LastFM cheats big time

Earlier this week, after a refresh of my LastFM homepage, I saw my scrobble count reduced from 6555 to 62-hundred-and-something. At first I thought is was just a glitch since I had experienced something similar before, around the end of the week when the weekly charts are compiled. In those cases, the scrobble count got fixed after a few hours. However, this time the count never got fixed.

After some time, I got my scrobble count up to 6543 again. That was last night. Since then, I guess I played about a dozen tracks more before I went off to bed. Today, this evening, before refreshing again, I took a screenshot of my scrobble count, expecting the count after the refresh to be something around 6560, take or leave some. I refreshed, and lo and behold, my scrobble count was reduced to 6294! LastFM definitely cheats on its users.

At 2007-10-28, sometime in the evening:


At 2007-10-29, around 2015:

New rubber

This week, I had the tyres on my bike replaced after they lasted just over 25000km. The last few thousand kilometres it became quite clear they needed urgent replacement.
Motorcycle tyres are round, not square like car tyres. This is because we lean over in corners and we would like to have a decent grip with the road in these situations. Especially in these situations. When motorcycle tyres get older, they square up because there's only so many corners you can insert in any road before the straights take over again. So, because, on the whole, we have to drive vertically more than we can drive leaned over, tyres wear more in the center than on the sides, leading, eventually, to squareness.
When tyres get too square, their grip with the road lessens in corners, leading to dangerous situations. Especially in wet weather and/or on dirty or badly maintained roads (of which we have plenty a supply). The last few thousand kilometres, I had to be more and more careful in corners and I could feel the rear end slipping away with an alarming increase in frequency. I could also feel when the squarest part of the tyre hit the road: from that moment on, it becomes very difficult to lean over further. Very dangerous if you have to cut short a corner!

Now, with new tyres, I have switched from a thread depth of 1.6 to 1.7mm (1.6mm being the legal minimum and 2mm being an informal safety minimum) to a whopping 4 and 6mm front and rear respectively (front tyres wear less than rear ones).
Not only have I gained grip in corners, I also got a lot more manoeuvrability again: because the contact surface between tyre and road has become smaller I can more easily steer than before.

I sincerely hope they will last at least some 20000km again, because they cost me about €450.

LastFM rate of scrobbling

Some people accuse me of playing classical music in order to get my track count on LastFM increased faster. Since all those pieces are cut up into tiny little movements, they reason, I can scrobble more per time unit than they can.
Well, they're wrong. My collection of classical CD rips (single copies for personal use of CDs I own, legal under Belgian law) consists of 196 hours, 35 minutes and 24 seconds in 2486 tracks, which makes for an average of 4 minutes and 45 seconds per track.
On the other hand, my collection of non-classical rips consists of 90 hours, 40 minutes and 19 seconds in 1230 tracks, making a track a meagre 4 minutes 25 seconds on average!

I do admit that I have indeed a number of very short classical tracks (especially in vocal works) that are only a few seconds in length. But I also have slightly longer tracks too, that are well over 10 minutes in length. So in the end, it all evens out.