Seriously, just shoot me

I should be out of the house, working. I can't get a job to save my life (except, of course, for the one I DID get and then quit on the verge of a mental breakdown). I shouldn't be HERE, now, hearing EVERY FUCKING DOG IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD going insane over whatever their microscopic doggie brains find so interesting. The neighbors behind us (featuring Shannon Sturges as the Internet Thief!) leave their poor dog outside alone all afternoon to yip and yowl in its boredom/loneliness. This MUST stop. I can't have the doors or windows open from 3pm on, because that little fucker's yipping cuts through EVERYTHING. I can even hear it right now through the walls and everything on the other side of the house. It's THAT piercing. If it were howling I'd be on the phone to animal control.

Then the fuckers across the street from us, who have three massive dogs in a tiny house leave their front door open so their dogs can bark their stupid little heads off whenever anything moves in their line of site. Even me, inside my own house. Yeah, they're THAT stupid.

Don't get me wrong. I love dogs. I'd be thrilled to get a dog (or two). They're wonderful animals when they're trained properly and well treated. It's the asshole owners I want to eviscerate. What makes people who live in a crowded neighborhood think they don't need to control their animals? There are at least three cats which practically live in our yard. They won't let us anywhere near them, but they're content to live here. And then there's the dogs. Aaaaaaaaugh! The cats I can live with. I'm more concerned I might accidentally run one over than anything else. But the dogs...oh man. A few doors down is a cute little bichon frise whose owners leave it outside pretty much all the time. Why even HAVE a dog if you're going keep it segregated? Dogs are social animals! They thrive on interacting with their pack. Keeping one shut out and isolated is cruel, and it's a damn good way to raise a biter.

Ah, but what do I know? I'm just a worthless bum who can't get a job.

Wow.

Take a listen to this song (5/10 - sorry, I took it down). It’s in AAC format, so if you’re driving a Mac or Windows with Quicktime installed, you should be good to go. That file was encoded using HE-AAC thanks to a sweet little app called XLD. It’s apparently some sort of super AAC. That file is encoded at 64k/s, which is as high as HE-AAC goes. I’m listening to the album right now. I encoded it from a lossless source file just a little while ago, and damn Sam, am I impressed. I really cannot hear much of a difference between this and the original. Granted, I’ve got lousy ears, but I can still pick up encoding artifacts even in very high resolution MP3s. These? Not so much. The entire 43 minute album compressed down to 19 megabytes which isn’t surprising for 64k audio, but to achieve resolution at that filesize...it’s amazing. I’m not giving up on MP3 and lossless audio anytime soon, but when it comes to making files for my iPod...I think I’ve found the perfect format. And yes, these files are 100% compatible with iTunes (and, I presume, FooBar and Winamp and most other important audio players on other platforms).

The song I linked to there is a great little jpop tune by a defunct girl pop band called Boystyle*. They had one, maybe two albums and a bunch of singles and then broke up. It’s a pity, because as these kinds of bands go they were really, really good. Good songs, good singing, and of course they were all really cute. Oh well. Better they broke up on a high note than dragging on for ten years releasing progressively weaker material, the way some bands have done.

*Japanese Wikipedia run through Google’s translator. I make no promises for the accuracy of the translation, but it’s sure to contain more than one really, really funny bit.