kirktastic

I’m taking today and tomorrow off. I needed to be free of my cubicle.

Oh, Apple. The other day Apple announces some really sexy new iPod nanos. Dedicated readers of this site will remember that not too long ago I bought a short and stocky iPod nano to replaced my 2nd gen nano that went off to another plane. I do find the old nano sort of a pain. I don’t like the arm strap. On my 1st and 2nd gen nanos I always used a lanyard. But because I have three iPods (the iPhone, a full sized 80GB iPod for the car, and the 3rd gen nano for the gym) I’m not n a hurry to get another one. My favorite feature is you can shake it to shuffle the songs.

The other product announcement was the iPod touch next edition which seems to be less of an iPhone without the phone part and coming onto its own. The new touch has the Nike+ thingy built-in so all you need to do is put the other thingy in your shoe and you can get your run on. I think they should have put a GPS antenna in it too so you could figure out where the hell you ran to without hoping you ran into a place with wifi to triangulate to. But I think the iPod touch and iPhone are too big to stick on your arm for working out. Plus they are to pretty.

They announced a new version of iTunes. It is all the way up to 8.0. The “killer” new feature is a thing galled “genius” which supposed to put a little guidance into your musical journeys. You anonymously send iTunes your music library and history and it spits back a playlist that is based on some algorithm (it also has a bar over to the side which offers you ways to spend lots of money getting other songs you might like). So how does it work?

The bait song I used was Sausalito by Connor Oberst. Not too bad. There’s no Black Sabbath recommended and his Bright Eyes stuff is there as well as “like” artists. There was a thing I had back in my Windows days (it has been 5 years!) called moodlogic which attempted this idea but using peers to add not just genre but mood attributes to your MP3 tags. Of course it is subjective as there are no definitive definitions of genres. Pandora is something similar with internet radio to what iTunes is trying to do but it uses the music you already have (and makes suggestions as to other music you’ll like similar to what iTunes 7.x does with its store thingy on the bottom pane. And it does a better job than “iTunes recommends” since that tends to be only based on what you’ve bought and although I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on iTunes music, it pales to the thousands of songs that came by other means.

It is a nice start but it also shows just how unwieldily my music collection as become. I have a lot of music without and mp3 metadata and cover art. That is my constant rainy day project of cleaning up the music. I’ve gotten to the Ds. I have a strict rule where any new music I put in the damn thing must be tagged with album art.

Speaking of rainy days. Hurricane Ike is coming! Everybody panic! Earlier in the week it had a trajectory that after hitting landfall around Corpus Christi it would head to San Antonio and then up to Austin. Today’s models show it will got farther east toward Houston/Galveston where it could be nasty. They are canceling outdoor events and expecting lots of people in shelters. Unlike Louisiana, Texas has a very good disaster preparedness system and the money to pay for it. The only area of concern in the lower Rio Grande Valley near Brownsville and McAllen where some of the most impoverished people in the US live. And many of them are not exactly here legally.The feds have promised that they wouldn’t have agents at the evacuation centers or for those driving/riding at the inspection station. Which is damn humane of Chertoff (a man who should have been fired after Katrina and the stupid worthless liquids in bags rule). Except he said that after Hurricane Dolly and many people were busted anyway because the evacuation was voluntary and not mandatory. Yes these people might be here illegaly but they are still people. The good news is at present the storm is tracking to completely miss the south coast and so the rain shouldn’t be too bad.