Jeeze, I didn’t realize just how much money I’ve spent in iTunes (and on CDs) over the years until I decided to make a “smart playlist” and put every alternative, rock, punk, pop, etc genre I have into it. The thing came out with 3348 songs, and a playing time of 9.3 days.

So, what did I do about it? I put the whole thing on shuffle, and hit play. Its like a radio station with music from the past three decades, a mix of heavy metal, and slower stuff, explicit stuff that couldn’t be played on the radio, and a handful of those old “guilty pleasure” songs you’d never admit you listened to in a million years.

And what else am I doing about it? Using iTunes printing feature to post the whole song list in PDF format right here for the world to see. Yeah, I know, some of the songs on there are inviting ridicule, so sue me, it was a different time when I bought those.

I think it’s pretty fitting that the first song on the list after I hit the shuffle button was the most famous phone number in the world since I haven’t heard that song in years. I would have hated to have been one of those poor unlucky bastards who actually had that number in the 80′s – their lives must have been miserable. Actually come to think of it, I can’t even remember what phone number my family had in the 80′s, but I do remember the green rotary phone in the kitchen with the really long, tangled cord, my, how far we’ve come now that I have an iPhone sitting on my desk.

That actually raises an interesting point about the passage of time. I’ve grown up in a world where we had rotary phones (and you only had one phone in the entire house unless you were lucky), we had big boxy TVs with two knobs on them and small curved glass screens that distorted the picture in the corners and only got a handful of channels on the rabbit ears (those channels going off the air at a certain time at night, and starting the next morning again with the national anthem, and only one TV per house unless you were filthy rich, oh and you had to be home at a certain time to watch a program, which you found in a magazine called TV Guide), big vinyl records that wore out after too many uses, VCRs with simulated woodgrain sides and blinking clocks, station wagons with simulated woodgrain sides, and dinner every night at the kitchen table (unless you had the oh-so-rare permission to go to a friend’s house for dinner).

That period gave way to touch-tone phones (but still with long, tangled cords), cable TV with a couple dozen channels, portable tape decks called the walkman, and big-screen TVs massive cabinets in the den, and an extra TV in the parent’s bedroom. You had to go to the local pizza parlor (think of an early version of Dominos or Pizza Hut) to play a video game on a large machine in a cabinet (simulated woodgrain on the sides, of course). A president named Reagan proposed building a space station to beat the russians.

Then came cordless phones (with long antennas that you had to pull up and down for each call), bulky computers with two big “floppy” drives (and no hard-disk) and monitors that only produced a few basic colors (and MS-DOS, no windows or Mac OS yet), and dot-matrix printers that printed on huge spools of paper with holes in the sides that you had to tear off, and cable TV with 50 something channels (and nothing on). Movie theaters only had one or two screens in them (not the 20 screen multiplexes we have today), and you could get a ticket, popcorn, soda and a box of candy for around $5 (try getting even just a ticket for that price now). The state of the art in video games was the Atari 2600, and the controller had a stick and a single button. You could plug the thing in to your TV and play at home. If you tried to call someone and they weren’t home the phone just rang and rang and rang until you gave up.

Somewhere along the line was controversial that the captain (Picard) on that new Star Trek show (The Next Generation) said the word “damn”. Interracial couples are sort of rare, and people don’t talk much about “those two guys who live together but aren’t married”.

Then came the Macs (or windows), with a monitor that had more colors (256, wow!), a hard-disk and a smaller, hard-sided floppy disk that wasn’t really “floppy” anymore. Laser printers that printed on plain sheets of paper, and something called a modem that let you connect to a service called “prodigy” (or eventually “AOL”). No one knew what the heck the world wide web was. Tape decks started to give way to CD players, and finally you didn’t have to “scrub” back and forth trying to find the beginning of your favorite song. The big game to have was Super Mario Brothers on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the controller had a cross-shaped pad and two red buttons labeled A and B (and two lesser-used buttons called start and select).

We fought a war in Iraq, and watched the whole thing on CNN (the only twenty-four hour news channel).

Next were such innovations as “car phones”, which were like really large cellphones you had to have installed in your car by a professional (of course before that there was also the “brick” cellphone that you could attempt to carry around with you, but I never noticed anyone who actually did that except on TV and the movies). Public service announcements stopped showing a crying native american (called an indian back then) and started pleading with families to eat a meal together every day (huh? people didn’t do that already? when did people stop doing that? I had done that with my family every day of my childhood). If someone wasn’t home when you called them an “answering machine” picked up the call and recorded a message for them on a small tape deck, for some reason this annoyed the hell out of people (what? you enjoyed it more when the phone would ring twenty times? Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, there’s just no pleasing some people).

