MadMup.com

In preparation for my trip to Canada, I purchased full-blown iPod. I figured I would like to listen to music on the flights and I also envisioned spending most of my time in Canada alone, so I thought it’d be a good purchase. In the Mac-PC debate I fall pretty squarely on the PC side of things, but I understand that people like Macs and I have no problem with people using them (though I do have a problem with Mac users implying I’m stupid for using PCs). While iPods aren’t technically Macs, they are made by Apple, so I felt a little dirty buying one.

In the interests of full disclosure I should mention that this is actually the second iPod I’ve purchased. The first was a 1Gb Shuffle which I am trying to trade to any interested party (make me an offer!).

I bought a 30Gb iPod because the Shuffle wasn’t getting it done for me. There was no screen and it doesn’t hold much. I knew these things going into the purchase, but I thought it’d be okay. It wasn’t. I found that I wanted something that could hold all my music so I could listen to a particular album if the mood struck. I looked at how big the collection on my hard drive was and it was 6Gb already, so an iPod Nano wasn’t going to be enough, either. Enter the 30Gb iPod.

So, the first thing I did after purchasing it was rip my entire CD collection all over again. I used Windows Media Player 10 on a Windows XP machine to rip them to MP3 format at 192kbps bit rate, and each CD took a little over 2 minutes to rip. (I tested Windows Media Player 11 Beta, but it took closer to three minutes per CD, and I didn’t use iTunes because a) it’s quite a bit slower (though I don’t have the actual time here for comparison, sorry) and b) I don’t care for iTunes’ layout, design, and way-of-use.) When I was done, my entire CD collection weighed in at almost 19Gb.

Well, okay, not my entire collection. As I went through the process I realized there were CDs I wasn’t ever going to listen to (orchestral versions of Beatles songs, for instance), so I didn’t rip them.

Once I was done ripping what I was going to rip I transferred them all over to my G4 Mac that otherwise does nothing. I figured if I have to use iTunes to transfer my music to my iPod (and I do – though other programs have been written to do this task, they haven’t worked well for me), I might as well use its native environment (and this way I wouldn’t have to use iTunes on my PC – I had to re-install Windows a few weeks ago because iTunes had messed my computer up something fierce).

I didn’t end up using my iPod on my trip very much, as it turns out I like to read on flights and the people in Canada were extremely good at keeping me “in the loop” and having me hang out with them. The purchase wasn’t a total loss, though, as I’ve started taking it to work with me. Summers at my job are quite busy, as I have to upgrade (and therefore be physically at) every computer in my school – that’s somewhere north of 400 computers. It’s not difficult, but it is time-consuming, and having music helps the day pass faster. I’ve used a CD-player boombox in the past, but it was bulky and a pain to carry around. The iPod sits on my belt quite nicely and holds more music.

I started out listening to a “Favorites” playlist of 125 songs, but soon started listening to whole albums. Earlier this week I decided to start playing the whole collection in random order. Here’s a sampler segment from that playlist:

1. “Toy Soldier” – Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons
2. “Across the Universe” – Rufus Wainwright
3. “That’s Amore” – Dean Martin
4. “Somedays” – Paul McCartney
5. “Market Day in Guernica” – Katie Melua
6. “My Bologna” – Weird Al Yankovic
7. “Who’ll Stop the Rain” – Creedence Clearwater Revival
8. “True Companion” – Marc Cohn
9. “Do You Know You Are My Sunshine” – The Statler Brothers
10. “It’s Only Rock ‘N Roll (But I Like It) – The Rolling Stones
11. “Young at Heart” – Joss Stone
12. “Thank You Girl” – The Beatles
13. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” – Simon & Garfunkel
14. “Kamp Krusty Theme Song” – The Simpsons
15. “New Slang” – The Shins

It can be a little jarring, and I will admit to skipping songs if I’m not in a mood for them.

I’ve decided, though, that are just some things that I don’t really want on the playlist. Though I like Danny Elfman, I’d rather have words to sing along to. So, earlier this evening I took some albums off. Soundtracks: gone. I like Christmas music, and even listen to it off-season sometimes, but not right now: bye, bye Debbie Boone and George Winston.

I kept some other stuff even though it’s not well-suited to random play. Mandy Patinkin’s first few albums were medley-riffic, and hearing just one piece of the medley out of place sounds quite odd, but it’s still good stuff. Concept albums are also an ill fit with random play. Albums like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band weave song into song throughout the whole album, and later Beatles stuff like Abbey Road has little song fragments and even talking in-between songs. It gets a little surreal on my iPod.

