Endtroducing…

Classics. In honor of our four-year anniversary I have launched a new section for Brainside Out, that features some old stuff repackaged to look new.

Does this mean what I think it means? Yep. I finally got around to rebuilding Rubin Sez… and Leave it to Peter. More stuff may follow, but I leave for Baja in three days and I need to get packing. Also I seem to be falling ill, which will be great for my immune system as it reacclimates to Mexico for the first time in ten years.

I rarely get sick, so the timing on this thing is rather bizzare. I haven’t gotten sick since moving to Oregon, and then, a day after seeing The Aviator, I fall ill some sort of crud-achey-soar-throat thing. Can watching a hypochondriac make you sick? Doubtful.

It’s strange, but it’s not as strange as nearly being killed by a flock of wild turkeys. That happened yesterday. I also played a gig with Topsoil at the River City Saloon last night, so these things all balance out. The good with the bad.

I finally broke down and ordered my iPod Shuffle. I’ve also started regularly using iTunes instead of Winamp, which is something I never thought I’d do. The randomizer seems to work a lot better on iTunes, and from my existing collection I quickly built an awesome playlist with 6.7 days of music.

I don’t care too much for the large user interface on iTunes, so I usually run my music through its mini player interface. Maybe I’m just conditioning myself for the arrival of my iPod Shuffle, but I find that the seven buttons on the mini player offer more than enough functionality. And the display that shows the current track name, length, artist and album? M’eh. I minimize that as well. It’s my freaking music collection. I know the song, the artist and the album, and why do I need to know how long the track is?

There’s probably some profound observation to be made, here, about software design or engineering or human-computer interaction, about how we strain ourselves to build all sorts of additional functionality into a product, only to lose ground to a simpler, cheaper product with reduced functionality because it is, well, simpler and cheaper.

Profound things could be said, but I’ve been awake for an hour and now it’s time to go back to bed.

Please enjoy the classics as much as I enjoy Baja!