Computers kept getting smaller, faster, and more spacious in terms of storage, and the screens kept looking better and better. Cellphones got smaller and could be carried around in a bag and plugged in to a cigarette lighter in your car. Computers got CD-ROM drives, and TVs were commonplace in just about every bedroom. Oh, and people started having a second phone number for their constantly chattering kids, and phones scattered all through the house. If you didn’t have an answering machine by now, you were looked at as a dinosaur (and yet the machine answering the phone still annoyed people). People said the cure for cancer was about 10 years away.

Teenage pregnancy meant a 17 year old got knocked up by her boyfriend, and someone was getting an ass-kicking.

Eventually something called Netscape came around and people started “Surfing” the web. Pages were mostly just text, and some of it blinked (wow, that was cool!). No one had ads on their sites, but eventually commercials on TV for companies started saying “visit us on the web at w-w-w-dot-name of company-dot-com”, prompting people to turn to each other and say “so, you think we should get this web thing?”, which was usually followed by “I don’t know, is it expensive?”.

Computers became portable (sort of, if you had a strong back), cellphones started to fit in your pocket (uncomfortably though), and someone tried to put movies on large metallic discs the size of the old vinyl records, but most people stuck with the video tapes instead. Public service messages urged families to eat at least one meal per week together (oh my god, what the hell was going on here?). Modems gave way to cable modems which were called “broadband” and only available in limited areas.

There was a time that we thought the world would end when all the computers crashed on new-year’s eve in the year 2000 (hrmm… didn’t happen, oh well, I guess some of those people wasted all that cash on the years worth of food they hoarded). People started downloading music instead of buying CDs. Movies began being sold on DVDs, and some people talked of “high definition” TV but not many people actually saw it.

We fought another war in Iraq, and watched in on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and countless other channels (we’re still fighting it unfortunately).

Now, the high definition TV hangs on my wall, its a flat screen like in those old sci-fi movies from my childhood and it gets more than 200 channels (and still nothing on), and has a remote control with a screen of its own in it, My phone is a small slab of metal and glass that I dial by touching a person’s name, and it plays music and videos and lets me surf the web. It fits so comfortably in my pocket I have to remember not to accidentally sit on it. My TV and internet connections are fiber-optic (like those old wired magazine articles promised they would be eventually). My computer is the size of a notebook and is easily carried around. I can pause and rewind TV when I watch it (and watch my shows whenever I want, I find them in a list on the TV itself with my remote), and movies are now available on Blu-Ray discs (like DVDs but better). No one in their right mind buys CDs anymore, and some people download movies and TV shows from the internet like when music first started making its way online years before. They gave up on trying to get families to eat together I guess since I haven’t seen any more of those public service messages. I guess its common now for kids to be out late on school nights, go to movies without their parents, and all sorts of other stuff I couldn’t have even dreamed of when I was that young.

It isn’t controversial that someone says “bitch” on TV, and there were award winning shows on some channels that said “fuck” several times an episode.

Teenage pregnancy means a 14 year old got knocked up by “maybe it was (insert name), or it could have been (insert second name), or I guess it might have been (insert third name), I don’t know”. Students have to go through metal detectors at school because every once in awhile some crazed student brings in a gun and shoots up the place. People still say the cure for cancer is about 10 years away.

On the more positive side people routinely date and marry people with different skin colors, and in some states, gay people can get legally married. Unfortunately for them though its coming a bit late since some countries are seeing the start of a shift towards couples not getting married at all, but still living together and having kids.  We’re almost finished with that space station that Reagan guy wanted us to build (of course he’s dead now), oh, and we’re doing it WITH the russians.

Oh, and people think the world is going to end in 2012 when some old calendar stops counting (why does that seem so familiar? heh). If they’re wrong this time too, I wonder what this blog post would look like if I were to re-write it then.

Anyway, this got long, so here’s that playlist.

Current Playlist

Anyone who knows me probably knows that math isn’t my strongest ability. Actually I tend to think of math as a language of its very own, and like any other language except english I have almost no serviceable ability to use it without some sort of technological assistance. Maybe its the way my mind is wired or the way I learned as a child, but something goes wrong when I try to think in anything other than english.

If you ask me the rules for how to execute a certain procedure I can tell them to you very easily, but when you plug the numbers in and ask me to actually complete that procedure my mind blanks. It was the same thing when I tried to learn German or Spanish or French, I could tell you the rules for conjugating the verbs and all that stuff, but I couldn’t actually do it.

I tend to think in concepts, maybe that has something to do with it. When I read a book or something is explained to me I immediately start having this inner dialogue with myself where I hash out the way I might use it, or what I think it means, or what it might look like, or how I would explain it to someone else. I develop scenarios, I plot strategy, I build my own narrative. I prefer the “executive summary”, as opposed to the footnotes. I am, obviously not a details guy.

