August 2008 Archives

yesterday, my daughter called me to ask if her (and my) friend from (her) childhood could come crash at my house for a couple days. well, i forgot all about this, but today she called, and began to talk about a long conversation we apparently had yesterday. now, this was a specific conversation, in which the friend talked to someone who said that she'd have to ask her boyfriend, and that the dog couldn't come, and mentioned something about picking up kurtwood and meeting chris for dinner -- although we cannot be entirely sure exact names were mentioned, we are relatively sure that toads were. also some sort of 'grandma' person was mentioned in the context of a place to stay, and we know for sure that wouldn't have been me, my grandparents are long, long gone.

so she was wondering why i never called her back.

it's because i never talked to her. seriously. her sister was sitting right next to her while she had this conversation, so the conversation happened. i was fairly certain that i hadn't completely lost my mind between then & now, i very clearly remember leaving work, having a conversation about the toads with chris on the way home, and coming home and spending the next hour doing nothing but setting up the new TMobile @home phone. these are nice, crisp, sharp memories.

but everyone involved was exceedingly curious. so we pulled up my call logs online, which are not subject to being lost by my phone crashing, or erased, i mean these are the phone records that homeland security would use to track my communication, if i ever turned out to be a terrorist. and the call, the call most definitely did not involve me, not with my phone, not with any phone on our family plan.

but the conversation happened.

she even called the other number she had for me, which had never been mine but it was in her phone book as mine, and the nice boy on the other end (who must have been having one of the weirder phone conversations of his life) was quite patient, listened to our weird-ass story, and assured us that phone was in a locker at the time of the mystery conversation, while he was at practice.

we still haven't figured this out. but we're mighty weirded out, believe you me.

& also apparently this intends to be the second in what may or may not be a series of blog posts about my wide-and-dewy-eyed appreciation for the technology i have at my fingertips these days. here goes:

there are certain chord progressions which, if you put them in your song, i will like your song, even if the genre of your music is not exactly what i consider my cup of tea. today on my way home i heard just such chords, but had no idea the name of the song, or even the band. not even the foggiest of clues, really.

so as i scooped all my stuff up out of the car on my way up home, i committed to what i loosely refer to as my memory, a snippet of said song lyrics. not as easy as it sounds, i have a notoriously lousy short-term memory & am semi-brain dead from sleep loss. so anyway. fired up the 'puter, impatiently typing in the query as the browser was loading "if the silence takes you i hope it takes me too lyrics". a click later i made the somewhat unexpected discovery: i like death cab for cutie! who knew? "oh no! i like death cab for cutie", i exclaimed, and everyone looked at me funny. which was fine, i was already at amazon and less than a minute later the song was on my hard drive.

listening to it, i ctrl+t'd a browser tab and logged in to the lyricbase, where i added the lyrics & the cover art. ctrl+t again for youtube, grabbed the embedding code and clicked save, resulting in this, which represents another one of those crazy technological leaps i would have never believed had some future dude came & foretold them to me back in the day, when i would have had to hear the song who knows how many times on the radio before catching the name & artist, then would have had to get to a record store & buy it & listen to it a hundred times to catch all the lyrics (i love lyrics, but can't make them out so well, which is why i have a lyricbase in the first place). but i digress.

if i had a point which i may or may not, it would be to repeat my absolute delight at the awesome array of technology we have today. & if i couldn't imagine what this now would hold back then, sure as hell there's no way today i can imagine what this future does. i don't even care about the flying cars anymore, you know? the music will do it for me.

and just for fun, and because i can, here's a just-turned-six year old kid playing "soul meets body".

a little more than ten years ago, i had my first cell phone, when digital phones finally came out & prices allowed ordinary folk like myself to possess these mythical devices that previously only rich doctors and coke dealers carried. the coolest thing i did with it was to put my home phone on call forwarding and take calls at the beach. man, that was teh awesomeness.

a little more than ten years ago, i'd heard of the internet, but it wasn't until 1999 that i got my actual hands on an internet-connected 486 with a screamin' 33.6 modem & right after that i rented my very own shiny 486 from Rent-A-Center because this internet thing was the best thing i'd ever had my actual hands on, & within 6 months i had a job with the title of webmaster but that's another story entirely, actually.

