McNaught's Comet

Brett thoughtfully let us know about McNaught's Comet, the brightest comet in 40 years! On Monday evening Sarah and I went up Mt. Archer to watch it. Unfortunately the cloud cover and haze was terrible, making it impossible to see the sun set let alone a comet! I returned on Wednesday evening but it was just as bad. This was pretty depressing, since the comet's peak brightness was on Monday and it's supposed to fade over the week, so I was afraid we'd miss it altogether.
Nevertheless we gave it another chance last night, Thursday, and we were finally rewarded! I wish we'd brought binoculars or a telescope, but thanks to the tripod Sarah gave me for Christmas, I was able to take some pretty decent shots with my wannabe camera ;)
(click for higher res!)


No comet here, just a nice view of the city under a gentle sunset before the comet became visible.


Pretty good shot of the comet over the city. Bonus aeroplane to the left ;) There's a bit of camera movement blurring the lights; I mustn't have tightened the tripod enough.


Just the comet.


Just the comet again.

I might go up again tonight to check it out again... I reckon it's pretty exciting :)

Chocolate Coated Coffee Beans

At the end of last year, on a beautiful day for a ride to Roslyn Bay, over a coffee by the water's edge, I was introduced to a most marvellous confection: a single chocolate coated coffee bean, a tiny capsule of heaven on my saucer. My travelling companion, Aiden, told me of a magical coffee store far to the south where he had seen them previously. But could I get them in Rockhampton?

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I spent the rest of the year (ok, so that wasn't very long) searching in vain for a source of these wonders. Darrel Lea apparently occasionally stock them, but not any more. Same for Capricorn Roast. In desperation, I widened my search to Bundaberg (and my family thought I was there to visit them, shh, don't tell them!) but still my efforts bore no fruit.
Long long ago, in a better time, there was a gourmet food store in Rockhampton. But it closed, and with its passing the land was plunged into a period of darkness. Still, some spoke in hushed whispers of another store, one that yet survived. No phonebook told of this fabled store, and for a long time I didn't believe the rumours, but with the success of my quest hanging precariously in the balance I was prepared to turn to any small glimmer of hope. So, with Sarah faithfully at my side, I set out once more.
Far away we went, following the vague second-hand directions of Sarah's mum who spoke a traveller who claimed to have stumbled upon this store by chance in her wanderings, but who had not ventured inside. Over the mighty Fitzroy river, down Denham, and across to the far side of the Bruce Highway - surely we had gone too far then? - and still there was no sign of any gourmet food store. At the foot of the mountainous Range we were forced to turn back, resigned to the bitter taste of failure. But as we wearily turned around, Sarah, with her keen eyesight, cried "Stop! Stop!" - she had found it!
I was to be forgiven for missing it as we passed it the first time; the store had the confounding name of "Tables & Tots", and only in small unassuming print did it say "Gourmet Goodies". Excitedly, we went inside. The store was a confused jumble of furniture, tableware, and bric-a-brac piled on every available surface. But along one wall were exotic foodstuffs, and at the back of the store I found at last what I had been searching for: chocolate coated coffee beans... in no less than three mouth-watering flavours!
I immediately bought a small packet of espresso flavoured beans, which I prefer to the cafe latte flavoured beans I have just returned to buy after consuming the first lot. I have learnt that approximately 5 beans equals one shot of espresso - bear in mind that not all the caffeine from grounds makes it into the espresso. It's very hard to stop at just 5 beans, but so far I've been strong.
Thus ends the tale of my quest for the chocolate coated coffee beans!

Microsoft Zune

(This is a follow-up on the previous post on Windows Media Player.)
Zune is Microsoft's new portable music player and software of the same name. It's analogous to iPod and iTunes. Since Windows Media Player 11 was promising but ultimately flawed, I decided to give Zune a try.
Zune is basically identical to WMP (see previous post), just with a different skin. However, it does two things WMP doesn't:

1. Supports AAC natively
2. Imports playlists and ratings from iTunes

These are very very good things. That leaves only two downsides to Zune compared to iTunes:

1. As with WMP, it stubbornly resets my viewing preferences every time I switch panes
2. As with WMP, it lacks a way to duplicate Party Shuffle's automatic song selection

Nevertheless, given that it's so much faster than iTunes and has nifty playlist management - and imported all my playlists from iTunes - I'm going to give it a try for a while.

