I was feeling tired one day this week, so naturally a piece called How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off would catch my attention. It’s about how to, supposedly, condition yourself so that you will get up when your alarm goes off automatically — to the stage where you become physically uncomfortable if you remain in bed.

Whilst this seems to be a little extreme — sometimes it’s nice to lie there and snooze! — a second article seemed more practical. This was about how to become an early riser ; that is, to get your body into the rhythm of getting up at a reasonable time each morning.

One thing that seems curiously missing from the Internet — based on my searching, at any rate — is how to encode to MP3 in Ubuntu Dapper. By default you can encode to FLAC and Ogg, which is a problem for me because the iPod doesn’t support either of these.

MP3 encoding is provided by the GStreamer lame plugin in gstreamer-plugins-ugly. However, the version of this included in the main/restricted/universe (I’m not sure which) doesn’t include the lame plugin; meaning that even after installing the ugly plugins, you cannot encode MP3s. This confused me until today when I discovered that the standard version doesn’t include lame.

Although I was planning to give David Bowie a few listens, I didn’t get around to it in the end. I liked what I heard, but was distracted.

I was distracted by getting a copy of the new Morrissey album, Ringleader of the Tormentors. I got this because I found the single taken from the album quite catchy and I have been curious about what Morrissey is like for a while. I’ve come away with mixed feelings — I find some of the songs quite addictive, but some are a little cheesy. Saying that, I think overall the album is pretty good. I haven’t really listened to any other of either Morrissey or The Smiths albums, so I don’t know whether the new album is representative of the Morrissey in general. Ringleader of the Tormentors is worth a listen, however; I especially like tracks three and four if I recall correctly.

I’ve been trying out some albums recently.

Things I’m Currently Trying Out

At the moment I’m listening to a “Best of David Bowie (’69-’74)” album. My mother bought me it when I was sixteen, or sometime around that age, and I didn’t really like it that much back then. So I thought I’d pull it out now and give it another go. So far, I’m liking it much better than I did then.

If you are unaware of the 98%/2% email, you might want to go here to try it out, otherwise the remainder of this post will spoil it for you.

About a month ago, my brother forwarded me an email with a few mathematical questions and then a question that asked you to quickly think of a tool and a colour. According to the email, 98% of people will come up with red and hammer. I did this, got the red hammer result and was mildly surprised.