Are Seven

I’m a glutton. I want to take in everything at once in huge gulps. I’m not even done with one bite before I want another one.  I should stop to savor, but I just have a hard time with self-control.

I have the same problem with music.  I want to listen to everything at once, and in the days when I listened to CDs, I would listen to a minute or two of one song before that reminded me of another song that I wanted to listen to immediately.  I would listen to music for hours, but rarely, if ever, finish a full song.

Things are a little bit different now that I’m totally digital. The fact that iTunes won’t mark a song as played until it’s reached the very end of the song means that I’ll listen to a full song so that I can give it credit, which satisfies the part of me obsessed with stats.

But things are also a little different now in that I can no longer look at a few hundred CDs and decide what to listen to, and no longer have a car with 10 CDs that I never change out, meaning that it’s harder to get to know songs very well.  If I don’t like things right off the bat, I have all of my favorite music right in my iPod to listen to.  It’s too tempting to just switch something off if it doesn’t immediately impress.

I’ve turned to playlists made in iTunes to help me discover and re-discover music and to allow me to be a total glutton, to just open up my ears and let the music slide in.  Now that my library’s over 21,000 songs, I need to be reminded of what I haven’t listened to, and with the speed at which I’m adding stuff, I need something that will force me to re-listen to things; to give them a chance for a while and let them sink in.

The first playlist is a little complex, but it’s one of my favorites.  I call it Recent Radio, and it’s the substitute for listening to CDs in my car.  It takes everything from the current year, won’t play anything I’ve listened to in the last few days, makes songs move off of the list after two months, but keeps the songs that I’ve rated three songs or above in for four months (to provide a little more of that “this songs reminds me of this year” spice).  The recipe takes three different playlists, thanks to iTunes not allowing for “unless” statements in their playlists.

Playlist One: “Radio all”
Match all of the following rules:

• Year is 2008 (or whatever the current year is, obviously)
• Date Added is in the last 2 months
• Last Played is not in the last 4 days
• Rating is not 2 stars
• Rating is not 1 star (so that I can remove anything from the playlist that I don’t want to hear anymore)

Playlist #2: “Radio Select”
Match all of the following rules:

• Year is 2008
• Rating is greater than two stars
• Last Played is not in the last 4 days
• Date Added is in the last 4 months

Playlist #3: “Recent Radio” (this is the one that combines the two)
Match any of the following rules:

• Playlist is “Radio All”
• Playlist is “Radio Select”

These playlists give me a fantastic stroll through all of the music from the year, forcing me to listen to stuff that I might otherwise ignore.

But what about the thousands of other songs in my library?  There’s tons of stuff in there that I love, but my constant curiosity about new music keeps me from really listening.  For this, I recently came up with my “Random Neglected” playlist:

• Last played is not in the last 12 months
• Rating is not one star
• Rating is not two stars
• Limit to 100 items

It’s extremely simple, but even as I listen to it now, I get huge spoonfuls of songs that I haven’t listened to in at least a year.  It takes in my Never Played playlist as well, and gives me an incredible overview of my library, while not taking in some of the stuff that I’ve given more than enough attention to.

Obviously, you could change these playlists to suit your own tastes.  If you aren’t as into new music as I am, you could simply remove the “Year is 2008″ from the Radio playlists and just have a good overview of the music you’ve added in.  You could decrease the time of the neglected playlist to let a little more in.

I’m telling you this only because it’s extremely important and could well save your life one day.  I hope to God you read the whole thing.

My latest thought: Apple’s fortunes will take a dive again, just like they did in the late ’90’s.

Now, pretty much everyone who knows me knows I’m a Mac guy.  I converted back when iPods were still only available for Macs, I really love my MacBook Pro, they’ve done an amazing job with marketing and making a computer that’s a joy to use and upgrade, and I’m planning on buying an iPhone, though I’ve been increasingly hesitant about that.

I learned computers on Macs.  But I switched in the late 90’s to PCs because Macs cost 2 to 3 times as much, didn’t have as much software being made for it, and what software there was didn’t come out until well after the PC version had been released.  It was a no-brainer at the time, and it seemed that way to many people, as Apple almost went bust before the iPod and OSX were released.

A lot has changed: applications are increasingly web-based, which means it doesn’t really matter what OS you’re using, and the software and games are almost always released for both PC and Mac at the same time, which is an argument in favor of Apple being able to stay alive.

But there’s no getting around the fact that Macs, iPods and iPhones are gourmet electronics, and it’s the gourmet things that are the first to go when people need to trim their budgets. You can already get twice the system for the same amount of money (or even less) if you buy a Windows machine over a Mac.  Again, I love my Mac, but I would never recommend to anyone to buy it.  And I think that, as the economy worsens and gas prices go up, it’s going to be harder and harder for people to justify spending that kind of money.

