Not a Great Deal to Report. It's been a fine weekend. I ducked out of work a bit early on Friday (4:30) and leisurely mowed the lawn when I got home, before my daughter woke up from her nap... for the second Friday in a row... which feels great and makes up for many of those 8:00 and 9:00 nights at work. Since the grassy area of our yard is small, we bought one of those
old-timey push mowers, and it is just right.
This morning, my daughter and I visited the
Arizona Science Center while my wife attended a CPR certification class. This was good fun. While she napped this afternoon, I got in the pool for the first time. The weather is finally warm enough. In the late afternoon, the three of us attended a company picnic at a nearby park.
For the past few weeks I've been slowly working my way through my CD collection, copying tracks to my hard drive. For the past few years I've made CD's for the office and for the car, but now I've got an iPod and I've decided to get serious about getting all my music onto my hard drive, to fuel the iPod. I took the frugal course and limited myself to the 4 Gig iPod mini, which is a decision I'm struggling with now. I'm up to the R's in my CD collection... working through six R.E.M. CD's as I type this, and my iTunes library is up to 2667 songs, 9.73 gigabytes. My approach is four-fold. In the case of many CD's, e.g., Kon Kan's "Move to Move" or Pizzicato Five's "Five by Five," I'm copying just one or two tracks off of each CD. In the case of something like George Martin's "In My Life", I'm taking about half of the tracks. And in the case of others, like Lou Reed's "New York", most Beatles albums and REM's "Green," which I am working on right now, I'm taking the whole thing. Fourth, and finally, I am also going through and, in particular for bands I don't own CD's of, I'm consulting iTunes' Music Store and filling in gaps. This has to be kept in check though, as it is really easy to spend a lot of money getting nostalgic for old radio tunes at $.99 a pop. I actually stopped doing the Music Store consultations at around the "D's", a week or so ago, as it adds too much time to the process. I decided to copy all my CD's first, then go back and consult iTunes Music Store to fill in the gaps later.
The "struggle" is that if I'd spent an extra $100 on the full-blown iPod instead of the 4 Gig "mini," I could synch the iPod 100% with my library. As it stands, I have to basically rank all the songs so that only highly-ranked ones find their way onto the iPod's limited storage space.
Stepping back, though, I really like the little gadget. It *somewhat* justifies all the money I spent on CD's over the past 10 years, many of which I never listened to, but which I had purchased just because, for example, I just figured on balance I somehow needed to have a copy of Sonic Youth, "Goo", in case it ever, uh, went out of print and I really wanted to hear "Kool Thing" when I was 60... Now, I actually will hear all those random old tracks once in a while in the car on the way to work, or when out riding my bike, or whatever. Similarly, I can spend $3.00 on iTunes to own the three Eminem songs I actually ever want to hear, and they'll be part of the mix, I'll hear them occasionally, I didn't have to buy the albums. Done. Having the car radio adapter makes all the difference, because I'm not a "walkman guy" and I don't spend enough time near my computer to enjoy the music, otherwise.
One disturbing side effect of this process is the realization that a few CD's have gone missing. For example, I KNOW I owned Pink Floyd's "Division Bell" and "Pulse", but they are nowhere to be found. (Ditto for my copy of "Fight Club" on DVD, but that's for another day.)
Another realization is that music really does go away over time... By way of example (and some of these I haven't necessarily *fully* explored RECENTLY, but, for example, the Sigue Sigue Sputnik LP I loved in 1988 is pretty much off the face of the earth (at least it never made it onto CD in whole
[see below]), so I have to make do with the handful of tracks off that album that made it onto their Greatest Hits CD. The first Traveling Wilbury's album never made it onto CD (unless it has been released recently), so that great, great album is basically gone. And some tracks on a couple Jazz Butcher Conspiracy albums from the late 1980's are basically history. (No regrets, No apologies, Just Great Chicken).
What DO You Know... Sigue Sigue Sputnik's "Flaunt It" is now available on CD on Amazon.com in 1-2 days for $14.49. The Traveling Wilbury's "Volume 1" is available on CD from Amazon.com in 1-2 days for $12.55. I'll be darned.
Notable dining this week = not much other than lunch at
Portland's on Monday. A very good lunch option in downtown Phoenix. Too far to walk from where I work, but worth the drive the two times I've been there.
Here are a couple Phoenix lunch spot lists worth preserving:
City Search - 2004 Power LunchesAZCentral - 7 Downtown Phoenix RestaurantsI got to see the Diamondback's home season opener against the Cubs a few Monday's ago. The Cubs won by a huge margin (but have been sucking ever since), and we had really spectacular seats. I'm mentioning this really only because the great seats gave us access to a pre-game lunch spot, the Dugout Lounge, buried in the stands right behind home plate. It's not posh, but it is fun. If you ever want to splurge for a really fun day at the ballpark, go for the top-rate seats and go early for lunch at the lounge.
