I grew up listening to Jackson Browne lament in The Load Out:
But the band’s on the bus
And they’re waiting to go
We’ve got to drive all night and do a show in Chicago
Or Detroit, I don’t know
We do so many shows in a row
And these towns all look the same
On our trip to Florida we stayed in a few hotels. This was a first for my children. They were excited. I commented at some point that the hotel rooms were the same as the ones I stayed in when I was on the road with my parents.
Identity appears to be missing from towns these days. All have the Walmarts, Targets, Walgreens, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue with corporate America, it is just that a town’s identity is harder to find.
That is why it is interesting to note Jewel’s June tour. Jewel is a singer-songwriter who burst on the scene in 1995 with her You Were Meant for Me song. If you hadn’t kept up with her, you may have thought she was a one-hit wonder. But she is still touring, apparently.
It seems like she has countered the road blues that Jackson Browne sung about. From what I see on You Tube, Jewel writes a song for each town she plays in. She researches the town and incorporates her research into her song. What a great way to connect with the audience!
I have stacks of CDs of photos I have taken over the years. I needed to organize them. I figured I had a few thousand photographs. I began tagging them, uploading, organizing, etc.
Eighteen months later I am not done. I’ve made lots of progress. I’ve been able to create some home movies (I have been organizing the digital video too). I recently passed 56,000 photographs in my Flickr account. Yikes! There’s still plenty more.
I had set a 30 June deadline to finish, but I haven’t. Part of the problem is that I have multiple copies of directories, etc. They aren’t necessarily identical. It’s tedious at this point, but I am a completest. I will finish.
Also I have the book problem. Way too many books. Again I am entering them into my GoodReads account. It’s important to tag everything. I am a school teacher and I use a lot of this to be able to pull the correct book for specific lessons. But we will be unloading lots of these too. Rather than get involved with half.com or the like I am going to release them via BookCrossing.
I tired of the photos and the books were going slowly when I discovered another big organizing project. I have discovered that organizing is fun for me. Anyhow, I discovered our 600+ music CDs. They had been put away neatly, but they weren’t being used. Since then we have entered the iPod generation.
Well, with external hard drives so cheap, I purchased one and spent about a week ripping the music. Things are tagged and sitting on our home network. The physical music CDs are now better organized and once again put away neatly. The payoff is that we now have access to these 6500+ songs without really adding clutter. Wife would like us to offload the CDs now, but I like to do things legally so am keeping them.
Well, my summer projects aren’t going quite as planned. I bored of organizing photographs. I did manage to squeeze out one movie of my son for my wife. That’ll buy me more time. I am up to 55,000 photographs. A lot of what I have to sort through are geocache photos from the last nine years. Many of them are duplicates and culling through them is so boring.
So I moved onto the books. Once again I am changing services. I began with anobii. I can’t get my export because those folks won’t acknowledge my e-mails. I briefly went to Library Thing. I left there for GoodReads. I decided that Shelfari was where it is. Amazon.com came in and all looked great. But it’s not. I am now going back to GoodReads. I have learned this is a good thing since Shelfari won’t export the damn reviews. Sigh . . . it’s one at a time again. I have tired of this too, but I plug along.
Helping the transition is my return to BookCrossing. “Return” really isn’t accurate. Despite having an account for more than five years, I’ve never released a book. That’s going to change. As I enter my books into GoodReads, I am weeding out some of the stuff I know I don’t need/want. I have a box going of what I am going to release. Keep an eye out Millville.
The other day while I was in the basement (freezing) working on the books, I reached for a CD. Ah, the music. Back in 2002 I gave away 1200 CDs. They were live recordings. That was in my purge stage. I am trying to get back to that. Anyhow, it’s the first time I went playing with the CDs for a while. That sparked an idea.
For years I have sought a social network for music. I occasionally ask. I am sure there are references here at eCache somewhere that talks about it. I asked about for some help. Then it dawned on me; I need to rip all this music onto a drive, oss it up on our network and I’ll have access to it all over. That’ll make selling the old stereo easier.
Off I went to purchase another 1TB drive. I figure I have a lot of music . . .
That has gotten me playing with iTunes a lot over the last couple days. I’ve been using it for two and one-half years, but I have known all along that I wasn’t using it correctly. As a deadhead, I generally input several shows, dump it to Silver (my iPod), and scrobble it to last.fm. Once listened to, I delete it and import new shows. I use the Live Music Archive @ archive.org a lot, although I get shows from other sources to. Occasionally I would rip a CD or two, but again, I deleted it afterward always keeping things neat and tidy.
No longer. As of this sentence, I have ripped 154 CDs onto the network wirelessly. There’s plenty more to come. I’m liking this so far. Yet, I find iTunes to be severely lacking in some areas.
Why doesn’t iTunes separate the first and last name of the artist? That’s like the first thing anyone who works with databases does. I want to be able to order my artists so Alan Silvestri is not up front. Just for the record, that is a disc Gert brought into the relationship.
Why does a two-disc set import as two different albums? The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is one conceptual album, but it displays as two albums in iTunes with seemingly no way to list it otherwise.
I like that I can substitute album art. First decision was to load the original cover for Roger Waters’ The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking . . . the uncensored one! I’m learning that I should import all the album art to associate with the songs.
Apple needs to get with opening up to share these data with social networks. iTunes feels dated in that I can’t share to Twitter, Facebook, and other networks (like eCache).
Dafos (Mickey Hart, Airto & Flora Purim ) choked big time upon importing. It made it, but the optical drive shook, rattled, and I was prepared for it to roll away.
Can I pass the tags I am entering into iTunes to last.fm? That would be so kewl to do.
It is lovely to preserve some music that is not holding up as well . . . like my Michelle Shocked disc that was stuck to the paper insert.
The only album art I have struggled with thus far is the Holiday Traditions with John Tesh CD. You’re correct if you pinpointed that as another Gert purchase. John Tesh, ABBA, All 4 One, and lots of other rubbish music I will never listen to is now available.
I will eventually need to address some things with iTunes. A master list for the web site will be needed. My initial look does not look terribly promising of updating the currently listened to sings onto the blog. I’ll delve into that later.
So here I am organizing (a pastime it seems), but it is a project I hadn’t planned to tackle. It has me thinking that perhaps movies may find itself on the network too. Hmmm . . .
