9:59 pm PST: Let’s do this bitch.

10:02 pm: The wedding starts at 3:00 am PST, FWIW. I’m anticipating the need to pregame this pretty heavily.

10:21 pm: Time for my pre-royal-wedding exercise. To negate most of the pre-royal-wedding empty calories I’ll be imbibing.

10:29 pm: I’m watching My Bride is a Mermaid while I exercise, these days, so I’m learning to swear like pissed-off anime yakuza. I’ll be referring to Harry as fappy yarou this evening.

10:30 pm: Incidentally, I first referred to Fappy Yarou as “Henry.” That’s how much I pay attention to the British royal family.

12:42 am: Exercise and shower finished. I’ve just realized that going into this dehydrated is a poor decision on my part.

1:02 am: I was all set to make a snide comment about Brian Williams, but then I discovered the people who are actually covering this wedding. Barbara Walters? Time to crack my first beer; it’s going to be a long, long night.

1:13 am: Craig Ferguson is interviewing Magnum P.I. I am already tempted to stray.

1:20 am: Technical difficulties: my laptop isn’t connecting to the network. Need to drink: rising.

1:28 am: Beer #1 is a Widmer W’11 KGB Russian Imperial Stout. It’s a bit darker than I like (keep in mind that I’m a super-light drinker), but my irritation towards my laptop is making it go down easier.

1:29 am: Oh God, they’re breaking out the baby videos.

1:31 am: Apparently hat size is the British woman’s dick measuring contest.

1:34 am: In before “it’s not the size of the hat, it’s how you wear it.”

1:35 am: Mr. Bean looks vaguely constipated.

1:36 am: This woman is wearing a blue vagina on her head.

1:49 am: Oh man, I hope when I get married that people compare it against my parents’ wedding!

1:52 am: Let’s next talk to the woman who washed Prince William’s bedsheets when he was a child!

1:57 am: The Prime Minister of Australia is wearing her hat at a ludicrously jaunty angle. Imagine it on the side of her head, and then rotate it down a few more degrees.

2:03 am: Marin, in reaction to a woman wearing a fuckton of bling: damn, how many wars was she in?!

2:06 am: Prime Minister Cameron’s wife looks quite nice for not wearing a Fabulous Hat.

2:11 am: Prince William has emerged! USA! USA! USA!

2:19 am: Sorry, William, you just don’t have that much hair to rearrange.

2:24 am: Fappy Yarou looks one dominatrix away from bondage, courtesy of all the cords he’s sporting.

2:27 am: Marin: The king of Tonga looks like a Bond villain.

2:42 am: HOW THE FUCK DO YOU HAVE THIS MANY PRINCESSES

2:44 am: Man, Charles is looking old.

2:49 am: The Queen is still pretty darn cool.

3:01 am: In what world is a six-foot train “short”?

3:01 am: NEWS FLASH: Kate is not wearing a Fabulous Hat.

3:05 am: Guys, I know I’ve only been to a few weddings, but you’re supposed to stand for the bride, not the groom!

3:06 am: Looks like Kate is nipping out.

3:09 am: Fappy Yarou looks twice as nervous as William at the altar.

3:12 am: Barry and I sing better than these honored guests. Manalive.

3:14 am: Kate looks a bit haggard. I wonder if she stayed up until 4:00 am last night finishing The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer, like I did.

3:17 am: “William Arthur Phillip Louie”? How does anyone say that with a straight face?

3:22 am: A non-scientific survey of people watching the wedding says that there are only females everywhere except London.

3:22 am: Really not trying to be harsh, but the brides in every wedding I’ve attended have all looked more beautiful than Kate does here.

3:22 am: Seems weird to have Kate’s bro talking with his back is to the newlywed couple.

3:29 am: Castrating the entire boys’ choir for this wedding is a bit harsh. “You must sacrifice your balls for your country!”

3:30 am: At my goddamn wedding I’m hiring a fucking hot choir, not these pansy boys. Phat beats will also be required.

3:36 am: haha, the Queen fell asleep! (It’s OK; I’d fall asleep too if I had to listen to this guy in person.)

3:38 am: blah blah promise blah peril blah blah. I’m taking notes for everything I don’t want at my wedding.

3:39 am: William is twiddling his fingers, this thing is dragging on so long.

3:41 am: And now more castrated boy choir. I think I’d have substituted a conga line here. Maybe people doing belly shots.