Edit:
In iTunes, you set a checkbox called "Compilation" to indicate that an album is a compilation. In WMP/Zune, you set a separate field for each track called "Album Artist" to something like "Various Artists" to indicate a compilation. Unfortunately Zune didn't import the "Compilation" meta-data from iTunes, and this was messing up my browsing experience (in both WMP and Zune).
After setting the "Album Artist" to "Various Artists" for all compilation CDs, the browsing experience became far, far, far better, so much so that the default view for each pane works quite well, and it's no longer so annoying that it resets the view each time you change pane.

In summary, the WMP/Zune browsing interface just got a lot better in my opinion; on par or superior to iTunes' 3-pane browser. *thumbs up*

Windows Media Player 11

Thanks to a network problem I've been unable to use iTunes (no library database) so I thought I'd try out Windows Media Player 11 at Carey's suggestion. This is my experience...

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Behind the screens
The first technical difference between iTunes and WMP is the way the library is managed. In iTunes you drag files into the library to add them whenever you acquire new files. This is a pain because you lose all song-related data like play count and stars and playlists if you want te rearrange the files on your HDD - you have to remove them from iTunes and add them again each time. In WMP, you specify folders for WMP to monitor, and all music in those folders is automatically in your library. This actually works pretty well, and somehow it manages to keep track of files even if I move them around while WMP is closed (I know it's actually keeping track of the files and not just removing/adding the file each time, because details like the play count are kept intact and the file itself is not modified to store this information).

The second technical difference is that WMP unfortunately doesn't support the AAC music format. That sucks because I rip most of my music as AAC, since it's an MPEG standard format. I expected that any decent music player would support it, but sadly not WMP. You can use third-party tools to add AAC support to WMP (meta-data support and codecs) but it's not perfect: the progress slider doesn't work for AAC files. (these codecs might fix the problem but it's commercial software) By the way, I don't think you can simplify the comparison to WMP = MP3 + WMA formats, and iTunes = MP3 + AAC formats, since a) iTunes can import WMA files by converting them, and b) AAC is standard and WMA is proprietary.

User interface
Using iTunes as a baseline, there are some positives and negatives to WMP's user interface.
WMP doesn't have iTunes' 3-pane browser that sorts by genre, artist, and album simultaneously. That means you have to flip between different screens to browse by those different categories. That might not be such a nuisance, except that each time you change screen, it resets your location in all the others, so you have to scroll down through your entire library to get back to where you were each time. It also resets the column by which you've sorted that category, which is really annoying. As a plus, though, WMP allows you to navigate the library in many more ways than iTunes (which would be nice, if only it remembered my preferences! grrr...)

Playlist management likewise has its ups and downs. Instead of Party Shuffle, WMP has Now Playing, which works slightly differently. Everything you play automatically goes through Now Playing - generally every song that's currently showing in the pane you double-click in is added to Now Playing, as opposed to iTunes playing either the library or a playlist or Party Shuffle. That's pretty neat, because you can browse to an album, or do a text search, double click a song and all of those will go into Now Playing and be saved there, even if you then browse away or do a different text search. Another neat feature in WMP is the playlist pane, which can be set to show either a playlist or Now Playing, and sits to the right of the main view. That makes it easy to drag music over to queue it up or reorganise the play order, without leaving the main library view. The downside of WMP's playlist management is that I can't find any way to mimic iTunes' Party Shuffle ability to automatically and randomly draw a certain number of songs from a specified playlist. In WMP you have to manually make sure there's always music queued up.

Performance
Ordinarily performance in programs like these, running on modern computers, shouldn't matter. Unfortunately, the Windows port of iTunes 6 was slow, and iTunes 7 is just terrible. Browsing WMP, in comparison, feels like casting off shackles and breathing freely once more.

Overall
I'll still use iTunes, however that's mainly due to where WMP foolishly stumbles rather than to where iTunes shines. WMP's inability to remember my viewing preferences and poor handling of AAC is terrible. Maybe in the next version WMP will come out ahead.