Good morning. Hello. How are you? #577
Mostly bitching about this Apple Music migration and a heartwarming story about a keel
Good morning! Hello! How are you? All well? Feeling it? Alive? Wanna sing that Pearl Jam song? “Oh I-eye-iiii, I’m still alive.” I have a soft spot for that song. I saw that tour. With The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Because I wanted to see Smashing Pumpkins on the Gish tour and that’s how you had to do it in Boston, at the BU Walter Brown Arena. They were pretty good. But pretty quickly after Ten I decided Pearl Jam was lame for some reason. That was probably a mistake. I wrote off all those bands as poseurs: Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots. That was small-minded of me. I regret that.
So I am mostly moved over to Apple Music now. It took a monumental amount of work, moved over about a hundred playlists. SongShift mostly worked, but it was not perfect. There are about three playlists it’s just not migrating for some reason. It is inefficient in fixing matches, sometimes it won’t match something and then it will suggest the exact same thing. The most frustrating thing is that if you fix a match on one playlist, it doesn’t remember that fix for subsequent playlists. I’m going to try FreeYourMusic in the next day or two for the last few remaining playlists.
Certain artists and albums aren’t on Apple Music, but out of the the thousands of artists and albums, I’d say maybe ten weren’t on Apple Music. Curiously, several of them were local boston bands. The Veronica Black Morpheus Nipple remix album Meta does not seem to be on Apple Music, nor does the Turkish Delight re-issue of Howcha Magowcha, both of which are on Spotify. The Sault 9 album isn’t there, but, then, it’s not anywhere anymore (still pissed about that. The weirdest one is that the Chameleons’ Strange Times isn’t on Apple Music, and that… sucks. I am bummed about that one.
There are good things and bad things about Apple Music. I really don’t like it’s integration with your iTunes, it is confusing and slow. There is no back button, which is annoying. Every time you start the app it starts on that stupid home page landing page instead of, like, the page you were on before. I don’t know what happens when you click the “add” button on an album. There used to be a function where there was a little arrow by artists’ names and you could click it and go to that artist page and I turned it off years ago and I want it back and I can’t figure it out how. It is finicky and right now, this morning, it is simply refusing to add any music to playlists, which seems.. problematic, so I can’t say with 100% certainty exactly what mix is going to be at the end of this entry. We shall see!
BUT it is mostly usable, my muscle memory will evolve, and I’ll make it work.
Oh wait. Aside from this can’t actually add anything to playlists that is a problem ha.
I haven’t transferred over the 300 or so daily playlists. I suspect I will never bother with that. Not any time soon.
Oh. I get it.
Fucking Apple Music decided it needed to transfer over my entire iTunes music library over in order to turn on playlist syncing. That is some first-class genius engineering right there. I did not want that, they did not say they were doing that. God.
Welp. I guess this whole endeavor is kinda fucked. The obvious solution is to make a separate library for cloud vs loval music Apple Music, but I don’t even know how to clear out the icloud music library.
And if I make a new library I will have to re-migrate all of those playlists and that took hours.
God. Crap.
I wish Apple had geniuses available over the phone. This is complicated!
Anyway.
Sixty-two people have now viewed my scintillating Youtube video on how to move a Birdie’s Bed and I’m telling you it is on a rocketship to the moon, it is going to be the next big viral hit.
Liam, the guy re-building the 112 year-old sailing yacht Tally-Ho out of Port Townsend, WA, had an amazing new video. Several months ago, when he was in his old location, they attempted a lead pour to add extra ballast onto their pre-existing lead keel and it was a complete catastrophe, the new lead melted the old keel and sprang a leak in their form and leaked lead all over the place. They were prepared and had secondary containment and didn’t, like, contaminate the ground or anything, but it was a giant mess, and they just sort of gave up on the keel and have only sporadically mentioned it since, while they work on other things.
But this weekend, they said they were working on the keel again, and not only that, they got help. The original video had found its way to a retired master keel maker, a dude from Santa Cruz (who looks like Paul Newman) who had been making keels for over thirty-five years, thousands of keels. Mass manufactured keels, but also custom pours, including for several America’s Cup boat keels. SO, this dude came out of retirement, sent all his hand-made, specialized equipment up to Port Townsend with a buddy that he seems to have just roped into this cockamamie scheme, then when Liam and his gang were all ready, he came up and helped them with the new keel pour. It was just some of the most heartwarming stuff on the YouTubes, like. Imagine having some extremely specialized set of skills that is not Liam Neeson and killing people, and then after years of that being mostly obsolete, some absurdly popular YouTube channel and really nice people have a very specific, desperate need for your exact skill set. It must just be… great. What a great surprise adventure. This will probably not happen to me I don’t think twenty years from now anyone is going to desperstely need help with their ActionScript external data text file formatting.
I think I finally got this light bulb situation sorted out, third time is the try, the LED light bulbs in this floor lamp are now dimmable, the correct color temperature, and not flickering when I turn on my space heater, so I guess that is an accomplishment. Only took three weeks to get this stupid lamp sorted. And I got a new space heating foot mat and it definitely works, so now I just need to figure out how to get power to it. One day my feet will be warm.
I bought a copy of Test Dept’s Beating the Retreat for $7 and I am very excited about it.
I have to write a whitepaper for work today and I am not very excited about it.
I finished the Man Ray book last night and it really did get me all emo and nostalgic. One thing that really struck me, though, was how vivid people’s memories were of the closing nights. I went all week, and it was great, as far as I can remember, but I barely remember any of it, it is all a blur, save for dancing to the last few songs. I went and re-read the Man Ray Memories Livejournal post I wrote the night after Man Ray closed for good, and it’s a good entry, it really captures Man Ray’s place in my lfie, but it only says the last week was “unsane,” (sic). Not helpful. I wish I could remember more from those last nights. Alas.
Now, back to the Galbraith book about economic booms and busts. No reason.
Okay well this mix is just literally everything in my “To Investigate” queue that i have been listening to a bunch, which I think I said, like, yesterday, too? But honest, they are mostly different. Okay I guess they both have this Christian Lee Hutson song on it but I do listen to that song a lot. I really screwed myself with this Apple Music migration I am going to have to do it all over again, once I figure out how to delete my iCloud music library, god, what a nightmare. I have a job, man, and a four year-old without daycare. I got shit to do. This is ridiculous. Just stop giving Joe Rogan a hundred million dollars already, jesus.
Talk to you tomorrow!