3:44 am: Elton John’s in the audience. Can’t we give him a piano and have him save this thing?

3:46 am: Just spotted Wheelchair-kun and Wheelchair-baachan in the audience. Wheelchair-chan is still my favorite.

3:53 am: FROM EVERY MOUNTAINSIDE LET FREEDOM RING

3:54 am: I hope the garter toss comes next!

4:02 am: The wedding is pretty much over. On the downside, I am horribly short sleep. On the upside, I now know where Lady Gaga gets her hat ideas from.

4:06 am: Wait, they have their fucking kiss—their kiss on the balcony—scheduled down to the minute? The monarchy and I would get along for about five seconds before we murdered each other.

4:20 am: Marin: haha Harry’s stuck in the little kids’ carriage.

4:38 am: Sweet Jeebus, is it going to be another hour before the scheduled balcony kiss?

4:39 am: What I wouldn’t do for a zombie outbreak right now.

4:43 am: This Thor commercial is the most entertaining thing I’ve seen in the last hour.

5:32 am: William & Kate’s 20-nanosecond kiss was totally hot J/K, I think I’ve seen fat men licking their ice cream more passionately.

5:33 am: And it’s time to pass out. My brain beat my body to that by about five hours.

I made the unfortunate decision to move my iTunes library yesterday, which broke something in iTunes’ database. The weird thing is that the inconsistencies were completely random: all but one song of one CD would be fine, another CD would have a half and half mix of OK and missing songs, and a third CD would be completely missing.

I paid for this indiscretion with the last 24 hours of my life. I’ve tried to tell iTunes where to look to fix missing tracks, hacked XML files, trashed binary files (trying to force iTunes to rebuild from the XML file), put a copy of the library back in the original spot and then consolidated files (…and then weeded out duplicates in the file system), exported playlists and then started over from scratch… I’ve done damn near everything you can possibly do to iTunes.

And then I remembered that I put a copy of my iTunes data on another computer, so my sister can listen to music.

…

The two takeaways I have from this experience are related to playlists. First: exporting a playlist containing missing songs, from the busted iTunes library, and then importing that playlist into a non-busted library, works great. In this scenario iTunes actually fixes the missing file links, unlike pretty much any other scenario involving iTunes actually having to do something.

Second: Your play counts and star ratings are not stored in your MP3s’ metadata; they’re stored in iTunes’ database. If you have to jettison a corrupted database, your play counts are toast (at least in my experience)… but you might be able to save your star ratings. You do so via playlists, again: create smart playlists for each star rating (one star, two stars, etc.), and then export those. The exported files will be regular playlists, which you can then import into the new iTunes database. There iTunes will fix any broken links… and then you can do mass edits on the songs in those playlists to reassign your ratings.

Mostly, though, don’t ever move your iTunes library. Manalive.

March 17th, 2011 is a day that will live in personal infamy. I wouldn’t know until three seconds days later, but that is when I fell to pneumonia.

For the majority of a week I sported a fever (high score: 104°F), didn’t feel like eating or drinking, suffered pain in damn near every joint in my body, and couldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time. It was awesome. I was too tired to even hallucinate.

I’m pretty sure the only reason I survived was thanks to the antibiotics I was prescribed in the middle of that week (I sure as hell wasn’t turning things around by myself)… which had the unexpected—at least to me—side-effect of making me vulnerable to other opportunistic disease. Pneumonia is a buildup of pus in your lung (I did not know that), and the antibiotic was able to kill the bacteria that was owning me—but it couldn’t clean out the pus in my lung. That pus became fertile ground for any other opportunistic bug that passed my way.

End result: doctor-recommended quarantine. One month quarantine.

I didn’t quite make that—I started being social again this Wednesday—but I at least waited until my cough had disappeared before re-emerging into the world. I was even able to telecommute, thanks to my office being rather laid-back and flexible. That said, I strongly suspect the office is where I was infected—I’m still (mentally) glaring at my coworkers for that.

Most impressive to me, ultimately, was how winded I got walking around my house once I had the energy to move. I don’t think the pneumonia had actually conquered all that much of my lungs (it was apparently located in my right lower lobe)… but it was still enough to make climbing a staircase a challenge.

I’m not sure how to wrap this post up, so I’ll steal someone else’s schtick:

» Rating: ONE SEXY LADIES