On a lot of blogs and in forums, I see complaints about the recent increase in gas prices. People are talking about 2 or 3 US dollars per gallon of gas. Outrageous. Well, let me tell you, the last time I filled my tank, I payed 1.45 per LITER of gas (euro95). That’s 5.49 per gallon, which approximates to US$6.85 per gallon. So stop complaining! And start using the metric system. Ignorant fools.
My domain-registrator DirectNIC has a live journal (pun intended) about Katrina and her devastating consequences. Reading it makes you keep your breath or skip a heartbeat. Read it here or here, and if you have anything to contribute, go here for a list of organisations helping out. It seems Wallmart donated a million dollars. Heartwarming.
I just upgraded my LAME encoder to 3.96. To my surprise, the encoded MP3 files came out being in mono rather than (joint-)stereo. How come? As a frontend for LAME, I use the brilliant EAC. In EAC you can specify extra commandline option to pass to LAME, and in my case, that would be --r3mix. But this option is no longer recognised by LAME and the best it can make of it is -m. Hence a mono mp3 file. Obviously changing the commandline options to something more appropriate restored my joint-stereo and the quality settings.
Hope this will save someone from pulling hairs.