There's something intensely pleasant about the sound of rainfall through an open window. It sounds gentle, with a lot of drips and drops, rather than the thunder of a downpour.

Of course, until I walked out onto the balcony, I had forgotten that it was not covered.

Update

Due to an unfortunate change of wind, I had to close the balcony door to stop the rain from coming into the house. And it's a shame, because Counting Crows - Millar's Angels is a great song for the rainy night.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been playing around with AudioScrobbler. I like the idea of being able to correlate my music habits with other people in order to generate my shopping list.

At work, my music player is going to be tied to Windows, either WMP or Winamp, most likely. The plugins for those are written by the same person, and look exactly the same, as far as I can tell. Except I can't seem to get the Winamp version to connect...

At home, my music is run through mpd. It's a client/server player, so I can use whatever interface I want. And a quick search popped up a python based mpd client that would shuffle data to the AudioScrobbler server. However, it didn't check for song lengths and it didn't wait the appropriate time before submitting. Admittedly, watching for a couple minutes for seeks is hard with mpd. I'm eagerly awaiting the listener protocol to handle this.

As a result of all my displeasure with mpdscrobbler, I decided to put something of my own together. It's not a complex protocol to follow. In fact, I decided to put together a library to handle the AudioScrobbler work and a client that hooked mpd and libscrobbler together.

As of right now, it works. I just checked out my user page, and songs are being updated. However, I can guarantee there are bugs in there. In fact, there will probably be minor design changes before the end of the week. I'm already planning to change the cache file format.

When things evolve into a more stable state, I'll release both the client and library for public consumption. I'm hoping it won't be too long before that happens.

I mentioned previously that playing 2 nights a week barely constitutes maintenance mode for sports training. To try to remedy the situation, I stopped off at the gym and spent some time with a volleyball and a wall.

Solo training isn't easy. Motivation is harder and a lot of drills really depend on two or more people. I'll have to grab a book and do some research on solo drills. Or find some people who want to practice up. In the meantime, I had a chance to run a few serving drills (a feeble attempt to work on my ugly jump serve), some hitting drills and a spattering of setting and passing.

It was hard enough work that I built up a pretty good sweat, so it must have been useful...

If you drove a car at 100 km/h, it would take 10 hours to go that distance.

There's a club at my gym whose goal is to reach that distance on a rowing machine. I met someone the other day who's past that mark, and he mentioned another who is nearing their 4th time around. That's a lot of rowing. As of this afternoon I've clocked on 19000 meters. I'm almost 2% of the way there. At this rate (about 6000m/week), I'll be there in just over 3 years.

That rate is pretty far from accurate, though. I've just been learning what a decent pace for me is, and I've had a couple slow weeks at the gym for whatever reason. In fact, of that 19000m, 8000 has been in the last two days. I have a feeling that I'll settle out to about 12-15000m/week, which should put me in around a year and a half.

You might not want to give up your car just yet.