NE NICE things about vacations is that they leave visions and sights in one’s mind. From the special suite at the 20^th floor (facing the sea) my girlfriend and I carry last weekend’s memories with this song.

WING to Valentine’s Day I recently found myself singing again, just like I did about 10 years ago when I was 19 or even 20 (I uploaded some stuff that I amateurely recorded on my PC). Much of it is stuff that Sinatra, my favourite singer, had sung.

NE of my favourite songs as of late is actually one that I knew well as a kid (but never quite paid attention to its lyrics). The composition of this piece would be hard to reproduce (many vocals and orchestra) and this particular version is a lot better than the many alternative ones.

esterday I dumped visual media players — a decision that I stand up for at least for now — instead using more flexible scripts to play just particular parts of songs/tracks that I enjoy, even repeatedly. I use mplayer and bash to do the heavy lifting. This is handy when good segments, e.g. one part of a long concert, need to be isolated. Segments like these are usually to be found in very large files, which can be found either by name:

find -type f | grep PATTERN

To isolate large tracks (by file size), use something like:

find . -type f -size +{10000}k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'

$ find . -type f -size +50000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'

The self-explanatory shell script to write would look something like

mplayer /media/disk-8/Music/volO/AugMix.mp3  -ss 0:20:0 &
sleep 600
killall mplayer
mplayer /media/disk-8/Music/volJ/concert.ogg -ss 0:35:0 &
sleep 200
killall mplayer

Enjoy.

One of my favourite sites these days is the Internet Archive, which contains a vast amount of video (films too) which is free to use and to share. Here is one example, “RetroVision Theater Presents The Frank Sinatra Show”

I watched the film Mamma Mia a couple of days ago with my 12-year-old sister. it was only then that I discovered this song, which dates back to older days — prior to my birth.

So, the song now reminds me of my little sister. I too will have children when I grow older, but the lyrics can be generalised to other family relationships.