We left this morning for our good friend Alison’s wedding in Sioux City Iowa. Within 45 minutes we heard a cry from the backseat, “I think I am car sick” quickly followed by the unmistakable sound of Simon wretching. Due to Maril’s cat like reflexes she was able to 1) find a plastic bag in time 2) place precisely in the most optimal position to catch the discharge. Maril’s physical response was quite impressive and just reinforced she is not a person to be messed with. Thankfully the event turned out to be little more than a shot across the bow, however, little did we know it was just a sign of things to come.
Approximately 30 minutes later Caroline indicated that she was not feeling well either. Since car sickness has never been an issue with her in the past and she had demonstrated no indications of being ill we brushed it off as just following her brothers lead. Surprisingly, Caroline does not make the same guttural moans that her brother makes when preparing to wretch. There must have been kryptonite in the car at that very moment as Maril’s superhero like reaction was unfortunately not repeated. Leaving a fair amount of clean up.
After these two events all was well and we happily went on our merry way and on time. Nevertheless, I hope that Heather and Josh who are watching our pets are having better luck!
If anybody is aware of any natural remedies or general ideas/”tricks” to help with car sickness please let us know as this is an issue; especially for our son. We have started to give him natural ginger sticks to chew on during long car rides. This seems to help but we are definetly open to suggestions.
Family
That was my wife’s reaction to finding out that there was a typo in this years Christmas letter; all 75 of them. This was a 11th hour find by my mother-in-law which quickly induced a panic across the Tangen family as we tried to identify alternatives, here is what we came up with:
- Blame it on the kids. This is what I wanted to do.
- Blame it on the husband. This was my wife’s and kids’ idea.
- Cancel all holiday activities across the MidWest. This was definetly a group decision while we were at out lowest point in the 6hr discussion. Also, felt we could only affect that kind of change around the MidWest because, let’s face it, this blog is not nearly as influential on the coasts…yet.
- Send out the letter as-is.
As you can imagine we decided to go with 4, but 2 still seems to be lingering and being tossed around.
We sincerely wish a very Merry Christmas to all as well as a happy and safe 2007!
Christmas, Christmas Letter, Family, New Years
Spent some time today playing with Tangerine!. Tangerine is an application that allows you to create playlists by analyzing the beats per minute (BPM) and beat intensity of the songs in your iTunes library. Once analyzed, you query the results by providing a desired range for both BPM and BI that you are looking for and voila…you have a playlist.
I have always been particularly intrigued by this as my musical tastes are rather eclectic and often specific to what I am doing at that moment. Which, of course, means that my playlists are difficult to create in any meaningful way as by nature they are static.
First thing I noticed was the speed in which it ripped through my library. Their blog states roughly 3 songs/second. on a 1.83 Ghz dual-core iMac. I am running this on my 1.67 Ghz PowerBook so did not see quite the performance but was able to process 3.2GB in 200 seconds which is roughly 2.5 songs/second. Frankly, this is faster than I anticipated.
I must say I have been pretty impressed with the consistency of the results. This is not to say that there are some oddities generated. For instance, one of the playlists consisted of Frank Sinatra’s Girl from Ipanema (BPM == 135, BI == 41) with Rob Zombie’s Dragula (BPM == 125, BI == 62). Also, some of the BPM’s that were reported by iTunes were in some cases significantly different from Tangerine!’s analysis. But being that this is in beta (more on that later) I am hopeful that the algorithm will continue to be refined.
A couple of other things you should note if you are thinking about giving it a try. It currently only runs on OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Also, due to the DRM encryption around songs purchased off of the iTunes store Tangerine! is not able to analyze them. Although, they have stated that they are actively working on a solution.
Finally, Tangerine! is currently in beta but if you blog about it or report a bug they will send you a license key when it is released. Here is the Potion Factory, developer’s of Tangerine!, blog.
Music, Technology