General

Bi-annual lamentation over iTunes

I tried to play music in iTunes.

A story in two images:

This seems easy to solve!

Oh, I am signed in.

Next: The software equivalent of “turn it off and on”, which is to say, I restarted iTunes.

This did not work.

I next logged into the web version of Apple Music. I needed to sign in there, but once I did, it played a song that I have only ever listened to through Apple Music (not purchased separately in the iTunes store). Yay, it works!

I tried iTunes again, thinking this may have sent a successful signal to the mothership.

It did not.

I thought about doing some searching on the interweb for other solutions or to see if other people are experiencing the same issue, then I remembered that I have several thousand songs I own–that I actually purchased on physical media and ripped (as we called it in the olden days), so instead of wasting my time hunting down something I probably couldn’t fix anyway, I just listened to my own music.

Using Windows Media Player.

Alas, iTunes, alas.

Bonus: When prompted to allow the Apple ID sign-in, it seems Apple places me “near Abbotsford”:

I mean, it’s right, if you consider 43 km away to be near.

The weather, May 21, 2023 edition

It’s cloudy, with a high of only 19C forecast today. What is going on?

What’s going on is after two weeks of weirdly warm summer-like weather, we are now back to normal weather for mid-May. I’m still wearing my shorts, though.

And 19C and cloudy is still perfectly pleasant. To celebrate, here are a bunch of cats enjoying the sun:

Banger shmanger

It occurs to me that as banger enters the lexicon as a word to describe something good, great or otherwise appealing, that I do not like the word. It’s a bit too affected for my tastes, sort of this generation’s “groovy.”

And then I realize oh yeah, I’m old! This is one of those ways I know I’m getting older. A younger generation, one that came after mine, is now pushing new lingo into the general vocabulary and if I get cranky at their twenty-three skidoos, I’m just an old man yelling at clouds.

So be it.

(Don’t even get me started on baller.)

BONUS: Can we also already retire “lives rent-free in my (or someone else’s) head” as an expression? I think I’ve seen it about a billion times or so this year. NO EXAGGERATION.

What “one more thing” means to me…

It means coming back from the grocery store and realizing I forgot to get the main item I went there to buy. I get everything else, just that one more thing…

This is why it’s important to put everything on your shopping list and not assume your giant brain will remember anything not on it.

I knew I should have added dishwasher soap to the list. Do I really want to go back just to get it?

The persistence of paper books and bookstores

When you think about it, it makes sense that ebooks did not push paper books out of the market.

Most people only read a few books a year–or none at all. The hardcore book reader is not your average person. What makes more sense to these people:

  • Spend $20 on two paperbacks per year (rounding to $10 each for convenience), or…
  • Spend anywhere from around $80-200+ on an ebook reader, plus $20 for two ebooks

Let’s take the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite as an example. It costs $160 Canadian (on sale as I type this for $125). $160 would buy you 16 books at $10 each. That means someone might need to read for eight years before the Kindle purchase breaks even, so to speak. After that, you get the advantages of an ereader and ebooks. But eight years is a long time. Too long for most people, I suspect, and so they just continue to buy the occasional paperback. And unless you’re content to peruse the meagre selection of books at a drugstore or similar place, the place you go to is a bookstore, hence the persistence of bookstores. Well, there are undoubtedly hardcore readers who also simply prefer paper to an electronic reading experience, too, and they probably play a big part in sustaining bookstores.

Bookstores have the advantage of letting you see piles of books on shelves, where covers can grab you (or turn you away), an experience that simply can’t be replicated by an online store–even one selling actual paper books (though that was how Amazon started, and it remains a successful system for them).

Although I’m nearly 100% ereading these days, I do sometimes wax nostalgic about bookstores and just wandering the sections and seeing what was new, or in stock, or would randomly draw my eye. I tried using the BookBub newsletter for a time to sort-of replicate this, looking over its random bargain offerings, but got burned by too many mediocre novels. To be fair, when I was reading in my late teens and early 20s, the same thing often happened when I picked up bargain books at places like Book Warehouse.

All of this was inspired by a comment about a kind of bookstore that was slain by the rise of the web–the computer bookstore. Yes, somewhere I have a copy of C++ for Dummies. Also, JavaScript, HTML and others. Learn to code in 21 days! As far as I know, these bookstores are completely gone now, since the information in these books is now copious, often free and more up-to-date online. In every way this is better, yet it’s still another experience that I once found enjoyable and is gone forever.

Time marches on.

And now, back to my ebook…

How social media works

I saw this, appropriately, on Mastodon today, and it’s pretty much perfect.

I just want to add that quick-to-judge people have been around since forever, the internet (and social media) just grease the wheels for them, so to speak.

Creativity, taste and practice: Blend together and enjoy

I came across this quote from Steve Jobs (by way of Ira Glass), and it speaks to me in a way that rings so true I can still hear the bells clanging in my head. Stupid bells. It also echoes what I read in Talented Is Overrated1I was originally going to link to my reivew, but it turns out I never reviewed this book. It’s short, so I’ll just re-read it and do a proper review. Short version: The first half is compelling, the second is mostly “be a better businessperson blah blah blah”., which posits the idea that we all have ability, we just need to nurture it and practice…a lot.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

Steve Jobs

I looked at tumblr tonight

It’s kind of weird. Like, what if Facebook was nothing but posts from your eccentric friends you never hear much from any more, instead of your grandma?

But it’s still around, so they must be doing something right(ish).

Anyway, I’ll have more Social Media Thoughts™ soon.