I’ve whittled my songlist down to 3792 songs currently. iTunes tells me that’s a little over 9 days’ worth, and it’s a better mix of the variety and sameness I’m after. I’m sure there will be more cuts later, and I doubt spoken-word comedians will make the next one.

My playlist, like my life, is a work in progress.

Note: Please do not turn the comments section into a Mac-PC debate.
Note: Thanks to the CT for getting me thinking about music.

The World of Warcraft is a big place. There are two large continent-type islands that are broken up into smaller state-like areas, and it can take a long time to get from one area to another. While there are “flight paths” from some areas to other areas, you have to actually walk to that endpoint before you can then fly to it from previously-known flight paths. Even so, some hippogriff flights can take 10+ minutes. Of course, walking the same path might take hours, so it’s definitely an improvement.

Everyone in gameworld also starts the game with a hearthstone that allows for a quick transportation “home.” Some of the state-like areas are large enough that running back to the main town in that area can take 10-15 minutes, and that’s not even including the possibility of getting killed on the trip. As a player progresses through the game and gets to higher-level areas, the hearthstone can be set to these new areas – specifically, players can ask the innkeepers in a town to set their hearthstone to return them to that inn. Then, wherever the player is in the entire world, when they activate their hearthstone (this process is called “hearthing”), they will be transported to whatever inn is currently set as their “home.”

Out here “in real life,” the concept of “home” means different things to different people. The first thought people tend to have is the actual physical house or apartment they live in: “I’m headed home” from a party or from work or from anywhere else. This physical location changes as we grow up and move out of our parents’ house, out of our dorm rooms, out of our first cheap apartment, and so on. We refer to each new place as “home.”

“Home” is also a feeling, though. Feeling “at home” is different than being at home. “At home” is more about being comfortable, about fitting in. Think about the times you’ve felt “at home” when you were nowhere near where you lived – you felt like you “belonged,” didn’t you? Whether there was someone who was going out of their way to make you feel that way or it was just that you didn’t feel excluded or extra, there was something about the situation rather than the location.

Billy Joel said it this way in his song “You’re My Home”:

Whenever we’re together, that’s my home
…
Home can be the Pennsylvania Turnpike
Indiana’s early morning dew
High up in the hills of California
Home is just another word for you

Granted, he’s more specifically talking to someone he’s in love with, but the concepts are the same: we’re most at home with people we’re comfortable with. In World of Warcraft, if you’re in an inn, you become “rested,” and when you leave it, you’re a more effective warrior/hunter/whatever until your rested state has worn off. “Home” is like that out here, too: we get recharged enough at home to go out and do our jobs and whatever else it is that we need to do. If we don’t have that “home,” we wear out and everything gets harder to do.

You’ve heard the phrase “You can’t go home again”? Obviously you can return to the place where you grew up. I think the phrase is actually talking about the expectations and feelings associated with growing up. The main point of growing up is to get you where you can function on your own out in “the world.” The nurturing and correction are unique to the growing up experience, and they engender a specific set of feelings and memories. Once you’ve left that environment, you’ve also left those feelings. When you return home and visit your school or your church or friends from “back then,” you have memories that guide your expectations of how things will be, and they’re having the same sorts of thoughts – you’re still that kid who threw a banana peel out the bus window and had eraser fights in the church basement. You know that you’re not, but the memory baggage is too much. You can’t go home again, indeed, but I think we spend the rest of our lives looking for the adult equivalent.

When someone tells me to “make myself at home,” I’m rarely able to do so. I’m sure they mean “act as though you were in your own living space,” but I’ve got too much else attached to the concept of “home” to be able to relax enough to do it.

I leave you with a few quotes about home:

A man’s homeland is wherever he prospers. -Aristophanes

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. -John Howard Payne

My home is not a place, it is people. -Lois McMaster Bujold

It was a few months ago that I wrote a song for Snakes On A Plane. It was just today that I finally recorded it with a friend.

Here’s a suitably musician-y picture of Scott and I during the recording session at his studio/house today:

He teaches at the school where I work and plays publicly in places around town. He does mostly Dylan and Guthrie and blues stuff, and was more than willing to aid me in this endeavor.

I am not entirely pleased with the way my singing turned out, but it is what it is.

So! If you’re interested, here you go.