Aloha, Mister Hand!

[swashbuckler332]

• The bulk of my music listening is taken up by film music (I know, big surprise), but I do listen to other genres as well. I tend to find that what I listen to has a seasonal quality to it, with harder rock in the summer and more folksy stuff around the winter, and so I am in a transitional period in that respect. One other genre that I've noticed I listen to year-round without variation, however, is jazz. Granted, some of the jazz I listen to is film music, but I also often play jazz on Sundays out of a personal tradition held over from when the jazz section was moved into the classical room when I worked at Tower. This weekend I was going through my collection (see below) and rediscovered a few gems such as McCoy Tyner's Expansions and Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.
• Last week I mentioned that I had an iTunes crash that rendered the music on my iPod inaccessible either through iTunes or through Windows (via the iPod_Control's music folder), forcing me to restore it. However, since I had been very careful to preserve most of what was on it because of the last time something like this happened, it was a fairly easy task to throw on it my most frequently played music. This event has finally spurred me to do what I should have done in the first place; I went out on Saturday and bought a disc drive that I have dedicated entirely to being a mirror for my iPod and from now on will be synching the iPod to the library located on that drive. This makes me a little less mobile with respect to where I can add music or not, but I have tended to find that most of the time I'm loading it I'm on the desktop anyway.
  
  I do not believe this should be necessary (I have had plenty of players in the past that did not require this sort of thing), but I have to do what works best with what I have. And the iPod does, indeed, seem to like synching better, although it doesn't solve the major problem of the Fifth Generation iPod Classic 160 gig, which is the pause to read the hard drive that sometimes occurs between and during songs. I am not certain if the new version does this or not (Apple skipped the 160 gig version of the Classic last year in favor of a 120 gig), but it might be worth it to me if this issues has been rectified.
• People are stupid. People are dumb. Most people would be better off keeping mum!
• People can also be intelligent and adventurous at times as well (this link courtesy of glenniebun).
• What the hell is up with Facebook Scrabble!?! It keeps freezing while loading the flash screen, sometimes listing a communication error, other times just telling me that I can't get in. I can usually load it if I'm persistent, but there is no rhyme or reason to the portal that finally works (sometimes it's just a matter of reloading the page) and it is occurring on every computer I use, my personal laptop, my desktop and my work laptop. I know it's working if I get all the letters in "Loading." It also isn't necessarily updating when moves are made, nor always giving me a notification. Once I get in, I have no trouble moving around the games I have going on, but I have never had this much trouble singing into anything. It wouldn't be so bad, except that I need my Scrabble fix.
  
  It turns out that a few of my co-workers also play Scrabble, which has led to some interesting tournaments and showdowns. Plus, I got a triple word score on my own name the other day, which is always a neat thing to do, not to mention having the eight-point "J" and the four-point "H!" You know you have a Scrabble problem when you start adding up the point value on street signs.