donkey cannon

A little slow this morning, folks. Rochester and Booby and me hit up the sports bar we love to hate last night to watch that thrilling Spurs/Jazz game alongside that thrilling BoSox/Yanks game. Wow. Good thing there was a trivia game going on that we DOMINATED. Our team, Donkey Cannon!, nearly doubled the score of the 2nd place team, and our efforts garnered us a coupon forgiving us a $50 bar tab. Which, we used all of that. And we were drinking $2 Miller Lites, so... A little slow this morning, folks.

Anyhooters, some new bloggy stuff: You may have noticed that new little animated gizmo o'er yonder. It's part of the iLike deal. Basically, iLike hooks into your iTunes and tracks what you play, then uploads it to a personal page for all to see. That little application in the sidebar just kinda publishes what's on the page: songs in your music library that have the most plays, what you've recently added to your library, songs you've tagged as your favorites, and what you've recently played. I've got my quibbles with it (namely that it doesn't update enough), but it's a fun little deal. If you want to sign up for iLike, add me as a friend. Firetruck and Rochester are on there, too.

You can see that my most-played song is "Such Great Heights" by the Postal Service. Which, that's an excellent song, but I've no idea how it got to be my #1. Further, I suffered a library-related accident the other day which, among it's many side effects, completely wiped out all my playlists. So, I have no idea why iLike still thinks that's my most-played song. Cos right now it's probably actually "Impossible Germany" from the new Wilco album. Which is great. Also, The Onion had a great interview with Jeff Tweedy the other day. This is part of his answer to a question about the sort of disappearance of albums as lavishly produced art forms, like in the 70s:

It reminds me of how much was lost with the gains of punk rock. Punk rock messed up a lot of shit. As much as I love it and as much as it's probably the main reason I'm making records today, it really threw out a lot of stuff that wasn't so bad. It wasn't such a bad thing to have people working hard at making up songs. It wasn't all just rock-star excess, and it didn't all need to be torn down. I understand why punk was seen as a necessity then, but I don't know why there's still some sort of idea that musicianship is uncool.

I don't really like punk that much, although I appreciate its position in the history and development of rock music. I think what's missing from this discussion, though, is the sort of hand-in-hand development of punk music and indie labels. It's tough to imagine that bands like Wilco would be as successful as they are without indie labels and the business model they've used.

Anyway. The accident was caused by me moving all my digital music to a new external hard drie. It's 250 GB, which should be big enough, by my rough-ass calculations, to hold all of my music, ripped in 192 kps mp4/aac format, three times over. It allows me to not have to worry about finding structures and space to display all of the physical cds, which is an increasing problem. With iTunes and the Airport Express, I can simply keep all the music on the hard drive (with the cds as a physical backup), have instant access to anything in my collection, and stream what I want to hear wirelessly to the stereo. A few clicks and it's on my iPod. The only hitch is ripping all the cds I have, which is a lot.

So, that's what's going on. With Sanjaya and The OC gone, I'm trying to figure out new things to blog about. I did have another Star Wars dream the other night, but I'll spare y'all the details. Suffice to say that I played the role of Dr. Luke Skywalker.

Later, jerks.