Parade of the iPod People

This shiny new 160 gig iPod of mine means I can squeeze a significant chunk of my music collection in my shirtpocket. On the downside it now takes 15 minutes just to scroll through and settle on an album to play. Paralyzed by choice.


I'm fortunate enough to have a job that doesn't require much aural attention, so I spend a good chuck of the day under headphones listening to music. With my old 8 gig Nano my method was to keep lists of albums I wanted to hear as it occurred to me, then readjust my iPod accordingly in the evening for the next day. Which meant a copious amount of time spent agonizing over what to delete to free up room. Now everything I'm ever going to want to hear, aside from new music, is readily available. There's not room for everything, of course. That Foreigner Greatest Hits album I can't remember why I downloaded gets left behind, as does the obscure Philip Glass soundtrack that sounds like a Cylon-operated ice cream truck malfunctioning.

So that's all well and good. My two complains are, first, the battery life isn't as potent as the previous one. Minor quibble, since it gets through the day just fine with plenty of juice to spare, but I wonder about the technological regression.

The second complaint is that audiobooks are now organized by track instead of author. The problem with this is I use audiobooks to organize my collection of old radio shows, spoken word recordings, and such things. If I want to listen to The Goon Show, for example, I'm not going to want to search by the episode name, I'm going to want to search under The Goon Show. And then I want the shows listed chronologically (as I've organized them) not alphabetically. Most likely I'm going to listen to the episodes in the order they were originally broadcast. The Nano did this just fine. The new one, I see, is going to be stubborn. To remedy this, I've changed the radio shows from 'audiobooks' to 'music' and can now search by genre for 'radio' to list all radio shows. The irritation here is that I can no longer separate music from non-music, and must specify all smartlists to avoid playing anything in the genres 'radio', 'spoken', 'audio', etc. Needless complications.

Apple, please. If it ain't broke...

Cape May

The Congress Hall Inn. Originally built in 1816, this is its third incarnation after burning down twice. Unsurprisingly they're not enthusiastic about guests lighting candles in the rooms.


View from the rocking chair on our balcony.


Sunset Beach, littered with fabled "Cape May diamonds," which I was disappointed to learn are actually mere quartz pebbles. No monetary value whatsoever!


Wreckage of the S.S. Atlantus, an experimental concrete ship which its builders were surprised to discover didn't float very well.


The Southern Mansion, right profile.


Typical ice cream colored house on Washington St.


The Cape May lighthouse.