Quoting jaylake...

However, one problem for me is that over the last few years, respect for my viewpoint has been notably absent from the public discourse, while scorn for it has been very widely promoted. This fuels my anger and frustration. Look at best-sellers like Ann Coulter's Treason or Michael Savage's Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, or programming like the O'Reilly Factor and Rush Limbaugh's radio feed. The right likes to believe it is on the receiving end of instutional bias from the liberal media, but where are the liberal Ann Coulters and Rush Limbaughs? Michael Moore? Al Franken? Not the same thing at all, not nearly the sell through numbers or pervasive media influence that the right has. And not the same abusive, ad hominem attacks on conservatives simply for the sake of being conservatives that are daily fare in the other direction on television and radio.

When liberals speak out passionately we're so easily slapped down for being out of line, for being unreasonable, for being haters. When conservatives do so, they get national talk show gigs.

I should have done this ages ago...

I've got a bunch of stuff in iTunes that was ripped at 320kbps. Why? I don't know. There's not really any point with mp3 of using a higher bit-rate than 192kbps, and 128kbps variable bit-rate with a high quality setting (that's 128 min, using higher rates when the amount of data merits it) is good enough to satisfy my hearing.

With bitrates that high to start out, it's worth down-sampling. That's going to save quite a few gigs on my iPod.