Sharon and Jacques’ Excellent Blog

I’m intrigued by software and what people are doing with it. As I see interesting software, I try it out usually with mixed results. Every once in a while, I come across something that it really good and I decided TuneUp was too good not to share.

I use iTunes to manage my music collection as I switched from Windows Media Player when I purchased an iPhone. Like most people, I have some tracks in my music collection that lack album art and other tags so it doesn’t display well in iTunes or on my iPhone. iTunes will lookup up the album art but it doesn’t do a great job especially if the name of the song filename has been changed or the song tags are missing or wrong.

Enter TuneUp. The software works on PC, Mac with iTunes and Windows Media Player. I tested it using Win 7 x64 with iTunes 9.0.1.

TuneUp adds a panel on the right hand side of iTunes with various tabs. You drag and drop songs that you want it to identify/fix, or it will scan you music collection for missing album art or other missing tags. It was able to scan 20,000 songs in less than 5 minutes (your mileage may vary as I did this on a fast machine).

The beauty of TuneUp is how it figures out what song its dealing with. It creates a fingerprint of the first few seconds of the song and then queries their database of 90,000,000 songs to find a match. It takes a couple of seconds per song to do the lookup. It retrieves the album art and tag data and displays them in a list. You can choose to update the iTunes library or ignore the updates on a per song/album basis.

I have a large music collection spanning bird songs to lots of obscure classical music. It was able to identify 98% of the music tracks without problem. It amazed me by identifying the bird songs and assigning them to their original albums.

I was able to correct the majority of tag and art problems in about an hour and highly recommend the software.

It’s available from TuneUp Media for $19.95 – $29.95 USD and it was money well spent. On Mon Apr 26 2010, it’s featured on Bitsdujour.com for 50% off for 24 hours.

Some days I get inspired to turn in and nest.  Whether it is home renovations and improving our surroundings, or inviting good friends over for a meal that is stick to your ribs homey and delicious.  Today is just such a day.  With foodie friends Ian and Jenn, and neighbours who appreciate fine dining Mark and Tammy – it all seemed to come together.  With the rain pouring down, a nip of cold in the air, and the wind blowing with vigour, I needed to put together something that felt like it would stimulate conversation and make the mouth water.

A couple of years ago, I made something called Cioppino.  It is a genovese dish that takes the best that the sea has to offer that day, adds in tomatoes, onions, garlic, basil and parsley and builds an infusion of mediterranean flavours.  In short, it is a type of fisherman’s broth that one can find in variations all over the world.  A quick trip to the fish counter to find the flavours I love.  Fresh mussels and cherry clams, a bit of crab and plenty of shrimp, and a nice piece of monkfish.  Monkfish is a fish that stands up to cooking well that many call the poor man’s lobster.  Now I don’t know if I have been blessed with eating exceptional East coast Canadian lobster that is sweet and tender – but monkfish tastes nothing like lobster to me!

I have now completed my tomato broth which will act as my base.  Because I had plenty, I added in some shallots and plenty of garlic, and along with the tomatoes, some spinach.  For some je ne sais quois (and because I saw it somewhere in a cooking magazine) I added in a few dashes of worchestershire sauce.  My mother always added in sugar into her tomato sauce to cut the acid a bit.  While I love her meat sauce, I wanted a lighter sweetness so used brown sugar this time.  The sauce is simmered lightly.

Next step is the various seafood to be cooked.  This is more of a last minute thing that I do after guests have arrived and drinks are firmly in hand.  With some lovely olive oil that is organic and from Malta (and only used for special occasions) I saute garlic and then add some pesto.  Now I have made my own pesto – but frankly for me it is a staple I love to have on hand all the time.  A couple of tablespoons of store bought pesto goes into the pot, immediately followed by the clams and the mussels.  The flavours start to pop and a bit of liquid is needed, so I add in clam juice and some white wine as the shell fish begin to open up.  In goes the monfish and crab, as well as some saffron.  A few more minutes pass and at the last minute I add in the scallops.  I tried to find fresh octopus yesterday, but was out of luck.  Plus I am not sure how my guests will like it.  The heat is dropped right down to a simmer, and I add in ladles of the tomato broth that I have cooked and all the flavours start to infuse.

