What has been lost has been found...

Shiloh's acting strange. When I got in the car to go look for her, she bounded into sight out of nowhere and readily got into the car. When I parked the car - seeing as there was nowhere to go to have to look for her - I tell you the dog threw a hissy fit, as if I had deprived her of some great joy (which, I suppose, I did, because Shiloh does enjoy riding in the van.

Galina and I watched Beowulf this evening, and if that's the future of movies, you can have it and them. Sure, the CGI is probably a zillion times better than whatever I could imagine, but there massively being something not right with very nearly everyone's movements and facial expressions more than overcame those effects - and I would go further and specify those necessary effects - that could not, but for computers, be rendered.

I also wasn't terribly thrilled by the "updating" of the story line to depict a tribe of beings with feet of clay, but hey, that's Hollyweird for you. What puzzles me, though - and here, I'm not confining my remarks to just this movie - is how everyone revels in being so "cutting edge," when all they're saying and showing is basically the same tired old thing over and over.

Cheers...

Floola to the rescue...

Sort of.

I would not have considered connecting my iPod back to iTunes, except that Floola apparently has a lot of trouble managing podcasts, so much so that I kept getting a message upon starting the program to the effect that something was majorly wrong with the database.

When I connected the iPod to iTunes in an attempt to fix the problem, I was repaid for my efforts with the erasure of my entire database. Since this behavior is indistinguishable with what I have come to expect from normal iTunes operation, I'm putting the blame on iTunes.

Now, you'd expect that erasure of the database would solve the Floola problem, and it did, in an unusual way. You see, Floola has the capability of recovering the database (but not playlists or any other features), which it did.

Fortunately, Floola is smart enough to figure out that if you copy an episode of podcast ABC to the iPod, it should be added to the "album" of that name (something that eluded me when using iTunes, though I will admit I didn't apply every effort to crack that nut), so I am currently satisfied with a setup in which I fetch podcasts with something other than Floola, and then copy them over by hand.

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I've been searching, on and off, for episodes of a podcast titled The VerbCast, sponsored by Partners in Excellence in Scotland. It's reputed to be a 20-episode series on French verbs. Unfortunately, the program under which the podcasts were distributed came to an end in 2007, and apparently, there wasn't enough money in the budget to even try to spread the news (you can, theoretically, subscribe to this podcast on iTunes even today, though you won't get anything, and the podcast is still listed on, for example, Podcast Alley).

Ah, well. Back to work.

Cheers...

UPDATE: There is something to be gained from having worked, in a previous career, as a software engineer, complete with the mindset that keeps chasing after something even if the chase starts to border on the silly. Google just sent me back to Podcast Alley, where I read a message in which the poster provided a link to where he claimed the whole set of podcasts was housed... and it apparently is! ...Downloading now!