Current mood:	relaxed
Current music:	Cobra Strike - 32nd Degree
Entry tags:	computers, photos, reading

Snow day
The view out my front door this morning:

I had to leave my car at work yesterday. I tried driving home, and performed a very tight 180. If it had been on purpose, it would have looked masterful. Alas, I really was attempting to move in a straight line.

Being snowed in gives me some time to try and catch up on some reading. As part of my anti-procrastination declaration, I recently received three huge tomes of SAT prep stuff. On top of those, I finally got around to picking up The Sandman: Endless Nights (which is fantastic, of course) and am currently working through or have yet to start on The Complete Guide to Game Audio (not at all what I was expecting, but I intend to finish it regardless), Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician and Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (haven't even started it yet; it's rather intimidating).

I've been exploring Foobar2000 this morning. I briefly encountered it months ago, when the foobar SPC plugin was the only one to properly emulate the uniquely compressed samples in Motoi Sakuraba's ridiculously awesome Hiouden soundtrack (snatch it from SNES Music if it interests you). There wasn't much to the program then, so I was a bit confused when I witnessed the regulars of #vgmix raving about it. This site can more properly explain why replay gain is such a desirable feature, but I'm already sold on the convenience of playing emulated file formats in Foobar. The "special" installer comes with a wide variety of emu plugins, and each index within a GBS, HES, KSS, NSF or SID file (as well as each SPC within a RAR) is listed seperately on the playlist, making song selection a breeze. I've never experienced such convenience when playing SIDs, and I'm really enjoying hearing a lot of great stuff for the first time.