Distributed Mind

I have to admit, my Mac laptop from work is growing on me. The hardware is alright for one thing (big screen, light, easy to carry, CD and DVD writer, acceptable - if short - battery life, built in wired and wireless networking). The software is the real kicker though, and I am not thinking of the legendary Macintosh interface which I find to be inferior to a good KDE or Gnome setup. No doubt the OS is easy to use for system settings though; for example, I can nearly transparently switch between different wired and wireless networks (though becuase of how IU is setup I occasionally have to connect to a VPN but all that takes is two clicks). What is nice is having a professionally designed and programmed interface over a real kernel (well, there are a few quirks though - this isn't Linux or FreeBSD), so I still have UNIX-like environment for the heacy duty tasks. I know some people don't think that is a good thing, but believe me if you develop at all, or just used to being able to just use grep to search through file contents without having to go to some lousy GUI search interface, this is invaluable.

Oddly enough though, my favorite thing to do with my new laptop is play with iTunes. The biggest drawback and advatage of iTunes is how everything is centralized. It has a central music library which enables you to manage music rather easily. Of course, if you don't want iTunes to run your music, that is somewhat of a drawback. What you get from it, for example, though is the ability to make a bunch of different playlists easily - more about that later. Also, it is easy to browse through the music files. And it is very easy to rip CDs - a couple clicks, basically.

The playlists are the interesting part though. I have ripped a significant though small subset of my CDs, and created various playlists for different types of settings, e.g. I have one called "Struggle" with lots of stuff from Star Wars soundtracks, Beethoven pieces, and other random classical music, or one called "Melancholy" which has everything from "Ordinary World" to "Binary Sunset" from Star Wars, with a Moby track or two thrown in. And I can think of some other odd music to throw in there. The thing is, if I am careful, it sounds very natural. It is something I have always thought about doing - I always joked about doing an "Ultimate Mix" radio station ("The greatest hits of all time - literally."), this is the first time I have been able to conveniently do it (I could do it to an extent with Winamp but it was more cumbersome). And I was right - it works. Music need not be grouped by genre (as classical radio stations have known for years - opera and Gothic music are much farther apart than Pop and Techno).