What did you do this weekend?

I have a cold - first one in a while - so I mostly just felt mildly crap all weekend long. Today was day 4, and it has been the worst day so far in terms of actually feeling lousy - I had such a headache this morning that I could hardly move. Covid tests came back negative though, so I have that going for me.

I got quite merrily drunk at my parents' retirement party on Saturday evening, and then spent Sunday feeling worse for wear, and just sat in my PJs watching how i met your mother with my housemate all day. Honestly a much needed day of recharge and I feel prepared to take on the week now

This weekend was pretty lazy, but a needed recharge period. On Friday me and my partner went rock climbing with some friends and then played Pictionary for a little while.

Saturday and Sunday were maintenance days, we cleaned the apartment with our new vacuum and they gave me a haircut. Only real thing of note was we went to a local dog park for the first time since we moved here with a couple we have met around the area. That was a really good time and our dog enjoyed it as he hasn't been to a dog park since last summer.

Saturday, I spent an inordinate amount of time waiting that ultimately felt like an entire day wasted. My father's birthday was last week, so planned to get together on Saturday for lunch. That morning his car was supposed to be picked up by a tow truck and taken to a body shop for repairs.
The tow truck was then delayed from the morning to the "late morning". Fine with me, lunch was planned for 1pm.
Then the tow truck was delayed to 1pm.
Then 2pm.
Then it was "on the way" and be there by 2:30pm.
Then 3:30pm.
It finally arrived at 4:45pm, loaded, and left at 5:15pm.
Keep in mind that I live a little more than half an hour away from my father, I left at noon to get coffee and head his way. I received the text that the tow truck would be there at 1pm at 12:45pm. So I ran a couple of "errands" (as in not actual errands, but a "Hey, I can pop in here while I'm in the area" sort of thing) and took my time doing so as to not just be sitting around or driving all the way back home, just to turn around and head back to him. By 2:45pm I'm out of things to do/places I'm willing to go in the area and likely spend money I hadn't intended on, so I just parked in a quiet area under a tree and took a nap.
I have my faults, but punctuality isn't among them and being on time is one of the easiest things possible to do, so it's a pet peeve of mine when someone wastes my time because of their own lack of punctuality or ability to provide appropriate time estimates, such as this body shop/tow truck driver. What should have been a 2-2.5 hour endeavor to travel to my father, go to lunch, drop him off, and travel home ended up taking 7 hours from the moment I left my house to the moment I returned because of the inability for someone, allegedly professional, to show up on time.
It ultimately costs me even more time, because it robs me of the willingness to work on something else. An example is that I spent a good portion of Sunday working on my cars, as anyone with a hobby can attest, you get into a groove when you're working and that momentum can allow you to continue longer than planned or ordinarily expected. Had I been home at 3pm, I'd have started working on the Tercel again, got into a rhythm, and likely continued well into the evening running an extension cord to have light (as I still don't have electricity in the workshop yet), and made much more progress. Instead I arrived home just before sunset with no such motivation to start on the Tercel knowing that any pace that could be reached would just be ended shortly after as my circadian rhythm would be telling me it's time to go to sleep.
And the lunch-turned-early-bird-special-dinner was disappointing.

Sunday, I worked on the Tercel some more. Mostly planning fuel lines and prepping for other things, nothing particularly photogenic or noteworthy as I'm in a middle ground stage where little things get addressed before the big ticket items get installed.

This weekend was the tail-end of spring break at my university, so I mostly spent it getting ready for classes (and trying to avoid that fact as much as possible). I emailed a bunch of offices about preparing to get an summer internship, dropping second-half classes I won't have time for this semester, and seeing if I can study away in a different state for a semester next year. I feel like I'm trying to make up for lost time since I'd originally planned a lot of these ideas freshman year right before COVID hit, and I don't know whether it'll be possible to make everything work like I envisioned it. However, I think actually talking to the relevant individuals to see what my options are will be a lot more helpful than just pondering all the unknowns and potential roadblocks for what I want to accomplish.

