This BBC guide to video aspect ratios is interesting, however despite extensive personal research on this subject, I’ve never encountered many their numbers anywhere else. Because of how much is now edited with desktop systems like Final Cut Pro, I think a great deal of this information should be noted and dismissed as archaic since these numbers will likely cause minor distortions with modern video tools.

I’ve been listening music more or less exclusively as MP3s since sometime probably in 1998. Through that time I’ve been obsessive about metadata, all the additional information stored in files that gives them context and makes them searchable by existing tools. One thing that always bothered me was when an artist was sorted by their first name instead of their last name. So, in a fit of iconoclasticism* I decided that I’d gradually change the artist tags in all my MP3s to be last name first where appropriate.

This is a textbook lost cause.

So I hereby cede defeat. I never browse anymore anyway, I’ve just got too many songs and unique artist names. Either I listen on full random or use the iTunes search field to find songs.

Organizing by single genre still frustrates and baffles me, with few exceptions I largely ignore them.

* According to Google, this post is only the 107th use of the word ‘iconoclasticism’ on the web. Whenever this page gets indexed, I’ll have a Googlewhack for ‘iconoclasticism mp3‘.