Thunderstorms last night, shortly after midnight: they woke me up, and interfered with my sleep for a good part of the night.
Rather sleepy this morning.
Yesterday evening I retrieved the Sharper Image stereo from the bedroom closet and laid out the pieces—the speakers and the stereo itself—on the living room bookshelves; this morning I hooked everything up & turned it on. It still works, which means we can play CDs now without turning on the DVD player & television. How nice.
But now there's fifty feet of speaker wire tucked behind the bookshelves, which seems a little excessive: we could put one speaker in the front yard and another in the back, there's so much wire back there. Perhaps I should trim it a little.
(During the stereo's time in the closet, or perhaps while I was wrestling it out of the box yesterday, the volume got turned all the way up; the noise when I turned it on frightened Jacob, who needed a bit of calming from Mama before he'd go back to his breakfast and Bob-the-Builder DVD. Poor little guy.)
Thunderstorms today, too: 12:49pm, the sky is dark & noisy, and sheets of rain hurl themselves against my office window.
It occurs to me that the anti-iTunes contingent might have a point: some albums really are cohesive works, not just collections of unrelated songs. I wouldn't want to buy Amused to Death one song at a time—or listen to it that way.
On the other hand, I have doubts that the average Metallica or Red Hot Chili Peppers album qualifies as a single cohesive work.
Years ago, I stumbled across Jennifer Ringley's web site: either I found it myself, or one of the WRIfolk pointed it out to me, I don't remember. This was long before JenniCam, when she was just a college student using the dorm computer lab webcam to post an atlas of body parts.
Then there was JenniCam, and brief fame (infamy?).
JenniCam still exists. But the fame is long gone, and there never was much fortune to be had from the JenniCam franchise. Instead of doing web design for National Geographic in Washington, DC, Jennifer lives somewhere in California (Sacramento?) and works for an unspecified (but DCFS-ish sounding) goverment agency. She has a house, a boyfriend (of whom former JenniCam fans have just about nothing nice to say), and a bunch of pets.
It sounds pleasant enough—but I have to wonder whether she expected to settle so completely into a pleasant but mundane adult existence. (Does anyone?)
The coming-soon page on the Microsoft web site proclaims the imminence of Money 2004:
Count on faster, easier-to-apply tools for organizing and managing personal or small-business finances.
Faster? I'll believe that when I see it, 'Softies.
On the same page, Streets & Trips 2004:
Right around the corner, it's a complete travel-planning package loaded with maps, points of interest, routes, clear driving directions, and Pocket PC compatibility.
Well, now. Does 'Pocket PC compatibility' mean it works on my three-year-old iPaq 3600, which is running PocketPC 2002? With Microsoft, you can never be sure. Perhaps Streets & Trips 2004 only works with Windows Mobile 2003.
More geekstuff from Microsoft! The Wireless Intellimouse Explorer looks nice, and I'd love to remove a few wires from the rat's nest under my desk; but I suspect that Jacob would run off with it and I'd never see it again. I know how to drive Windows entirely from the keyboard, but that doesn't mean I'd enjoy doing it. Better to have a mouse that's tied down.
Sometime when I wasn't paying attention, the other Planet P Project album was released on CD. Amazon has it, for only $7, along with a bunch of Tony Carey solo albums.
Loyal readers will recall that this is one of the six albums saved from the Great Album Purge of last month; I kept it because I was sure it wasn't available on CD. How nice to have been wrong.
More music!
The Nails have a web page, www.the-nails.com. No word whether any of their albums are available on CD. My old, battered copy of Mood Swing is another of the six album-purge survivors; it would be nice to replace it with a CD.
Marc Campbell has a web page, too: www.marccampbell.com. Does this mean he's not with the Nails any more?
Another round of thunderstorms this evening. The creeks are rising, roads are flooded, much excitement all around. We were out in it, on a perhaps ill-advised trip to Circuit City to shop for portable DVD players. We found one, which will come in quite handy for keeping Jacob amused during long car trips.
Sputnik recorded approximately 3½ inches of rain today. It's a soggy world outside.