I have very happy memories of playing video games in arcades, at the roller rink, in restaurants at those little table-game contraptions, and at home on my NES. Now a brilliant person has made a web site that lets you play what appears to be every video game ever made, all in your web browser.

It's like being warped back 20 years and handed a million dollars in quarters. I spent all day giggling like a 6 year old girl.

All the Pac-Mans. All the donkey kongs. Galaga. RBI Baseball. Double Dragon. Legend of Zelda (I and 2). Mario Brothers. Super Mario Brothers 1 through 3. Paperboy. Castlevania. Spy Hunter. Track and Field. And hundreds more.

I spent 4 hours playing "Princess Tomato in Salad Kingdom" out of sheer disbelief.

Don't go to this web site. Seriously.

Short story: iTunes 7-- only the Mac version-- is setting my BPM to huge numbers (as high as 65324!) in a seemingly random fashion. If you care about your BPM values, don't use iTunes 7!!!

Fellow iTunes geeks, read on for the long story.
I have probably spent over a hundred hours fine-tuning my iTunes music library so that I can enjoy my tunes exactly how I want to. This includes playing by genre, rating, and especially by tempo or "beats per minute" (BPM) as it is called in iTunes.

In order to establish the tempo of all of my songs, I downloaded a program called "MixMeister" to analyze and update all of my MP3s. It kinda worked: the BPMs were reasonably close, but in updating the files, MixMeister also removed any album art that was stored in the ID3 tags for the song. Not cool, but I lived with it.

I downloaded CoverTunes (a program so good, Apple bought it) to get my album art back. I loved this program, and soon my entire library was up to date.

When I upgraded to iTunes 7, I was ticked to find that the integrated CoverFlow functionality ignored my previously set CoverFlow album art. So I turned on the iTunes feature to automatically download album art. It was horribly inaccurate, but better than nothing.

After a couple of days of playing, I noticed something very strange: thousands of my songs has ridiculously incorrect BPM values. They seemed evenly distributed from 300 up to over 65000; that is, there were no ranges of values where large numbers of songs appeared. I was furious. I wondered if maybe iTunes was doing the reverse of MixMeister: setting the album art but destroying the BPMs!

I hunted around the internet and found beaTunes to automate the process of fixing the BPM values. It worked very well, and for the few that didn't analyze properly, I used iTunes-BPM from Blacktree to manually tap out the tempo (you can do this in beaTunes apparently, too). Finally all 4500+ songs in my library had the correct BPM value, and I could use my smart playlists to listen to songs with similar tempos, depending on my mood.

Wrong. Within minutes, I noticed that when iTunes would switch to some songs, the BPM value would get changed to an enormous arbitrary number. I would literally be looking at the line in iTunes, and as the song became highlighted, the BPM of 85 would change to 32451!

In my home network, I have two PCs and a MacBook. All my music is stored on a shared drive on one of the PCs. My MacBook iTunes library references this location, as do both my PCs. iTunes is never running on more than one machine at a time, so there's no threat of some kind of write corruption going on (that I can imagine). I wondered if the same thing would happen with the PCs?

I tried skipping through a playlist on the PC with the shared drive. Over the first 25 songs, nothing strange happened. I tried the same thing with the same playlist on the other PC, again no problems. I switched to the MacBook, and at song number 13, boom: the BPM jumped from 121 to 39874. When I went back to the other computers, they now read the BPM as 39874, which makes me think that this error is being written to the ID3 tag, not just the iTunes XML file.

Once I manually change the BPM value, I can play the song on the MacBook without the value jumping. However, seeing as how this strange behaviour seems to be random, and that I had previously used MixMeister, beaTunes, and manual entry to update every single file, I don't think any of my files are "fixed" or safe.

Could this be caused by the fact that the MacBook is accessing the MP3 files over the network using SMB? This behaviour is a show-stopper!

Just for more info: all my computers are updated to iTunes 7. Does anybody else see weird BPM values? Leave me a comment and let me know!

I am blaming the following event on the fact that I was up all last night fixing my iTunes library. Even Apple sucks ass sometimes.

So I go to the bathroom to answer the call of nature. Earlier in the day I showered, but not having need to leave the house, I have been lounging around in my underwear. So I take off my underwear, and seat myself on the throne.

My mind wanders. I am thinking about things I need to do today. I decide to make mashed potatos to take to the Thanksgiving dinner. I think about how to improve a lesson I will be teaching on Tuesday. I try to figure out why iTunes is destroying my music listening experience.

I finish my work, wash up, and leave the bathroom. And I am completely naked. I must have forgotten to put on my underwear.

Check the bathroom: no underwear, anywear. Did I take them off before I entered the john? Check my bedroom, the living room, the office, the hallway: nothing.

I am stumped. Then it hits me. You know how sometimes you mix up what goes where, like when you put the milk in the dishwasher and the dirty glass in the fridge?
Well, I think I did something similar, and instead of putting my underwear back on, I chucked them in the toilet and flushed them into oblivion. Only I guess the dishwasher/fridge thing isn't such a great analogy, because it's not like I wore the toilet paper to balance it out. I just flushed my gitch. I think.

I know I'm not fat in a head-turning way. But I have been in denial about the size of my swelling paunch. Until today.

Last night, I made a bunch of chocolate chip cookies, for a Thanksgiving Dinner I'm attending today (thanks, Amy and Joe!). Some of them got a bit burnt, so I was eating them for breakfast.

Here's the scenario: I was standing up, glass of milk in hand, crunchy cookie en route to mouth. I took a bite, and some crumbs came loose, and landed in my bellybutton.

Let me say that again. The crumbs landed in my bellybutton.

And I was standing up.

I'm teaching a class of 14 grade 11s how to program in a language called C++ (pronounced "see plus plus"). We're working on some simple programs to get the hang of variables ("x"), assignments ("x = 7"), comparisons ("x < 15"), and decisions ("if (x < 15) { launch_missile; }").

At one point, we were investigating how to manipulate numbers using different operators, and so I said, "Okay, somebody just shout out a number for me."

In absolute unison, 14 voices said, "Five!"

Everybody's eyes opened wide, and a few of us said, "Whooooa," and then we laughed. A nervous, slightly disquieted laugh.

There was no reason they should have been stuck on five. We had been using "signed integers" which means they should have been accustomed to offering any number from -32768 to 32767.
Even if we assume that the kids were somehow anchored to selecting a number between 1 and 10, the odds of them all picking 5 are 1 in one hundred trillion.

Is this just more evidence that schools are factories for like-thinkers?