The field is wide open for a hardware maker to compete with Apple.  They need to develop their own, free flavor of Linux that focuses on the same kind of “it just works” ease-of-use that Macs have and then make their money by selling high-quality, good-looking machines.  Do the same thing for mp3 players and phones.  Make millions.

Blogger in Draft
After saying last week that Blogger is well behind Wordpress in terms of features, Blogger goes and releases a bunch of new features for Blogger In Draft, their test version of the blogging software.  And it reminds me why I love Google.  Their products may not be perfect, but you always know that they’re working on it. It makes it a whole lot easier to be happy with the free products that they keep putting out.

There was an interesting post today on Google Blogoscoped about an internet sensation that goes by (apparently) Fred, and is wildly popular with…people.  Kids, presumably.  The video itself is worth watching, at the very least so you know about Fred, and you can kind of see how it’d be pretty hilarious to junior high and high school and high college students. Like, say, an Adam Sandler movie, it may not be that funny at first, but you can see how repeated viewings and–more importantly–repeatedly quoting it with your friends could turn it into a sensation.

It’s the main point of the GB post that’s a thought starter: that these videos have tens of millions of views, and yet the vast majority of us have never even heard of it. GB quotes a LA Times column:

That an act with millions of fans could escape the popular attention is more evidence of the digital fissuring of our culture. As we ensconce ourselves ever further in our respective demographics, personal and professional, we continue to drift apart from the people right next to us, until even an iceberg holding 4 million tweens can float by unnoticed.

It’s over-dramatic, maybe, but it’s pretty dead-on.  There’s always been pockets of people that have their own interests and cultures and phrases and dances that are never even glanced at by the mainstream, and there’s always been the standard rifts between kids and adults, but this is different.  There’s now the ability to have enormous pop culture phenomenons that are never registered or reacted to by the rest of culture.  The internet world.

Yet…while there’s the possibility to have these sorts of movements, it’s also much, much easier for anyone to find out about it. You don’t need to be immersed in these pockets of culture to understand them.  A quick look up on Wikipedia or a check-in with Google tells you in about five seconds just about everything you want to know. There’s no more spending weeks wondering, “What the hell is this rick-rolling that everyone’s talking about?”  Even this afternoon, a co-worker sent me an email that said nothing but “SSIA”.  A quick search, and I knew it meant “subject says it all”.  Mystery solved.

It may be easier than ever to get out of tune with trends, but it’s easier than ever to quickly find the key and sing along.  If you want.

It was inevitable. The cannibalization has started. I started up another music blog and I end up writing about the song that’s been on my mind all week, which means I’d only be repeating myself on Fine Tune Friday and nobody wants that. The song I would have been writing about was the irritating-but-irresistible “If This Hat Is Missing I Have Gone Hunting” by Get Well Soon, but I already wrote about it.

Instead, enjoy another nice slice from the same album, a song called “I Sold My Hands For Food So Please Feed Me”, a song that isn’t irritating at all, but is actually really lovely. It reminds me a little of Radiohead’s “Let Down”, which is maybe a little bit too much of a comparison stretch, since that’s one of my favorite songs of all time, but it’s in the same vein. Enjoy.

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New to my library this last week:

• Mates of State, Re-arrange Us. Nothing we haven’t heard before from these folks, but nice all the same.
• Sigur Ros, Med sud I eyrum vid spilum endalaust. I think I might be one of the few people who like Sigur Ros more with each album they release. I never got into the first one too much, but each release has hit me harder. This one is great.
  
• Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Lie Down In The Light. A combination of recommendations from Pitchfork, Christian, Thomas and good ol’ Limo Crazy’s Muxtape made me cave and buy it. It’s great.
  
• Various, Ken Burns Jazz - The Story Of America’s Music. As I slowly plow through this, I finally broke down and bought the whole thing on Amazon. I’m sure that jazz purists would laugh at anyone learning about the history of jazz through Ken Burns, but…I love it. It’s a nice capsule.
• Girl Talk, Feed The Animals. More short-attention-span mashups that’s…pretty much exactly the same. A whole lot of fun, but not a whole lot more.
  

Gotten anything good lately?

I’m going to do my best impression of Paul Revere as a Tech guy here and let you know that there’s a little bit of a bug in gmail, where if you enter your reply into the text box below a message, it does “reply-all” instead of just “reply”.  So if you’ve noticed that you’ve replied-all when you didn’t mean to or are getting really inconsequential emails sent to reply-all…that’s why. It’s probably safer to actually click on the “Reply” button instead of just up and typing in the box at the bottom.

