One minute I’m kidding myself that I’m still too young to listen to Radio 2. The next minute I’m finding Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s phone calls to Andrew Sachs a bit puerile (and unlike most of the 10,000 people who complained to the BBC, I have heard them).
So that means that I’m now too old for Radio 2. What the hell happened there?!
It’s like a piece of time travel… my first generation 5GB iPod is getting hard to charge and put new music on, as its Firewire connector is dodgy – and the Firewire port on my PowerBook is broken which doesn’t help.
When 
the new 16GB iPod Nanos came out, I knew I had to have one: no moving parts and more than 3 times as much storage as my original brick. I know the Classic is better value per GB but I only have about 9GB of MP3s, so I figured the Nano would do.
I had feared that it wouldn’t work with my PowerBook – but hell it even works with my G4 iMac. V e r y s l o w l y. How I miss Firewire… an album would zip across that thick cable in seconds. It’s like missing Concorde – in the good old days it was all so much quicker.
All my music is on the big fat G4 iMac – which only has USB 1.0 – and so I ended up having to leave it running all night to transfer some 3000 songs. So imagine my amusement today when I started putting some videos on the Nano (MPEG Streamclip is the tool you need for making iPod-friendly videos, by the way), I pressed ‘Sync movies’ – I said movies – and it deleted all my music in a second. All gone. Hours of transfer work zapped. So I’m transferring it all again, and I can’t even play the addictive tilt-operated Maze game while it does it…
After a strangely satisfying day at work I feel like I’m on a roll. I’m reading a great book (thank you Sarah) – a Douglas Coupland that eluded me – Eleanor Rigby. Pretty much every page has a beautiful idea or joke – like the idea that the reason that the FBI witness relocation program is so successful is because anyone who goes on it gets shot. Genius!
And I’ve rediscovered a lost gem in my CD collection (thank you Smilja wherever you are) – Are You Okay? by Was (Not Was). It’s from 1990! It still sounds great! It has an up-tempo song that’s actually about domestic murder! It has Leonard Cohen singing about Elvis’s Rolls Royce! It has a song – oddly not heard on the radio much since 9/11 – called ‘I Blew Up The United States’! And I feel better than James Brown! I feel better now. How do you feel?
I think I’m the only person I know who likes Los Angeles.
And this cheered me up just now: quotes from the Steve Martin film LA Story.
For example:
Harris: Hello, this is Harris. I’m in right now, so you can talk to me personally. Please start talking at the sound of the beep.
[BEEP]
Sara: Hello?
Harris: Hello.
Sara: Hello?
Harris: Hello.
Sara: Is this a person?
Harris: Yes, it is a person.
It always amazes me how quickly my children sometimes manage to break new toys. So it cheered me up a bit to learn that the boffins at CERN (they have a web site you know) have already broken the Large Hadron Collider.
Hope they kept the receipt.