I did say food that sticks to the ribs and I like more than just the bread to sop up the sauce as a carb.  I decided to also make a risotto.  As you can imagine, timing is everything as I am making both the seafood and the rice at the same time.  My trick is to make sure I have a glass of wine next to me.  It does triple action lubricating me, the risotto and the seafood.  Yes, I do need an entire bottle to myself.  Galloping Gourmet?  Hardly, more like stumbling.  This risotto needs to be fresh and counterpoint the tomato broth.  So I have decided to add some lemon rind and juice to it near the end, topped with fresh basil and a black olive tapenade.  A bit of balsamic glaze on heirloom tomatoes on the side will round it all up and voila – food is served family style with crusty bread.

Here is the thing about me and cooking.  I love food, I love shopping for food, I love the colours and the fusion of ingrediants, I love cookbooks, magazines and websites dedicated to food.  Given a different life or a change in my path – eating and cooking and sharing it would be a passion for me to pursue.  Here is the problem:  I never write anything down, I never follow a recipe (which is precisely why I don’t bake) and I have never made the same thing twice.  Oh I try to replicate dishes – but every time it is a bit different. 

Reminds me of our dinner parties.  While the friends are often the same, the conversation is different, the ambiance is changing and our enjoyment of one another endures.  The time with friends is as unique as the dishes served.  And that is just fine with me.

It seems that I hit a bit of a nerve with the last posting about optical media and its tendency to fail. I thought I would write a few lines on how to prepare an external hard drive for backups to ensure that your data has a good chance of keeping it whole. One friend pointed out that its a dirty secret in the industry that optical media has a typical shelf life of 5-7 years unless it states that its designed for long term archival storage. That set of 50 CD-Rs that contain your best of the 70s and 80s likely isn’t archival quality.

Don’t forget that an external hard drive is also a  single point of failure. If that drive fails or you have a fire, all of data is going bye bye. One of the posters mentioned a system called a Drobo which is an external drive systems with lots of drives in it and it manages the failures. Expensive but worth it for the non-technical types. A cheaper solution is to get an external hard drive that can take 2 hard drives and set up the drive with something called RAID 1 This page lists at least a dozen or more from Canada Computers. All the data that you write to the drive is mirrored on the other drive so failure is less likely.

The place to buy computer equipment in Toronto (and elsewhere for that matter) is Canada Computers (http://www.canadacomputers.com). Hard to beat their prices or selection. Certainly cheaper than Tiger Direct.

Get yourself an hard drive or RAID box that will comfortably fit your collection plus room for growth. I use backup software, Retrospect, that lets me add volumes to the backup. You should consider something like this as well as opposed to simply copying them.

I would suggest a bare bones drive dock such as the Themaltake ST0005U. Ugly, but you just drop a drive into it without having to buy another case. Its about $46 at Canada Computers. This dock features an eSata and USB interface. If you are moving lots of data, I would recommend eSATA. Drop me a line if you want more information.

Plug your disk into your computer. A dialog will appear asking you to format the drive. Make sure that you DO NOT select Quick Format. You want to verify every single byte of data on that drive. Depending on the size of the drive or RAID configuration this will take a few minutes to many hours. Let this complete and then use it for backup.

If you do a quick format, its possible that you will write data on to a bad portion of the disk. The disk may recover but I’ve learnt the hard way this is not a good idea having had more than a few pictures show up with strange lines in the middle of them. I traced it back to bad blocks on a disk and had to restore from backup.

Make a point of doing backups on a regular basis if the data is valuable and you might want to consider also making a backup and storing it in a safe deposit box.

Good backing up!

I have a large photo collection which I make a point of backing up whenever I add new photos to the collection. I use Retrospect, an excellent backup program that I have used for many years, and I was backing up initially to CDs and for the last few years DVD+R. I started doing backups about 10 years ago so I had more than 600 disks in the backup collection. I considered it a worthwhile safeguard as I have lost photos in the past for various reasons.