And while I’m at it, there’s a Google Calendar phishing attempt going around, too, which you can read about here. As with this and everything else, it’s always safest to enter in passwords only by typing in the address in a browser. People like Google or your bank or credit card company will NEVER write to you saying that they need you to enter in your password.

In spite of all this, I still say you’re a fool if you don’t use gmail.

One of the signs of aging is when you’ve been over the legal drinking age for so long that it starts to become kind of flattering when you get carded, the thought being that, even though you’re well, WELL above the age of 21, you’re still getting mistaken as someone who could easily be on the cusp, still in your early 20’s.

I don’t buy it. Getting gray hair and then losing it is enough of a pain. There should be some glory in looking well over the age, and that glory should be that I should walk into any old bar, order a drink and have someone bring it to me. I know that I don’t look like I’m 24 or 19; I look like I’m 36, or 30 at least. Let’s put my gray hairs to work instead of letting them hang out there on the temples, all lazy-like. Listen to those hairs. They’re talking, saying, “I’ve done this before. Many times.” Yes, I’d be flattered if I thought that someone sincerely suspected that I was in my early 20’s, but no one does. So let me get some advantage out of that.

I know that spots that sling the devils drink “have to ask”, but just fair warning to all that when asked to get out my wallet and pull my ID out of it and have bouncers pore over it with a flashlight or waiters act like they’re paying me a big, fake compliment: I won’t give a big smile along with my ID and say, “Ha ha! Thanks for asking!” I’ll frown and give a frustrated sigh that’s so immature that maybe then I’ll feel that there’s justification for asking for my ID.

For those of you following along at home, you’ll know that I’ve set aside Tuesday as a day to talk about various topics from the tech world that strike my fancy. It’s not enough to do a blog, but it’s enough to ramble on incoherently about. Come on along!

Anywhere.fm
I finally gave anywhere.fm a try this week. Think of it as an online iTunes, and you can share it. I was looking for ways that I could listen to music at my new, lonely solitary-confined office, and this seemed as good as any. Well sir, it turns out that it’s still FAR from being a replacement for iTunes. The upload works somewhat, but isn’t great. In theory, you could put your whole library in there…if you have several days.

I tried this for about half a day, but I realized that my dream of having my entire music library somewhere off in the cloud, available from truly anywhere, is still a wait away.

Open Source vs. Pay Software
I found myself with a very frustrating problem last week: I need to to use Microsoft Project, but the money to buy it was still in the works, so I had to deal first with a lousy trial version, then switch over to OpenProj, which didn’t work exactly as advertised, so I had to recreate and entire project plan.

Ultimately, this is why I usually go with Open Source. It’s not that I’m such a cheapskate that I just refuse to pay for anything that I can get for free (though I am a cheapskate). It’s that you so often have to jump through so many hoops to buy something that it becomes a detriment on your time as well as your wallet. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

The music industry is finally learning its lesson, and you can get unprotected mp3s on Amazon. And I’ve started buying most of my music again. It wasn’t the fact that I had to pay for it before; it was that it was extremely simple to have the free, unprotected version (and much better quality) than it was to pay and have to worry about how many computers it existed on.

I love Google, but mostly I use their stuff because it’s so much easier. You’re not constantly running into features that you have to pay to use, you’re up and running in no time, there’s no passwords or verification codes: you just use it. Microsoft (and plenty of other companies. I’m looking at you, Adobe) could learn something. Fine; have people pay for it. But once they do, let them go with it.

Blogger vs. Wordpress
I’ve started using Blogger again, since we were looking for a free and easy home for Naive Harmonies. After time away from Blogger in favor of Wordpress, I’ve found that Blogger is WAY behind the curve, which is surprising. I don’t know if this is a very, very low priority for Google or if there’s some big redesign coming (a la Google Analytics), but it seems that they should pay a little more attention to it, considering that a lot of the blogs serve up AdSense, something that Wordpress blogs can’t do. But apart from it being free, and being able to host javascript and AdSense (all good reasons, granted), there’s no reason to use Blogger over Wordpress. The interface is so far behind Wordpress, there’s got to be at least a few Google employees who feel embarrassed about it. Naive Harmonies is on Blogger, due to the “free” part, but…I don’t know for how much longer.

The fate of Yahoo(!)
I have to admit I’m getting a little nervous about the fate of Yahoo. I guess that it’s unlikely that they’ll go completely belly-up, but it’s starting to look bad. I wouldn’t miss the mail (worst. free. email. ever), but losing Pipes would be a huge blow, and the fantasy football has been a comforting constant through the years. Here’s to hoping they get things fixed up.

