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Tonight the space shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California after being waved off two days in a row from Florida. This got me thinking about the 747 that carries the space shuttle. Wikipedia points out that there are two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. Both were originally flown by airlines, the first by American Airlines, and the second by a Japanese airline. The engines had to be upgraded and all extra weight was stripped from the plane, but there are still a few seats left in the first class section in the front of the plane. There have only been these two and the first one was the one that launched the unpowered shuttle prototype Enterprise back in 1977. The shuttle has landed at Edwards 54 times.

One funny thing in the Wikipedia article is the following picture of one of the mounts on top of the 747 where the shuttle connects to the plane:

Today, like all Thursdays, we went to lunch at Firehouse Subs. But unlike all previous Thursdays, today they had a new coke fountain installed. I had heard about these before, but had not actually seen one. This soda fountain can deliver over 100 different beverages. I was hoping it would be like the World of Coke’s room where they have flavors from around the world, but really a lot of the combinations seem to come from mixing pretty standard flavors. So you can get Coke, but you can also get lime Coke, vanilla Coke, cherry Coke, orange Coke, and raspberry Coke. I got an orange coke and you could see it running orange, so it is probably just mixing Coke and Fanta Orange.

There are a number of flavors of Fanta (including Peach which is supposed to be pretty good) and Sprite, but also Vault and Powerade in addition to Dasani flavored water. I don’t even want most of this stuff. There are also a number of different Zero flavors, so I had a Pibb Zero first which tasted kind of flat to me.

You use a touchscreen which has the basic flavors. When you click one of those you go to a screen of flavors based on that first choice. I didn’t want to spend too long checking everything out because there were people in line behind me, so I couldn’t play around with it much. Two people I ate with tried raspberry Cokes and agreed that it wasn’t very good. The orange Coke was okay, I thought, but I could have probably made one at their old fountain too.

The downside is the machine also makes ice and Firehouse used to have really good ice (the little crushed ice pellets) and now it is just regular ice.

Last night I was at Sears shopping for a dishwasher. Because of where I parked I had to walk past the hardware section, so I thought I would look and see what kind of Torx screwdriver sets they had, even though now I am reasonably happy with the set I got from Home Depot. While looking around (I didn’t find quite what I was looking for) I came across this tool, which made me laugh.

I’m not a Craftsman nut and already have plenty of bottle openers, but I liked the idea. In searching for a picture of it online, I also found out that Sears makes a Craftsman set of grilling tools.

I’m loading up the Archos now that it has a super big hard drive and can hold all of my music. I keep singles in a file called @Downloads. The @ is so that it sorts to the top of the list. But the Archos doesn’t automatically play everything in a folder (I think Rockbox has a preference where it will do that, but that’s not what I want to do anywhere else). So I opened a song in Windows Media Player which is my default MP3 player on my laptop. Then I drag all of the songs in the folder into that window. Now I have a list of all the songs. Then there is a Now Playing drop-down list where I can choose “Shuffle List Now”. Then from that same list I can choose “Save List As” and then change the type to m3u instead of WMP’s default.

Now I have a shuffled playlist. This is better than just regular shuffling because regular shuffling will repeat songs. The playlist it creates has all of these extra lines in it that start with #EXTINF. I’m not sure exactly what those do, but I think they help generate all of the song info faster. WinAmp playlists are the same way.

I did a search for how to strip out the EXTINF lines and found a guy who knows way too much about DOS. He said that you should start a command window (Start:Run and type cmd is the fastest) then navigate to the folder you want to go to and type in the following magical line where +clean.m3u is the name of the playlist without the extra lines in it:

findstr /i /b /V “#EXTINF” “+downloads.m3u” > “+clean.m3u”

This is pretty good, but I still had a bunch of blank lines (I could probably get rid of them by modifying the command above, but I don’t know how to do that). So I opened the new file in Notepad, copied everything, pasted it into a blank Word document, and searched for ^p^p and replaced it with ^p. Then I selected all, copied, and pasted it back into the Notepad file. Finally, just delete the downloads.m3u file and rename clean.m3u.

Here is what the switches mean:

/i Case insensitive

/b Match text at the beginning of the line

/V Print only lines that do not match the pattern

Then you do the file name to look in and then type > and the output file, otherwise it will just print it to the screen.

Later I found out how to strip blank lines from a text file:

findstr /v “^$” “+clean.m3u” > “+downloads.m3u”

Now all you have to do is delete +clean.m3u since the original +downloads.m3u will be overwritten by this second command. Apparently ^ is the shortcut for beginning of line and $ is a shortcut for the end of a line, so an entire blank line is ^$.

One of the advantages of the Archos is that it uses a standard notebook hard drive, specifically a 2.5 inch ATA hard drive (current notebooks use SATA drives which are not the same). So ever since I bought it, I knew there was the tantalizing possibility of upgrading the hard drive to something bigger than the original 20 GB. When I wrote an entry about looking for a cheap used hard drive, Jeb offered up his broken iBooks as possible sources of a new drive. One problem was he didn’t remember how big the hard drives were and Apple doesn’t give iBooks model numbers to help find out (Dell gives every computer a service tag which allows you to at least look up the original configuration for that specific computer).

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