mahiwaga

Still on my retrospective tour through my blog (which took me way back)

TIL:

1. The band name is Yazoo. Apparently, it only got shortened to Yaz in North America.
2. Vince Clarke used to be in Depeche Mode. Which totally makes sense, soundwise.

3. Enrique Iglesias did a cover of “Only You”.

I am a sucker for any and all mashups no matter how terrible they are and a lot of them aren’t terrible.

So I haven’t listened to this yet, but I stumbled upon Yeezer, a mashup of Kanye West and Weezer.

• Kanye West and Weezer meet on the greatest mashup album of all time • 2015 Oct 6 • A.V. Club

• The Kanye West/Weezer mashup album no one asked for is actually pretty good • 2015 Oct 4 • The Daily Dot

This naturally led me to the Taylor Swift/Aphex Twin mashup album entitled Aphex Swift

• David Rees’s Taylor Swift-Aphex Twin mashup album will win the Internet • 2014 Oct 26 • The Daily Dot

And reminded me of the fact that Ryan Adams covered the entirety of Taylor Swift’s 1989

While wading through all these old blog posts, I keep running into mangled Unicode characters. I’ve had this problem ever since I started blogging in 2000, but I never knew the source of the error.

Apparently it’s because whatever software I was using to handle my blog posts was misreading UTF-8 as Windows 1252 or ISO-8859-1.

This led me to creating a Ruby script to replace the most common mangled Unicode characters I’ve come across so far, adding more as I get through my old blog posts.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
input = File.read(ARGV[0])

map = { '•' => '•',
        '—' => '—',
        '’' => '\'',
        '…' => '…',
        '≥' => '≥',
        'ö' => 'ö',
        '“' => '“',
        'â€' => '”',
        'é' => 'é',
        '®' => '®' }
re = Regexp.union(map.keys)
output = input.gsub(re, map)

File.write(ARGV[0], output)

(This technique was lifted from a Stack Overflow answer on how to replace multiple substrings in a single call to the gsub method.)

It so happens that a lot of the mangled Unicode characters I run into used to be smart quotes, and I stumbled upon this phenomenon:

• Smart Quotes are Killing the Apostrophe • 2013 May 6 • New Republic

I miss reading Barking Up the Wrong Tree. I used to read it a lot more when Google Reader was still alive. Now I’m lucky if a bunch of people share links from it to Facebook.

I’ve been meaning to read this article for a while.

• New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy • 2015 Sep 20 • Barking Up the Wrong Tree

In summary:

1. The Most Important Question To Ask When You Feel Down: What am I grateful for?
2. Label Negative Feelings
3. Make That Decision
4. Touch People

Makes a lot of sense!