My brain wandered off this morning (as my brain tends to do) and when I found it again, it was thinking about robot drone planes for some odd reason. In an effort to get my brain back to the things it was supposed to be thinking about, we thought it through a little bit.

The US Military has been using robot drone planes for a little while now, and there’s a certain part of me (specifically, the 9-year-old who had a toy chest full of Star Wars toys) that thinks this is–not to put too fine a point on it–totally fucking awesome. I mean, robot planes? That is so cool.

But then there’s the adult part of me, the part that saw a bit on the cable TV on fighter planes that said that the only restriction on planes going faster is that the human pilots are unable to withstand the pressure, that gets at least unnerved if not downright and outright scared by the development. What will happen to warfare if the possibility of your own troops dying–one of the chief reasons that even the most hardened hawks will hesitate to go to war–is removed?

Then there’s the second amendment. If not a full believer of the second amendment, I am at least an understander of its chief aim, which is to make the government afraid of the people, at least enough so that they won’t attempt to use the military to keep the public from their rights. But the more robotic the military becomes, the more difficult it would be for an armed public to take control away from the government.

These are just a few of the thoughts that keep my brain and I busy in idle moments. Your thoughts–especially those of Hans, aka “Mr. I Love Articles About Robots”–are welcome.

I have pretty mixed feelings on highly retro sounds, especially when that sound is of the ’60’s. Choosing to recreate a past sound both shows a love of the history, but it also shows a lack of creativity. Isn’t there a way to show your love for a time of the past but also update it with the intervening times and sounds an personal creativity?

Still, there’s plenty of times when a retro sound hits so nicely and beautifully that it doesn’t really matter. Maybe it’s not the new sound and steps forward that are always so impressive, but it’s still a sound of affection.

Pete Molinari, “I Don’t Like The Man I Am”

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I don’t know much about this song. It was on the Mojo compilation about “new soul”, and it was one of the few that I hadn’t heard that I liked. This song really stood out in it’s comforting simplicity. It’s like so many country or blues songs when you know exactly how the tune is going to go and how the melody is going to resolve, and the fact that it goes just as you think it would feels great. It’s a beautiful tune.

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Added to my library:
My eyes were bigger than my ears this week. I found plenty of time to download, but little time to listen. But here’s what’s in the “To Listen” pile:

• Sprites, “Wish I’d Kept A Scrapbook”, which is a Tullycraft cover, bringing last Sunday’s show to a nice little point.
• Coldplay, Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends. Sounds pretty nice, though guess which way they headed when faced with the fork in the road that goes in the direction of sounding more like U2 or forging their own path? Buy it at Amazon.
• Get Well Soon, Rest Now Weary Head You Will Get Well Soon, which I found via 3voor12. It’s a little like combining Beirut (the band, not the city) with Lambchop (the band, not the puppet or the food), and I can’t quite decide yet if I like it or not, but they’re competing with Mogwai for best song titles of the year. Samples: “I Sold My Hands For Food, So Please Feed Me”, “If This Hat Is Missing I Have Gone Hunting” and “Witches! Witches! Rest Now In the Fire”. Listen over at 3voor12.
• Brian Eno, Another Green World, which I bought after hearing “The Big Ship” on Limo Crazy’s Muxtape. What a beautiful song. Buy it at Amazon.
• Hemme Fatale, “Silent Sleepover”. Fun Human League/Ladytron-type stuff that I found over at Fluxblog. Get it at Fluxblog.
• The Fairline Parkway, A Memory of Open Spaces. I love it now that, when a friend writes and tells you that they have a new album out, you just got and buy it immediately, instead of thinking, “Well, I guess I have to wait until the next time they play. Buy it at Amazon.
• Douglas Armour, “The Light of a Golden Day, The Arms of the Night”. Nice indie dancepop found over at Fluxblog, a site that I’m happy to be reading again. Get it at Fluxblog.

Passing by a 7-Eleven earlier tonight, I saw that there was a new flavor of slurpee that ties in with the new Incredible Hulk movie.  The flavor?  “Radioactive Rush”.  I get the tie-in and everything, but would you really be interesting in drinking a drink that had the word “radioactive” in the title?  If you answered “yes” to that question, then I have a few more drink flavors you might be interested in:

• Sewage Surge!
• Very Berry Beriberi
• Contamamint
• Die A Real!
• Lychees ‘n’ Lesions
• Lepro-C Vitamin Water
• Spongebob Squeeze
• Guano-ade (tie in with Batman)
• StigMate

I’m going to pitch this to the marketing people that came up with Radioactive Rush.  My guess is that they’re the same people who figured that “Viper” and “Great White” are perfectly logical scents for deodorants, so I can’t image that they won’t go for it.  When I’m a millionaire, I’ll buy you a drink.