anyway. if, back then, some future dude had come up to me & said, "hey i'm a future dude, & i've totally been sent here to tell you that ten years from now, you'll be sitting in a funky beachside cantina eating a juicy ahi burger with one hand and playing on a thing called plurk on teh mobile internets on your qwerty-keyboarded telephone with the other, while you uploaded a very decent sized photograph you took with said telephone to a place called brightkite while you were listening to your music collection from a memory card the size of your pinky fingernail that held two ... get this ... two gigabytes yes giga, not mega, bytes of said music on a pair of stereo headphones that weren't even plugged into anything but the little controller thingy that you used to you know, control things like that" ... well i'd have thrown my fancy-ass CD walkman at future-dude's head and told him he was batshit insane, even though the term batshit hadn't even been invented yet. and then i'd probably have slapped him. in the face. with an ahi, had i had one handy.

seriously.

anyway. on the way home from the funky beachside cantina, walking up the stairs to my tiny beachy apartment, a particularly amazing song came on the bluetooth headphones. i set my beer down on the stairs, unclipped the receiver and attached it to my son (who was newly born when all that future dude stuff would have happened, if it had), and slipped the headphones in his ears.

hilarity ensued.

10 years of genius-hours invested in tech R&D: $gazillions
BlackBerry Curve with Bluetooth headset & huge/tiny microSD card: $200-ish
watching an 11 year old boy experience 'Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict' for the first time: priceless

i just wanted what any girl wants, to be able to scrobble to last.fm from my shiny BlackBerry Curve. i heard all those iPhone kids were doing it, and i wanted to be just like them. and yes, if they were jumping off bridges, i'd probably want to do that too. or not.

but anyway. i did a little quick googling about scrobbling from a BB Curve, and found flipside.fm, a music player that works on BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices. flipside.fm "plays mp3s from your memory card, displays full-color album art, finds missing album art, creates playlists with ease, and tells you more about your music", which is fine. it also scrobbles (uploads your current playing track to your list of played tracks on last.fm), and scrobbling was what i wanted to do most of all. kind of a long-held fantasy of mine.

another one of the promotional blurbs for flipside.fm says that it lets you explore your music collection with your little trackball, something meant to appeal to the BlackBerry user, and on the surface this sounds like a lot of fun -- if you have a bunch of time on your hands to sit around playing with your telephone, which i don't. my BlackBerry is my portable music device, my bPod if you will; i have a big-ass microSD card in there and i keep a good playlist, i listen through my Altec-Lansing T515 headphones (my highest recommendation on those, btw) when i am out & about. so i have my basic needs with my mobile music experience, among which is the ability to use the play/pause, forward/back controls with my headphones, which flipside.fm did not support. neither did it support the usual shortcut keys on the BlackBerry (n for next, p for previous, but who cares about that, i want to use handy buttons on my little bluetooth doohickey, not fumble around with my telephone, no matter how legal that is to do on the freeway as long as i'm not holding it against my face).

so that was the deal-breaker right there. i didn't test it to see if it would work with my corded stereo headphones, because i'm not even sure where they are. however if the shortcut keys on the phone don't even work, why would the headphone controls?

so after three exciting days of scrobbling to last.fm from anywhere i felt like it, my trial expired, and that is that. there is no way i'd fork over  $19.95 for software that takes away my preferred set of controls, and forces me to explore my phone's music collection with my slick little trackball. i just don't have that kind of time on my hands.

tonight i have set up "Plurking Our Butts Off", at pobo.lizard.tv, a collaborative effort in which many plurkers (hopefully) will gather to support each other as we endeavor to alter our current weight levels. i am particularly encouraged by the whole Plurk vibe that spawned this, since it is by far the most collaborative, cooperative, close-knit (get it? knit?) community i've ever been privileged to be a part of.

Plurking Our Butts off is accepting registration, so go sign up!

oh and i am by no means a WP expert but i can promise you by tomorrow evening that little blog site will be nice and shiny and pretty. any feedback/suggestions are very welcome, of course.

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oh and if you're reading this and you're not a Plurker, and thinking, oh my, i would love to join this strangely-named place, then may i ask you to please use this link? and thank you.