I’m sick. I don’t have a fever, or a cough, but I most certainly do have all the classic cold symptoms. Because of this I cancelled classes today, which is only the second time I’ve ever done this (and the first time I had pneumonia). That should give you an idea how I feel.
Now I can enjoy staying at home and feeling both tired and very uncomfortable. I hate being sick 🙁
Oh yes – we bought a new car! Details (and photos) to follow…
Amusingly, I discovered I can easily export my iPod track data from iTunes. Not only does this include every song, but also how often I have played them. As a result, fascinating information can be processed and passed on to you, my dear readers! It must be said though that this data is only a few years old, since I obtained my current iPod only a couple of years ago. What I’d give for lifetime data like this!!
Before I start with the lists, my iPod has a grand total of 3318 songs on it at the moment, totalling 15149 minutes of music. That’s 10.5 days!
I have music by 167 bands in total, although only 49 of them have more than 10 songs on the machine.
Now here’s where it gets interesting…
Top 5 Bands (by total number of songs)
No surprises there, especially if you know my music tastes. Erasure’s position above Mode is solely by virtue of them releasing more material. In both cases the iPod would contain upwards of 99% of everything either band has released.
Now, what if I take the above list and see which of those five I actually listen to the most? One way to do this is divide the total number of listens for the band by the number of songs I have on the machine by that band:
The Same 5 Bands (by average listens per song)
Intriguing wouldn’t you say? Especially the fact that I have quite a few of Bowies albums on the device and yet have barely ever listened to him (only 4 songs, each from the Labyrinth soundtrack, have received any play at all). The Alphaville numbers are particularly impressive because of how uniform they are. I don’t listen to just one or two albums a lot, I apparently listen to the bands entire output more or less uniformly.
But it gets even more interesting if I do a similar analysis, except opening it up to the entire iPod. In other words, which bands do I listen to, on average, the most?
Top 5 Average Listens (per song)
Five new names! Position 1, Air Supply, is the freakish outlier, obtained since I have only two of their songs on the machine. I have listened to Making Love Out Of Nothing At All well over 100 times (almost ten hours!) and All Out Of Love (which I like a lot less, but is in the same playlist) only a bit less. Hunters And Collectors making the list was frankly surprising to me, but apparently shouldn’t have been since I’d listened to Say Goodbye almost 70 times alone! Speedwagon’s presence is heavily bolstered by the ~50 listens of Don’t Let Him Go, Keep On Loving You and I Can’t Fight This Feeling. Ever since I got their best of CD a few weeks ago though other songs (Take It On The Run, Time For Me To Fly) have been rising quickly in playthroughs. One day, they may surpass Air Supply. Finding The Stranglers on this list was amusing, and helped by the fact I only have three of their songs and love them all! Morrissey wasn’t much of a surprise since I listen to his recent three albums all the time.
Looking at the device overall, I was surprised to note that a massive 52% of the songs on it have never been played! I have entire albums by some bands (The Police, Jesus and Mary Chain) that have never even had so much as one song listened to! Why are they on there!?!
However it must be said the software in the iPod only counts a listen if the song is completed, and I am a compulsive pusher of the ‘next’ button. This would obviously skew my results a little.
The last figure I shall share is the total amount of time I have actually spend listening to music since I obtained this iPod about 3.5 years ago: 42.7 days
Remember there is only 10.5 days worth of music on the device. If I had wanted to, I could easily have listened to it all by now 🙂
It was KLS’s birthday on Sunday and we went apple-picking at Indian Ladder Farms, which is a working farm not far from our house. Although we we weren’t aware, apparently the crop this year is one of the best in a long time and the farm was extremely popular with hundreds of people there to pick apples.
The weather was great and the trees were abundant with apples in several different varieties. We purchased a ‘half bushel bag’ ($14) and started picking…
…and eating!
The varieties on offer included Cortland, Golden Delicious, a few others I forget now and Empire. The orchards were divided up by trees, and as you can see the apples just hung off the branches like grapes. I’d never picked apples before, so I was a little surprised by how densely they grew on each tree.