Went to see a fun little exhibition on Nordic travel posters at Nordiska museet called Come to Norden.

I'm a sucker for vintage graphic design/advertising, so it was a fun way to spend a late-ish morning wandering round. The collection was much broader than I'd presumed – with some real gems – but the exhibition layout was a little unintuitive.

Disappointing meatballs were had for lunch at the gallery cafe.

One of my primary complaints about the move to streaming music has been that there are certain albums that just plain aren't available (e.g. Pure Reason Revolution's Amor Vincit Omnia). Up until now I've kept a separate music app with some albums I'm not willing to give up, but I hate that they're not integrated or available in my main music app.

This weekend I investigated Apple Music's "music locker" type service, which is something I had heard existed but could find little definitive information about online. The feature falls under the umbrella of "iTunes Sync" and gives me exactly what I'm looking for! I can add albums to artists and they show up in my library right alongside the streaming ones on my phone. They also show up in my third party apps (Marvis and Albums) and I can add songs to playlists just like streaming songs.

Once they're in, they're pretty much indistinguishable from the streaming offers. Here's the page for my beloved Alphabeat, where The Spell is a synced upload and all others are available for streaming via Apple Music. Meanwhile, here's xyce -- an artist that isn't available for streaming at all. Everything there is an upload.

I'm immensely happy that I now have seamless access to this chunk of my library that has remained separate for so long. That said, while the outcome is pretty much perfect, the road to get there is BUMPY.

The first speedbump is that there's no way to get music into the system from an iPhone or Linux computer. It might be possible through WINE or something but I wasn't ready to try to tackle that.

Thus I installed iTunes on my Windows machine that I only use for gaming.

The second hiccup is that FLAC may or may not be compatible with iTunes/Apple Music. Searching this up revealed lots of conflicting information and nothing with definitive certainty, so I decided to play it safe and go with Apple's lossless codec. I thus redownloaded a lot of Bandcamp files in ALAC and converted some of my FLAC CD rips to ALAC using fre:ac.

This brings me to the third hiccup, which is that even if you add stuff in a lossless format, iTunes Sync compresses it to 256Kbps AAC. I don't mind this as I very much doubt my bad ears can tell the difference -- it just seems odd that Apple Music made a big push for lossless on streaming but doesn't match it here.

The final hiccup is tagging your music. I use MusicBrainz Picard to tag my files (which is amazing), but making sure that the albums end up where they're supposed to on Apple Music means I've had to do a few cycles of uploading-deleting-tweaking-reuploading. Thus far I've figured out the following: iTunes needs the Album Artist tag to match exactly and IS case sensitive. Furthermore, the Artist Sort Order and Album Artist Sort Order fields in Picard will default to sorting by last name which has to be manually corrected, as Apple Music sorts by first name.

I've already added a bunch of albums, but I've stuck to ones that are single artist only and don't have any fancy tagging footwork. The next step is to try to figure out how iTunes handles multi-artist releases under a single album artist. I'm hoping they're just lumped under the album artist, but I suspect I might end up adding a whole bunch of one-off artists to my list, which is what I don't want. After that comes the actual Various Artists releases.

I took my kids geocaching--we hunted down and found our first three caches (all the ones within walking distance of the house). One of them took a while to find and ended up being multi-stage, but that only made it all the more exciting when we finally got it. We're all hooked and already planning another hunt for next weekend which will probably be in a park that's a little further from home.

Skiing! It’s been pretty awesome so far. Snow in Tahoe isn’t wonderful, but it is decent. My dad dislocated his shoulder our first day, so that was definitely a bummer. I also need to buy new boots and insoles. I have expensive custom insoles in my ski boots, but in the years since I got them, I found much better footbed support for my daily wear shoes, and my ski boot soles just don’t cut it anymore. I am planning on doing that after this trip.