“Guaranteed or your money back!”

This phrase bothers me every time I see it. Let’s break it down, shall we?

Part 1 “Guaranteed”: will work as advertised or you get your money back
Part 2: “Or Your Money Back” If the first part isn’t true, your money is refunded.

They promised to give you your money back if the product wasn’t guaranteed, so you don’t get your money. But then the product is guaranteed so you should get your money back. But they said you get your money back if it wasn’t guaranteed, so you don’t. But it is guaranteed, so you get your money back.

*insert picture of MrPages chasing his own tail in a circle until he passes out from exhaustion.*

Sometimes you just have to write about the really pressing issues threatening our society.

Yeah, this is mostly what it’s like to live with me. I’m anticipating a half-dozen sympathetic notes to MrsPages from wives around the internet in the next week or so.

Here are some photos of our newly painted walls. We’ve been getting a lot of hits from Google searches on “Behr Rejuvenate Green”.

One is in sun and the other in shadow in the morning, and then vice versa in the afternoon. You can see how the one in shadow looks more sage-y and the one in sun looks much brighter, with a hint of yellow. We love the way it looks in both places, and they look good together when we can see the two walls at once. It pulls wonderful colours out of the wood (both dark mahogany and pine) and out of the terracotta of that angel on the piano.

Click the images to see larger versions. The paint color is officially “Behr Tint 410E-3 Rejuvenate”, and we absolutely love it.

See the paint colour selection process here.
See the renovation of this closet into an entry way here.

If you’re here to see this color, welcome! Please add a comment!

South Beach? Grapefuit? Atkins? Nah.

I’ll stick to the QECAMA diet.

Written by my absolute favorite blogger, Brant Hansen of Letters from Kamp Krusty, it’s a common sense diet based on long-proven principles of thermodynamics and medical science.

I personally guarantee that you will lose weight on this plan. I absolutely 100% guarantee it.

I present to you the diet plan that the world will reject because it works too well: “Quit Eating Crap and Move Around“.

Sounds like something I should have written.

I want to post some notes on the utilities that I find useful. I’m on my PC 9 or more hours a day. I work on the PC and I have a lot of my hobbies on the PC, so I have some definite likes and dislikes, and I have the time to research best-of-breed solutions for problems that I have. So, you get to hear about them. Lucky you.

For the inaugural post, I will discuss all things sound-related.

MP3 Player and Organizer – Windows Media Player comes free with windows. Everyone likes iTunes and it comes free with an iPod or with the install of QuickTime. I happen to like neither.

I use MediaMonkey and love it. I like the way I can manage my MP3s exact locations on disk, I like the tag management utilities, I like the disk utilities, I like “party mode” which lets the kids add songs to the playlist but not mess around with the database, I like the player. The free version has almost everything the paid version has, but you need to tell it to look for new songs when you add them to your hard drive. The paid version does that automatically.

We have it installed on two different computers, and all of our MP3s on a computer on the network. MrsPages and the little Pages can listen to what they want upstairs while I have my office door shaking with my own choices of music. Great stuff.

Audio Editing – No question here at all. Whether you want to get into detailed editing of a sound file to remix a song, or just to cut a long ending off an MP3, you need to try Audacity. It’s free, it’s high-powered and it’s simple.

“But I’ve never needed to edit audio!” you say? Well, how about being able to move some of those old cassette tapes to MP3 so you can listen to them on your iPod? (Want to know how specifically? Let me know and I’ll write up a set of easy instructions). Want to make some of your MP3s smaller file sizes so you can cram more of them onto your iPod? Want to remove some hiss from those old vinyl recordings? Want to trim that stupid “hidden track” that makes your favorite song 34 minutes long on the CD? Audacity does it.

MultiTrack Recording — I know there are some musicians that read this page, and this one’s for you. Reaper Multitrack. Free (they ask you to pay if you can, but it’s uncrippled) software that does most of what very expensive studio packages like CakeWalk, ProTools and Cubase can do, but for free. It supports VST, VSTi and DX plugins. Great piece of software, especially given the price of its “competitors”.

If you want any more information of help with these programs, let me know. I’ve used them all pretty extensively, or can get you in touch with people who can help.