foosic and last.fm

On my old blog (check the wayback machine), I posted about a music stats system called foosic. Mostly, I liked that it had a foobar2000 plugin and did a great job of identifying tracks (audio fingerprinting) such that if people all had different tags—which they do—it still keeps the stats in one place and reports the title, artist, genre, etc. as the most used form.

However, almost as long as I had been using foosic, there would be times when it was just down. I emailed some people, and it came back up. Then, earlier this year, the problems became persistent, and then it was gone. So, I figured I’d have to use last.fm (formerly AudioScrobbler, hence the “as” logo). Back when I found foosic, I tried last.fm and hated it. It was slow, I had to use a custom program to submit tracks, and I didn’t really need all of the “social” crap they laud.

Funny thing is, when you only have one choice, it starts looking pretty appealing! Plus, I found foo_audioscrobbler, which completely sidesteps the need for the external program. I still don’t really care about the last.fm community, but band suggestions are nice, and pretty relevant. So, certainly if you are a foobar user and want some external playback stats, last.fm should work for you. And, if you are interested, you can see what I’ve been listening to. I’ll even be your last.fm friend if I know you… isn’t that special?

What’s up with Matt?

You may notice that my website has been down for a long time, and is now just a placeholder (thanks for the hosting, Mikey).  Well, late last year (October or November) my web server died.  I think the processor overheated.  It’s pretty old hardware, and parts are hard to come by or significantly overpriced.  I was looking for a cheap (read free) replacement box, but haven’t really found one yet.  So, that’s why I don’t have a web server.  Then, a month or two ago, my main computer crapped out.  I think the processor was zapped when the PSU went out.  PSU has been replaced, new processor and heat sink ordered.

While all of that was happening, Sam has been growing and doing all kinds of things that we’ve been wanting to keep track of.  We take tons of pictures, but Nikki was also wanting to write some thoughts down.  I had initially hoped to get my web server back up and host it and all that, but I just didn’t have the time.  I checked out a couple free blogging hosts, and settled on WordPress.  She really seems to like it.  Then I recommended it to my sister, who has been posting pretty prolifically about her English teaching stint in Lithuania.

Having thought of several things to blog about in the past 10 months and not having anywhere to do so, I realized that I should just bite the bullet and use wordpress myself.  Maybe when I get the web server running again I will install the wordpress.org software instead of hosting it here at wordpress.com, but maybe not (having to pay for CSS editing kinda blows, though).

REPOST: Excel Graybar

Repost from my old blog so I can refer to this in a new post:

I really thought I had posted this, but I can’t find it. I like when printed Excel sheets have some formatting to let you scan the page easily, and graybar (or greenbar) is usually the best way to format. If you just need something very simple, probably the easiest way to get graybar in Excel is to use Conditional Formatting. Here’s what you do:

1. Select the range you want formatted
2. Click Format | Conditional Formatting…
3. Change the dropdown to “Formula Is”
4. Type in the formula: =MOD(ROW(), 2) = 0
5. Click the “Format…” button and set your formatting – background color is on the Patterns tab, but you can apply any formatting you want… bold, outline, etc.

This will apply the formatting to even rows and not odd rows. If you add or remove rows, the formatting will adjust because it’s based on the row number. If you need the ODD rows to have the formatting, the formula is MOD(ROW(), 2) = 1. You can even click the “Add >>” button and use both formulas to apply different formatting to both even and odd rows.