Why this is coming up right now is because I came to a realization yesterday (or the day before?): the way I make my living is entirely dependent on math. Furthermore, several of my passionate interests also depend on math. Its a strange thing, to realize that your major strength is totally dependent upon your greatest weakness. Let me explain, just a little.

I make my living with my investments and with entrepreneurial endeavors, but mostly the investments lately. The market can go up, it can go down, whatever and I still somehow manage to make a living. Obviously math is important when you’re dealing with money, and stock prices, and earnings per share and all that, and yet, somehow I don’t go there. I don’t know how I do it but I can somehow figure out the right move by looking at the big picture and ignoring the smaller details. In fact, if I try to drill down into the details and too many of the numbers my mind locks up and I’m like a retarded monkey just staring at the screen.

I look for movement, I look at graphs, charts, the news from a company’s sector, and the competition it has, but don’t put the giant spreadsheet with all the numbers and formulas in front of me or I won’t know what the heck I’m doing. Somehow this has worked for me for a many years. I keep a running list of all the bad calls I’ve made over the years and its pretty short. Actually I’m much more likely to make a bad investment in a business of my own than I am in the stock market.

As another example, take politics. Politics is something I’m passionate about. What the day before christmas is to a small child, the days leading up to an election every four years are to me (yeah, that sentence didn’t make much sense, but its the best I can do). Anyway, elections are all about math. You have delegates in the primaries, you have the fundraising numbers, you have poll numbers, you have the electoral college, and some other numbers. Even people I know who are math wizards get driven insane by the whole mess, but somehow I just “get it”.

Again, I ignore the raw numbers and look for the trends, look for movement. The difference between Obama and Clinton’s, numbers means nothing to me, until I see the previous week’s results alongside them. I ignore the numbers and just look to see how the thing is changing. I can’t look at a static snapshot and understand what’s going on, but if I see the thing unfold over time I’ve got it pegged. Like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, if they hold still they don’t register with me, but when they move against the backdrop I’m locked on to it instantly. If I were to keep track of the predictions my instincts have lead me to over the years, I’m sure I’d be right about 80 percent of the time (unfortunately even when I wanted, desperately to be wrong, like in 2004).

Long story short: Glance at a number and make an instant, instinctive judgement = good. Try to work with a number and get an exact result = not so good.

Bonus info: Audiobooks are lost on me, I don’t retain anything from them, but if I read the actual book instead I’ve got it nailed. People talking on the phone are the same thing, I won’t retain the info, but if I look them in the face I’ve got everything they said (seriously, talk to me on the phone or with my back turned to you and I won’t remember much of it after 10 minutes or so, talk to my face and I’ll remember every word for years). Maybe I need some sort of visual cue to organize info, like an arm movement coinciding with someone’s speech, or whatever, but either way, if I’m not using my eyes for whatever it is I’m trying to absorb I don’t retain it. This is one reason I prefer email over phone calls (much to a few people’s chagrin), when I read the text I retain its meaning, when I hear the disembodied voice I don’t.

It doesn’t matter how interesting or important it is, my attention level doesn’t change, I’m paying attention, my mind isn’t wandering, I am focusing on what’s being said, but unless I can see something I don’t grab on to it mentally. Obviously when I learn with my eyes, and I think with dialogue, and act with instinct I’m successful, when I try to swim against that tide, I’m not.

Double Bonus info: While listening to music, the lyrics tend not to register with me, its all the rhythm, tone and instruments. Unless I’ve heard a song several dozen times I won’t know what its about, I’ll just know it sounds good. This is probably why I’m not big on rap or hip-hop or whatever its called now, too vocal, and it may also be why I seem to be drawn to modern remakes of older songs from my youth, because I’ve already heard them repeated enough that I understand the lyrics without trying. (Chris Cornell’s version of “Billie Jean” is 100 times better than Michael Jackson’s original, as is whatever band’s version of “Beat It” I just heard a few days ago, oh and on an older note the “S&M” album where Metallica remade their own songs with an orchestra in the background is their best album, it has a depth that makes all the original songs on their original albums sound flat and uninteresting). By the way, Spoon’s “The Underdog” might be the best-sounding song ever, especially if they ever release a version without the lyrics, the music behind that song is unbelievable.

That said, I did get wordpress 2.5 on here a few days ago (thanks to my uber server admin guru dude Kit), and I’m checking out the damage now   Obviously the footer area is a bit broken, so pardon the dust until I can get that taken care of.  I did make a little change to the settings, so that the front page only shows the most recent post now, and you’ll have to click the nav buttons to go to the older ones.  The idea for doing this is that I should (in theory) be updating the footer section more frequently in the future, so I’d like to bring it closer to the top of the page.  I’m thinking of having Matt (when he’s got some time available) tweak the sidebar a bit, perhaps to remove the tag-cloud.

Anyway, if you notice any weirdness with the text formatting on the site, just try to ignore it, it’ll probably get fixed sometime next month.