What’s New With Mick

After a few hints from the family, I have concluded that is time to end my blues exploration – at least for the time being. I had a revelation while eating dinner with the family the other night: The Summer Playlist. I’ll describe it in detail below but first a little context about the music listening situation in our house.

During the work day I spend most of my time in my office, the kitchen or the bathroom (in that order). On the left side of my desk my MacBook Pro (MBP) runs iTunes all the time. The MBP is connected to my awesome PMIX-100 personal audio mixer (seen on the right of the photo). The mixer is connected to my Cambridge Soundworks desktop speakers which are located 18 inches in front of my head in the classic stereo position. This is where I do almost all of my listening these days.
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All I Got For Xmas 2010
Originally uploaded by rynosoft

Once again I had a very bountiful Christmas. Click the picture to see the details but my gifts included:

• Earth: The Book
• Microwave safe soup bowl
• Soup spoons
• Chopsticks
• Microwave safe coffee cups
• Instant coffee
• My four favorite Beatles albums remastered
• $75 in cash
• Personal audio mixer
• Let It Be…Naked
• Sugar free candy
• New earphones for my iPhone
• Six pack of grilling sauces/rubs
• Two iTunes gift certificates worth $45 (not pictured) – redeeming for various apps and songs
• Amazon gift certificate for $50 (not pictured) – redeemed for iLife ’11

Thanks to Buddy, Leroy, Tom, Jan, Michelle & Ric, Tina, Thomas, Graham and the Kittens. I know I’m hard to shop for and appreciate when people do so anyway.

If you were a teen in the 80s like me then you probably remember the short-lived sketch comedy series, Fridays, on ABC. Although it only lasted two seasons, it left an indelible impression on my young brain.

Sadly, a DVD release of those two seasons is reportedly held up by Michael Richards. Luckily, YouTube has most of their great sketches including the ones I’ve included below the fold:
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Here’s a fun little exercise you can do in iTunes:

1. In iTunes, click on your music library in the sidebar.
2. Turn on shuffle, ensure that you have “By Songs” selected in the Shuffle menu (which is in Controls in the main menu)
3. Type the first word that comes to mind in the search box
4. Play one of the songs that is displayed
5. Pick a new word or name from the currently playing song, type that word into the search box
6. Listen
7. When song changes, repeat 5

Note that in step 5 that you must pick a word that will include the currently playing song or iTunes will get confused and stop playing after the song is over. Obviously, having a large music library (23847 songs for me) and lots of metadata helps make the game interesting.

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While chatting with my old friend, Rob, I noticed he was typing a weird character combo. So I asked him about it:

Rob uses Apple’s default chat client, iChat. It supports AIM and Facebook.



I use an open source chat client called Adium. It has support for almost every chat service but evidently doesn’t know how to give the thumbs up.

Can you tell when WiFi stopped working on my iPhone?

I’ve been in Portland since 1990 after a short detour to San Diego after graduating from Wartburg. I met and married my wife, Tina, in 1992. We have two awesome boys who dictate how we spend most of our time. Both are very active in Boy Scout Troop 820 (troop820.org) and both play the double bass in the school orchestra after converting from the cello.

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N E R D
Originally uploaded by rynosoft

Last Thursday morning Tina and I got new tattoos in downtown Troutdale. I have a free touch-up which I can use in a couple of months if it starts to lighten. I may get the letters draw bolder then.

Last week Jon Stewart had some fun at the expense of Keith Olbermann but with a serious point. Olbermann addressed it at the end of his show last night:

Keith’s response was rather graceless and his joke about Jon was a bit mean-spirited. However, he did admit he was wrong and apologized.