Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Did you feel it? Did you get just a little bit more done today? A few minutes ago, at 6:59:60 pm local time, an extra second was added to the calendar. That’s right, after second #59, there was #60, then #00. It was done then because it was midnight in Universal Coordinated Time, UTC. It’s called a Leap Second.

So why add a second? Who’s going to even notice? Probably not you or I, but people in science doing precise measurement, especially of celestial objects, needed it. Do you need to reset your clock? Not unless you’re really obsessed with accuracy. Continue Reading…

I often listen to music on my computer. No, not often, nearly constantly. I have a large collection of MP3s and usually have a semi-random selection of songs in the playlist in Winamp. I let them shuffle at random and I have a plugin that removes the song once it plays, so nothing plays twice.

My first thought would be that it would play songs that don’t go together very well, clashing styles and tempos, but most of the time, it doesn’t.

First of all, it’s mostly all music I like in the first place. So just the fact that it exists means I probably like the song. But my tastes vary widely and according to mood, so that covers a lot of ground. And there are a lot of reasons I might ‘like’ a song or artist. Just because I ‘like’ surf music, doesn’t mean I always want to listen to it. Continue Reading…