rockets in the night - a metaphor

How do you folks make music mixes? I have a total of 6 that I really like, and it's taken me 3 years to make them.


[I don't like Apple, more on that later]

Do you think them up beforehand? Or do you do what I do:

1. And add a song


2. As it's playing, try to think what would go well after it


3. Listen for an excellent transition

Because this strategy is very time-consuming. You'd be surprised how hard it is to get songs to flow into one another well. I read that Trent Reznor hired Bob Ezrin JUST to sequence The Fragile. I don't like talking about specific music, because the chance that you like the same music as me is so minimal, but I'll give one example:

Beck's "Sexx Laws [Malibu Remix]" into The Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love" is really hot.

Problem is, for every transition like that, maybe twenty of them fail. And to test a transition, you have to put your cursor at the end of a song and play it through, which means that the playcount on your songs gets TOTALLY screwed up. And I'm nuts: I need to have my playcount accurately reflect my taste.

This all comes to light because this entry is going about computers. Namely, shitting on Apple:

.

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Now, I'm a traitor. I used to use Macs as a kid. I loved my old Mac Centris 8/160:

• 


• 

(Bonus points to anyone who knows what the "8/160" stands for.)

But I stopped using Macs in college when I started my computer science courses. There, everyone called them "Wackintosh" because there weren't any decent coding environments for them. That's because maybe 5% of the software out there was made for Macs. The rest was for PCs--which meant when a cool program came out it wasn't available on Macs.

(I remember King's Quest 6, specifically, not being out on Mac, which meant I had to play it at my friend's house; he went on to become a successful editorial and children's book illustrator.)

King's Quest Six was awesome, by the way:

.

But I hadn't given up on Macs. I bought a 2nd generation iMac when they came out, because I had heard good things about them:

.

Wow, THIS was a piece of crap. Maybe it was because they were switching from System 8 to System 9 or whatever, but every time I launched a program it went into "emulation mode" and took like 30 seconds to start up. Fuck that. Thankfully, desperately, I got rid of it on eBay, losing maybe $300 in the process.

I switched to a Sony VAIO.



I loved this Sony VAIO. I wrote It's Kind of A Funny Story on it. It was fast, easy, fun, worked great for school, and it was where I started using Windows Media Player to create, genre-fy, and grow my music collection. When it passed on (it lived for three years), I got another, an ultra-light.

The second one was also a beauty of a machine. My only complaint about Sony is that they screwed me on a charger replacement when they had to fix my VAIO because I stepped on it. This 2nd VAIO I still have but it is now on life support. After three years, it has developed these difficulties:

1. the cursor jumps around randomly every 30 minutes or so and will only stop if you hit a certain key over and over again


2. the hard drive spins very loudly if you have any big programs open

I took it to a shop; they told me--get this--it's because it's overheating. I NEVER would have thought it was a hardware problem. So I bought this Antec USB-Powered Notebook Cooler--



--which sits under your laptop and fans it lovingly to keep it cool. It's my new favorite thing since I am no longer into my high-performance Honeywell thermostat.

Anyway, I have become VERY concerned about my old computer dying, because, just as I BEAT MY EMULATED VERSION OF FINAL FANTASY I a few weeks ago--



--I am now tackling DRAGON WARRIOR--



--and the VAIO might die before I get to beat it!! I've only run into true irony a few times in my life (irony is NOT things sucking--as per "rain on your wedding day"--and it's not nostalgia, as per wearing a D.A.R.E. t-shirt), but this is truly ironic.

Just like when I was 11, I am trying to beat Dragon Warrior before I lose my game.

Anyway, back to Macintoshes. With my VAIO dying, I looked at new machines. My requirement was simple: ultra-light. I carry my laptop around a lot. But the newest VAIO didn't look like such a bargain. So I looked to the MacBook Air.

What sold me was the Super Bowl ad that showed it fitting inside a manila envelope:



So I bought one. About $2000. I was assured that it would

1. run all the programs that I need to run.


2. allow me to keep ALL of the genre information that I had assigned to songs in my Windows Media library.

I brought it home. I was very excited. Here's what I discovered:

1. Many of songs on my old computer were in Windows' proprietary .wma format, not in mp3. iTunes does not support importing of any of these files. None of them. That means that you have to get 3rd party software, convert all of your .wmas to .mp3s, and then bring them into iTunes. This involves downloading programs that cost $30 each, then seeing if they work, then trying other ones.
   
   Now, I thought that Apple was a friendly, easy-to-use company that welcomed converts. No, what they'd rather do is snicker at people with .wmas who have spent years organizing and genre-fying their music.



2. When you unplug an external HD from a Mac, it gives you a BS error message: "You did not safely remove your drive." Fuck that. That's an unnecessary message I'm going to see ALL THE TIME. PCs don't have to tell me that!



3. The MacBook Air's hard drive can only hold 80GB. (This is all models' max capacity.) I'm slightly over that with my music collection. I could keep my music on an external hard drive and play it when I was home, but WHOOPS! See the point above.



4. Mac couldn't convert a project from Flex for me. Flex is an Adobe program and Adobe is supposed to love Mac.



5. On a Mac, your list of programs and your indicator of which programs are active are placed in the same place (the flighty bar at the bottom of the screen). Don't know whose idea this was. This means that to open a program and to see which programs are open, you have to go to the same place. These are fundamentally different operations, and they're much better handled in different places, like with the Start Menu in Windows. Plus, who decided that that little arrow that indicates which programs are on has to be so small?



6. Safari crashed first time I used it.

So, luckily, I never buy anything major without asking the store if it has a return policy. They did, but with a 25% restocking fee. That meant Apple sucked another $500 out of me this time.

I went and bought the latest VAIO. It turned out that J&R in New York had it AND could give it to me with Windows XP instead of Vista.

In short, Wackintosh.

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Okay, that was MUCH longer than expected. Here is one of the things I meant to post:

• When I was in high school, I went into Jim Hanley's comic book store (the now-shut-down downtown branch) to try and sell my old comic book, Uncle Tumba (I'm going to have a giveaway of those soon), on commission.
  
  I met Ariel Schrag there. Ariel is a writer for The L Word and the author of four coming-up-on-legendary graphic novels about her high-school years. Touchstone just republished them, and on the L Word website, she's got a reading/presentation of the losing-her-virginity chapter of one of her books that's one of the funniest, best things I've seen on the internet lately.
  
  
  
  The only internet videos that usually distract me are--
  
  
  
  1. rare Nirvana videos
  
  
  2. Bill Hicks videos
  
  
  3. Louis CK videos
  
  
  4. videos of Carlos Mencia (fuck you)
  
  
  
  --but her video is awesome. And I'm not just saying that because Ariel was one of the first people who took a look at my writing and gave me a great suggestion. (She said that I shouldn't do comic books about Tibetan-monk super heroes. She said I should do stories about myself.)
  
  

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  No mental health stuff to report on right now; I can't help myself. I've just been really, really happy.