Taste-testing them right off the branches was a treat as well. Different types of apples have distinctly different tastes (probably due to the malic acid content) but it seemed we all preferred the smaller Empire apples.
Humans weren’t the only ones tasting the crop:
The bag grew increasingly heavier as we filled it (with dozens and dozens of apples). Eventually it became a bit too heavy for one person to carry comfortably. This was our signal to begin the hike back to the car.
On the way out, I couldn’t resist a wander into the pumpkin fields (Indian Ladder also offers pumpkin picking, but the fields were almost empty). Australian readers can appreciate the onset of Autumn evidenced by the backdrop in this photo.
All in all, a fine way to spend a birthday! Happy Birthday KLS!
….yeahhhhhhhhhh
That’s going to take some getting used to.
(In the spirit of AW’s frequent summaries…)
Like many others, I got ‘into’ your books with the wonderful The Bloody Red Baron, an alternate history novel featuring a vampiric Richtofen. It is wonderful stuff, and the several sequels only showed its brilliance was far from a fluke. But your skill as a writer had been around for longer than I knew, as the reissued Genevieve novels showed me. I ate them all up and demanded more. And then came Richard Jesperson and your reimaging of Conan Doyles Diogenes Club. Only now it was a secret English society of espers (aliens and future men?) tasked with saving the commonwealth from all manner of outlandish threat. I recently read Secret Files Of The Diogenes Club and it was the best short story collection I have ever read. Not only did it contain the best Lovecraftian tale not written by the master himself (Richard Riddle, Boy Detective) and the best superhero story ever (Clubland Heroes) but the tour-de-force at the end, Cold Snap was an unbelievably complex balancing act of wild ideas (the villian, amazingly a Doctor Who reference!), outrageous characters (essentially everyone in it), unexpected twists (the professor is…!?!) and just plain page-turningly-good writing. I’ll never forget to expect that that your books, Mr Newman, are required reading, and I will continue to expect they continue to get better and better.
Yes, we’re late to the party, but BBC America recently started showing the drama Skins and KLS and myself are completely hooked! We’ve always been suckers for (good) teen drama, but this one just destroys anything made on these shores. The language is bleep-a-minute (for USA TV) and the situations (frequent sex and drug use amongst underage teens) enough to surprise me BBC shows it at all but we couldn’t be happier. The tale of a 9 disaffected teens may be wild, crazy and even stereotypical, but the characters are real and likeable (even loveable) and the writing so good we were sucked in immediately. In my opinion Emily – both in character and because of her story – steals the show, and it’s a lucky bonus she’s so cute. Even better: she’s one half of twins, both on the show! The series is almost at an end, but we loved it so much we’re certainly getting the first two seasons (featuring a different group of kids) on DVD and keeping an eye on the listings in the hope BBC shows the upcoming season 4 as soon as possible after the UK.
Best show on TV, no question. Season five is upon us, and what started as a monster-of-the-week drama about brothers hunting demons has evolved into a full blown apocalyptic tale involving the forces of good and evil and the aforementioned Winchester brothers (Sam and Dean), both of whom have pivotal roles to play in the apocalypse. This series representation of angels (such as Castiel, above) is unique and refreshing and just… clever, and the way they present the machinations of Heaven and The Principalities, coupled with the return of Lucifer and his armies is powerful and extremely watchable TV. One of the creators of this show (Eric Kripke) comes from the lineage that gave us The X-Files and Millenium and it shows. But he has honed his art well beyond those older shows, and created something of a modern-day classic here in Supernatural. Highly, highly recommended.
25 years this year! And to think I got into this band as a fluke (a German cousin sent a cassette). Since then I’ve managed to get everything, including first issues of Dreamscapes (autographed!) and Crazyshow. You’ve been my go-to music for (literally) decades now, and I never get tired of any of your material. Other bands come and go, and while I have others I love dearly, it’s true for me there is no band quite like Alphaville. In fact, I recently told KLS I wanted a particular Alphaville song played at my funeral. If that’s not an endorsement, well what is?