This isn't to say I have eccentric tastes in music, but that either the amazon database for music tags was down, which it wasn't, or that moreTunes is crappy software.

In the end, I downloaded a media player called MediaMonkey and copied music library over to it manually and tried to tagged it from the internet that way. The problem is, the amazon search won't come up with anything unless the Album name is right, and yes, heaps of my songs had missing album names. The only solution to the problem I found was to search for the name of the song in the iTunes Store and the manually edit the ID3 tags of the songs to include the album name and ithens earch for the rest of the tags on amazon from MediaMonkey.

Slightly more efficient than looking the tags up in Wikipedia and enter it manually.

SCREW YOU APPLE. HOW HARD IS IT TO MAKE ITUNES AUTOTAG MY DAMN MUSIC.

</rant>

Update: MusicBrainz Picard is an excellent tagger, although it doesn't download the album art for you, might have to use some other program for that.

In diesem Sinne kommt hier hin und wieder eine Gedächtnisstütze für die großen Momente der Menschheitsgeschichte; die Dinge, die Kultstatus erreicht haben und mit jedem Anschauen größer zu werden scheinen.

Den Anfang macht "SiW - Sinnlos im Weltraum", ein Meilenstein, und die erste Neusynchronisation, die größeren Bekanntheitsstatus erreicht hat. Mit legendären Sprüchen „Ich hab' mir neulich 'n Pfund Butter im Aldi für 2,95 Mark gekauft, und ich war begeistert, es hat so gut geschmeckt!“ und neuen Erkenntnissen und Offenbarungen hat es schon vor der Jahrtausendwende Kultstatus entwickelt.

Hier ein besonders wahrer Ausschnitt

I used Windows Media Player to rip the, roughly, 5,700 tracks from CD to mp3 format. Media Player makes a great attempt to tag the mp3 files correctly but for an irritatingly large number of tracks the information is either incorrect or inconsistent. This is where MusicBrainz comes to the rescue. Specifically, MusicBrainz Picard, their free and open source, cross-platform music file tagger.

Picard uses the MusicBrainz database to correctly and consistently tag mp3, wav, vorbis, flac, mpc, mp4 and wma format files. If asked to identify a music CD it will recognise the artist and release based on an analysis of the content of the CD which it uses to construct a unique disc-id which can be compared to known disc-ids in the MusicBrains database (at the time of writing there are approximately 228,000 such known disc-ids). Alternatively, Picard can recognise individual music files by a form of audio fingerprinting and makes a special effort to associate clusters of music files with a particular release or album. If neither of these techniques succeed the GUI allows manual associations to be made with the correct titles from the database.

Once associations have been made, Picard displays the tag information currently stored in the music file alongside the suggested information (from the MusicBrainz database) together with an indication of closeness of fit and allows (selective) correcting of the tags in the music file. Plugins to Picard allow you to pull down cover art of incorporate genre information from Last.fm but I haven't tried either of these.

Reading Ian Dixon and Ed Bott's postings on how they organise their music collections made me realise just how many different ways there are to achieve the same outcome. Where I think the MusicBrainz tools score is in the quality of the database that sits behind them.

As hard as may be to believe, a lot of technically savvy people have never really applied their intellect to learning about finance and financial matters. Here is a list of some important financial rules, in terms techies should understand.

1. The short term stock market is like Kirk, while the long term stock market is like Picard.

2. Buying things on credit is like writing code without requirements or specs: try never to do it, only do it when absolutely necessary, and expect ramifications.

3. Know your own personal net worth like you know your computer’s RAM and proc speed. Which can you rattle off faster?

4. “Burn Rate” is a better term for rocket fuel than companies. If you want to know how well your company is doing, or if you should take that job and the new up-and-coming firm, look at the income, assets and cash flow (if you can). Not to say that taking a startup job won’t pay dividends, but quoting “burn rate” to indicate success is like saying that Spider-Man was able to climb tall buildings because he lived in New York.

5. If your machine crashed, chances are pretty good you already have a backup plan in place to get back up and running without a lot of pain. Do the same for your finances.

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Quelques petits extraits :

"Picasso pouvait se permettre sa trop fameuse boutade "je ne cherche pas, je trouve", dans la mesure où il accordait assez d'esprit à ses interlocuteurs pour qu'ils ne la prennent pas au pied de la lettre. Mais ce trait a été popularisé par des journalistes qui l'ont débité en petite monnaie auprès d'artistes impatients. La vérité, c'est qu'un artiste digne de ce nom ne trouve jamais, car un tel aboutissement sonnerait le glas de sa vocation. Un scientifique trouve ; pas un peintre, pas un cinéaste, pas un compositeur, pas un écrivain... Ceux-ci ne donnent que des oeuvres inférieures à l'intensité du désir qu'ils y ont investi"

"Célèbre ou inconnu, l'artiste justifie son existence par son oeuvre. C'est elle qui relativise la fatalité dernière de sa disparition. L'artiste espère mourir d'une mort moins absolue que la mort qui aurait été la sienne s'il n'avait pas été artiste. Illusion ? Évidemment, mais comme l'est toute idée humaine de la mort, ni plus ni moins."

"Ne pas se laisser piéger par l'impératif "sois de ton temps !" ne signifie pas ne pas être de son temps. C'est refuser de s'y laisser contraindre, et surtout de s'y contraindre soi-même par peur d'y manquer."

"Combien de fois me suis-je entendu reprocher de préférer lire dans mon coin au lieu de participer à telle activité collective. C'est autant de fois où je me suis retenu de demander si l'activité que l'on me proposait était plus intéressante que, disons, les aventures hallucinées de Moravagine ou les amours itinérants de Humbert Humbert. Connaissant la réponse, neuf fois sur dix je me suis replongé dans mon livre."

