iTunes Automatic Rating, or Why Your Gnarls Barkley Album Mysteriously Has Five Stars

For a long time, I struggled with how to rate my songs in iTunes. I wanted the rating I assigned to a song to sum up my long history of feelings for that song with but a single integer. I wanted to know that I could go to my five-star list for a surefire hit, or prune out some one-star songs when I was getting low on disk space.

But when I was a child, I thought like a child. The problem is, my tastes change. I constantly surprise myself when I repeat a song 3 or 4 times in a row, only to find out it's a mediocre two-star. I also look sheepishly on some of the garbage I rated 5 stars when I was in a weird mood.

It dawned on me that maybe the most accurate, mood-agnostic way to determine my opinion of a song is something I call the play ratio. Specifically, it is the ratio of the number of times I've "played" a song to the number of times I've either "played" or "skipped" it. If I've listened to a song 17 times and never skipped it, the ratio is 1; if I skip it every time it comes up in random mode, it's a 0. If I've listened 6 and skipped 4, it's a 0.6, and so on.

Hacking the Car-Buying Process

EDIT: Sorry, the comment spam was getting out of hand on this post. If you've got something you want to say, email me.

EDIT 2: I've gotten a few emails about the spreadsheet I use. Here it is:

• carpaycalc.xls

I bought a brand new black Mazda 3s about 5 months ago. Shortly afterward, a question about the car-buying process popped up at Ask MetaFilter, one of the best web sites ever. I wrote what ended up being an entirely-too-long response to the question. It got good reviews from lots of people, including a good friend of mine who ended up using it to get a better price than me on a similar car! I still get emails about it every few weeks or so from someone else trying not to get screwed. Here it is, in its entireity. After reading this, check out This article at edmunds.com that describes selling cars from 'the inside.' Then check out this MeFi thread.

I'll try to be as brief as possible, but I had an ALMOST-perfect car buying experience recently. I'll post what I did, and then throw in blurbs where I felt I could have improved. It's long, but I needed to type this up for a friend who's about to buy a car anyway. Take it all with a grain of salt.