When I was in the college dorms from 2003 to 2007, students could freely exchange music between their libraries: I’ve ended up with over 20,000 songs this way, over 2 straight months of music. Running low on hard drive space, I recently took a closer look at my music library. I’ve listened to 7,033 of those songs. The most number of plays on a single track is 3572—that is the pink noise loop from SimplyNoise I used to block ambient noise when I was in school and studying in noisy public spaces. Anyhow, in college I grabbed entire discographies from artists just because I thought I should like them. The Who. Bob Dylan. 146 Bob Marley tracks.

Critics rave about these artists, all of the musicians they’ve influenced and the paths they’ve pioneered. I just… didn’t like a lot of the music. There were a few nice songs, but I had these enormous, comprehensive collections from artists I didn’t even really like. I just had them because of this powerful should. If only I had time to understand, to listen, I’d learn to like them, right? I was the problem, the music is spectacular. I’m annoying and boring, the music is enthralling and exciting. The music is great, I’m awful. Yes?

Well, it turns out I just don’t like some songs.

I’m such a peacemaker, a compromise and consensus-seeker, that I sometimes don’t even have enough confidence in my position to stubbornly disagree. I’ve always feared that somehow my position, if frankly stated in opposition to another’s, would destroy any potential for an amiable relationship. It’s not true. I may not like it, but it’s the human condition: we disagree and it is OK.

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From an extended interview, whose quality I can not yet attest to as I have not finished reading it, Billy Joel on Not Working and Not Giving Up Drinking:

Some writers can write reams of great books and then J. D. Salinger wrote just a few. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. They were all phenomenal. Mozart wrote some 40 symphonies, and they were all phenomenal. That doesn’t mean Beethoven was a lesser writer, it’s just some guys are capable of more productivity, some guys take more time. Mozart pisses me off because he’s like a naturally gifted athlete, you listen to Mozart and you go: “Of course. It all came easy to him.” Beethoven you hear the struggle in it. Look at his manuscripts, and there’s reams of scratched-out music that he hated. He stops and he starts. I love that about Beethoven, his humanity shows in his music. Mozart was almost inhuman, unhuman.

I’ve seen unhuman aptitude up close and it always engenders jealousy. It may be false that Antonio Salieri hated Mozart, but I’m sure other contemporaries did.

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Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight: “I knew I was no longer the choreographer of my life…”

And on what it is like to have a left hemisphere stroke: “And in that moment, my brain chatter — my left hemisphere brain chatter — went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.”

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It’s finally spring.

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After nearly 7 years accident free, Mykala accidentally spilled coffee on her laptop. We took it apart, cleaned the entire thing, put it back together, and it worked… for 4 minutes. This is the last picture of the laptop before it went to the laptop farm. We will miss you, you were a wonderful computer.

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With Scott Forstall out and Jonathan Ive now oveerseeing interface design as a part of his duties as benevolent head of Industrial Design at Apple, one can be pretty certain that rich Corinthian leather and green felt will be expunged from future software. (And yes, those examples are just how it looks, not how it works.)

Anticipating a reduction in user interface “exuberance” at Apple, The Talk Show #39 discussed concerns of a loss of “playfulness” with Ive in charge. Such speculation made me remember Peter Burrows’ 2006 piece Who Is Jonathan Ive?:

During an internship with design consultancy Roberts Weaver Group, he created a pen that had a ball and clip mechanism on top, for no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. “It immediately became the owner’s prize possession, something you always wanted to play with,” recalls Grinyer, a Roberts Weaver staffer at the time. “We began to call it ‘having Jony-ness,’ an extra something that would tap into the product’s underlying emotion.”

That sure sounds like playfulness to me.

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Watching the world turn upside down in the era of constant information:

In theory, big countries should dominate all sports because they have the biggest talent pool. But they don’t, because societies squander their talent.

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