Voilà, tout le monde devrait lire Georges Picard, tout simplement !

The figures that impressed me so much in my childhood are dead, and their motives seem blurry in today's chaos. So, after years of dissapointment, a just remembered the feeling of admiration and expectations I had felt going through those historiacl characters, when I saw the first episode of Star Trek's "Voyager". Not only they start with a question about discrimination, that has a dark and twisted answer: the ferengis are what they are. More politically correct than this is the captain, a strong woman who reminded me of Golda Meir on that classic interview with the Italian journalist. She speaks like a mother, and yet she is a captain. She misses her husband, but her ship comes first. And she has postponed maternity, giving the place of a baby to her dog. Unlike Picard, Captain Janeway has a life besides the ship; a life that comes in present, and not like a french memory. But like Picard, she's first a captain, and then a woman.

But what impressed me more is not her determination to get the members of the crew back, but how, based on her power, she feels guilt, and you can understand that responsibility and guilt come together like horse and carriage. And then we find that the Caretaker isn't but another guilty entity, who has under "his" charge a population of immature civilians who aren't able to think by themselves. The Caretaker has been in History so many times, and I think again of Oriana Fallaci's interviews. About the Imperialist countries that left nothing but war and unreal patterns and then have showed some doubtful pity on them. About the civil wars, the boarders, the nuclear accidents.

A Caretaker v/s a Captain. The Caretaker is the overprotective parent who never allowed anything and now deals with a disaster. With a junkie, with a girl interrupted. With a generation of damaged people who have become infants when it comes to political life. And the captain is the loving mother. The leader who'll do anything to get her crew back safe to the ship, and will put herself second and third. What I still haven't seen in real life , and reason why I haven't made the decision of drawing that line on the paper.

Lo ha detto il noto attore inglese, domenica scorsa, durante l'annuale convention di Star Trek svoltasi nel New Jersey. E lo ha detto senza il minimo rammarico. Perché un attore così, innamorato soprattutto del teatro, ha sempre scelto film e progetti meno "appariscenti", se si eccettua il ruolo del professor Xavier nella trilogia degli X-Men (tra l'altro campione d'incassi). Stewart non ha mostrato nemmeno un po' di rammarico di fronte al successo della trilogia del Signore degli Anelli, successo consolidato anche dagli Oscar.

Alla convention del New Jersey erano presenti, oltre a Patrick Stewart, un altro stuolo di attori di Star Trek: Brent Spiner (Data), Dominic Keating (Reed in Enterprise), Armin Shimerman (Quark), Rene Auberjonois (Odo), GC Hertzler (Martok), Max Grodenchik (Rom), Robin Curtis (Saavik), Chase Masterson (Leeta) e Casey Biggs (Damar).

[Fonte: StarTrekNews24]

Outside a Picard store 

    I love cultural differences and observing them as I travel (which happens a lot lately); for instance Feta cheese completely disappeared out of my diet when I moved to the UK. Coming from a country that was a four hour drive away from Greece and having tens of thousands of olive varities available in every other supermarket and not just deli stores, the geographical location of the UK and the price of (Feta) cheese here made me stop eating it as often as I used to.

    Again, whereas vegetables and fruit were abundant not because of excessive production, I find it almost depressing to see a lot less fresh fruit and veg markets around here. There's only two I know of (one in Hulme and the other in the City Centre) but so far away it takes the fun out of walking or driving there. Or getting on a bike. Too fucking far from anywhere I might be. Screw it, those potatoes in plastic from Sainsbury's will do.

    But frozen food...living off frozen food to me would be something next to inconceivable. I do eat loads of frozen brocolli and brussels sprouts, peas and various other mixes but I could find them fresh and packed if I wanted to. In Romania I couldn't. They didn't grow them anywhere around the place so frozen was the only option but there were so many other vegetables you could pick from, frozen foods weren't as popular as they are in France. 30kg per year? Why, dear God, WHY? Why Picard?

Well I went to Paris so I had to check it myself. Also stumbled upon this blog entry from a while ago:

"One of the secrets of French cuisine, if I may call it that, is that in France there is a whole chain of frozen food stores to make easy meals. This icy mecca is called PICARD. As far as I can tell, many French use Picard (there are two stores within an 8 minute walk for me). I can't tell you how many times I have had something at a person's house and when I asked about the recipe, I was told "Picard!"

Personally, I buy fruits, vegetables and chicken nuggets there, but there is so much more. For instance, you could buy frozen shrimp that really taste wonderful as shrimp cocktail. There are frozen pastry pie shells (to use with the frozen fruit) when you want to make a delicious dessert for uninvited last minute guests. There are frogs legs, leeks, escargot, steak, salmon, crepes, quiches, galette des rois, soups, and potatoes of all kinds (pommes dauphine are the best). The list doesn't stop. And best of all, if you don't have time even to shop for that frozen food, they deliver -- at least in the Paris area. "

"Picard "

How's that for convenient? A whole culture revolving around frozen foods and by selling a selection of 'exquisite' sort of products they made the thought of frozen food not so repulsive.

Necessity is the mother of invention, isn't it? Sure most people here eat microwaved dinners and stuff - sometimes I look at women that are almost afraid to be seen around the microwaved meals area unless the aisle is empty because it puts them in a bad light: "What kind of a woman are you if you can't cook?" still lingers over the ages and creates an immense feeling of guilt for many and even though there have been so many surveys asking men about what they want in a woman and 'cooking skills' weren't rated so high as 'managing finances', it's still something women do to themselves. You must know how to cook. You'll see loads of women struggling. Others don't seem to care. Till they have a baby. Give them a store that promises food that tastes so good no one will know the difference and make you look like a person that has the know-how when you might actually be a cooking disaster and there you have it. It's quite amazing.

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(via Geekologie)