I was doing a backup a few days ago and got tired of of the speed of DVDs which is slow at best to write. I decided to move the backup and associated archives onto a large external hard drive (1.5TB) which I purchased for about $120 CAD.  I started by making a backup of the current collection which took about 24 hours including verification. It’s a large collection, did I mention that?

I then started copying the backup archives using Retrospect which basically involved reading all the DVDs I had burned and copying the data to the new drive. It has been a fun weekend of shuffling disks in and out of readers.

I was shocked to find out about 40% of the disks had 1 or more errors on them and some where just plain unreadable. I made a point of verifying all the disks as I wrote them since I’ve been burned in the past.

I had made a point of buying quality disks, using a marker that didn’t contain any acid and storing them in sealed disk binders and believing the general consensus that optical media had a shelf life of 100 or more years.

 There were some patterns to the failures:

1. For a while, I was labelling the disks with stick on labels. Almost without fail, these disks were totally unreadable. Throw out your labelling systems if you have any desire to save your disks for the long term.
2. Printable disks that I had printed on were the next most frequent to exhibit failures.
3. Disks that were written more than 5 years ago also seem to failed on a regular basis.

In case you were wondering, I tried reading the disks on 3 different DVD drives. An old Plextor model was the best at reading most of the disks. NEC drives worked about 70% of the time and an old Panasonic drive was just terrible.

What’s the moral of this story? If you have important data that you want to keep for long periods of time, better check your optical media. I would suggest making a copy of it to a hard drive and putting the drive in a safe place. At least the drives have the ability to do some type of error correction.

I hate to think of what has happened to all those disks that I made of movies and song compilations that I so lovingly labelled.

Hope your experience is better than mine!

We travelled from Mississauga through to Bradenton Florida to visit the folks for Christmas, and drove a straight 23 hours to get there.  With the help of satellite radio and the comedy channels, the trip stopped two people from killing each other in the car.  Being couped up with someone 23 hours straight is one thing, but driving 23 hours with your life partner in tow (or at least sometimes you wish you could tow them on the back of the car) is quite another.

We probably saw every cop in Georgia, as they just sat on every overpass trying to find yet another sucker to make their year end quota.  Onward we drove, quite thankful that at least we missed the snowy weather that was hitting other parts of the country quite hard.  We were riding in the hippo, and this was the first long distance journey we undertook in it.  It fared quite well and was comfortable, though I have to say that if you are my height (keebler size) there is really no good place to put your arms.  We also discovered that despite technology boy’s best efforts at bleeding edge – the darn hippo does not seem to want to give us the miles per hour on the digital speedometer.  Most of the time we were guessing at the speed, and my spellbinding math skills have still not improved since 10th grade.

I have to say one of the saddest things is the lack of Tim Horton’s along the way.  The last one is in Ohio – then there are Waffle House’s as far as the eye can see.  While I love saying the name – there is not much else that redeems it.  Part of our challenge was also the load of stuff we were carrying for friends and family.  My biggest fear was the 20KG of flour in the back of the car.  I was afraid the border police would think it was the other white stuff.

Upon our arrival we stumbled into bed for a nap, then woke to our family celebrations.  Christmas morning saw us with an 8:30 am tee off time and for once, Jacques joined in the fun.  Though he seemed to quit on hole 7 as he pulled out his binoculars and camera and started birdwatching on the golf course.  Seriously.  Maybe it was because he managed to nail someone’s house with a golf ball so hard it sounded like a gunshot.  True to form my game was excellent on the front 9, but after a few beverages and far too much laughing with friends – disintegrated.  A h well, not like I was keeping score!

We arrived home for another nap – then the luxury of too much food and lots of friends.  We have also been exploring the surrounding area, finding out of the way places to eat and walking on beaches.  It is a bit too cold to swim.  Today we heard a Brit complaining about the cold to which his wife replied – stop complaining, at least it is much warmer than England.  Ah, a woman who always sees the glass half full!

There will certainly be a few pics to come – so keep an eye out.  Happy New Year to all our wonderful friends and family!