Music Gel

Last night I talked about how Facebook's changing things. But it's not the first. One of the other things I've been noticing in the past few years is iTunes. A few years ago, I loaded in all of my old music, well, all of it back to high school when I made the switch from cassettes to CDs. Suddenly, the entire catalog of my owned music (and Lori's, too) was at my fingertips.

And then since then as we've gathered new music, whether it's a song one of us loves and buys off of iTunes or a new CD Rachel receives of children's music. So music is now a shared thing, too. We build smart playlists to segregate as needed, but in the end, it's one large collective. I was looking at it last night. I'm not sure I would have realized the power of iTunes without the iPod that my last employer gave me. It's a neat little thing, 80 gigs. I am amazed every time I take it out of its protective plastic case and how small it is. And yet, looking at all the music we own, it comes to less than half. 27 gigs, to be more exact.

Growing up, my parents music was all on LPs. They rarely played them in our presence and because of how complicated and likely to be damaged, we didn't really play their records. A time or two we'd look at the covers, but we didn't really know their music. There was the AM radio station that we'd listen to the in car, but it was all transitory, I don't think my parents were buying new music, but I'm not sure the music on there was new or had been in decades, so maybe my parents owned it already. Music just wasn't as big a part of our lives growing up. But ever since I got my first Time-Life FM radio in sixth grade, music became a part of mine. (I still mourn for the passing of radio stations KPLZ and KHIT.)

So now, we listen to music all the time, but not the radio. iTunes at home and now Pandora, Pandora at work, iPod in the cars. And Rachel's exposed to it. Not just whatever the radio decides to play, but because we have such a back catalog, it's less new than old, but it's a wide mix. And so Rachel's going to have a much wider level of appreciation than we did. Sort of. Because for now it will still be within the constraints of what we liked. But she has her own playlist and every time she hears something she likes, she asks us to add. And her list is varied, including modern stuff as well as things like The Beatles. It's pretty cool, really.

But it sure will be interesting when she gets to the point where she's discovering her own taste in music. She'll probably have a few computers of her own at that point, but it still seems like there will still be comingling of music. And music, too, becomes a shared thing across generations.

...

And that's my thoughts for the night and yet I'm short some words. Darn. Watching Firefly. Just saw the episode where the captain got married. Some funny stuff. Is a shame it got canceled.

Whelp, a full day meeting tomorrow. More about the strategy of our group. Primary author ended up being someone who's leaving the group at the end of the month to re-take the job they had a few years ago before they left to the job they had before the one they have now. In all that time they'd never been able to re-fill it, so they convinced him to come back to it. That's an interesting roundabout. I hear he's even trying to get his old desk back. He'd been in that area of the building for something like fourteen years so I guess, well, I don't know what I guess, but I can see how he might want to go back there, I guess that was a really good fit for him and this new thing we're doing is so amorphous and unstructured that it doesn't work so well for everyone.

I just know it's a smaller group and a small room on the fourth floor. I'm not sure what the day's going to be like, but, well, we'll see. I hope it's a good thing. My plan, at least right now, is to sit back and be a little quieter. That will be tough, but I think I need to save it for something bigger. This is just strategy, framework, This isn't the actual work. Let's save it for the chance to be creative, innovative and bring new stuff to light.