Kirk McElhearn, writing about the lack of syncing of the Recently Played playlist between the Mac and iOS on Apple Music:
This is a huge mistake. If I’ve listened to some music through a playlist on Apple Music, I may want to go back and check what I heard, to listen to certain songs again, add them to my music library, or check out more music by some of the artists I heard. Especially if I’m listening on a mobile device and didn’t have time to note what I heard.
I’ve been listening to podcasts for over a decade and agree with Marco Arment that they’re awesome. I also think podcasts are continually becoming more mainstream and am hopeful for the future of the integration of technology all around us and it’s ability to make podcasts as ubiquitous as radio. With the rate at which new podcasts are launching, it’s easy to miss great shows so this is the first of an ongoing series of podcast recommendations. I want to take the mrecommendations a step further than why I like particular podcasts and provide some metrics to help provide context around how the show fits into my podcast rotation and may fit into yours. When I converse with people who don’t listen to podcasts (or don’t listen very frequently) I find that one of the reasons is that there’s just too much to listen to and not enough time. Not every podcast is a must listen, especially interview shows. These metrics are bound to evolve and hopefully will be helpful in getting you interested in adding the show to your favorite podcast application. Let’s get to the first recommendation.
I can distinctly remember the summer of 2003. I was only a year into working in IT and realizing that I could seriously pursue this as a career. I was working two jobs, imaging Macs and performing various summer related tasks for my school district’s IT department during the day and serving up corn dogs, pizza and fried cheese on a stick (yes, really) at local fairs in the evenings and on weekends. I had just purchased my first iPod, the iTunes Music Store had recently launched and I was pouring a steady stream of my earnings into it. I spent over $500 that summer building the foundation of my music library and discovering new artists. It was exhilarating to have the vast landscape of music available to download on my iBook G4 using my Treo 650’s Edge connection[1] with the tethering that I wasn’t supposed to be able to access. That summer opened me up to a world that my protected upbringing had previously been able to easily divert by driving past the record store and turning K-Love up on the radio. Over the next eight years I’d spend hundreds of hours building my iTunes library to the nearly/merely 13,000 songs that have made the trek with me through a slew of computers and migrations. Then it all changed.
My buddy Stephen announced he was going independent today. Let me just take this internet armor off for a minute to say I’m so proud of Stephen. He’s poured himself into his writing and podcasting for years now as a side gig and he’s finally able to take it full time. I have immense respect for the amount of hard work and dedication I know Stephen put into getting himself prepared to sustain the independent career. It’s not easy to be steadfast in saying no to so many things so you can say yes to the the long term goal. Speaking as someone who has similar long term goals of going independent I’m proof that sticking with it is difficult [1]. Stephen joins Shawn Blanc, Myke Hurley, Marco Arment, Jason Snell and many others in proving that if you put in the effort and continually invest in your craft it is possible to live sustainably doing so.
As much as I enjoy Merlin Mann as a podcaster, this piece he published last night reminds me how I first fell in love with his writing.
And, even nine goddamned years after I’d left Ohio and improbably found myself in a pretty good college in Florida, I still craved the Reds cap that I thought was worthy of my childhood.
Part of the service at Soul City Church yesterday was devoted to grieving and praying in response to the attacks in Charleston, South Carolina, this week. I didn’t expect it and it overwhelmed me.
If you’ve ever followed a link to YouTube and found yourself looking back on an hour that you wish you could get back then I hope to be of some assistance with the occasional YouTube escape. These will be spontaneous trips to YouTube for things that are worth your time.
To pull the curtain back just a little, oftentimes the thing which most keeps me from writing is a fear of putting my own narcissism out on display for all to see. So often my first draft is little more than my own self-centered view of the world — a world where I sit at the center. This is not the world I am trying to build up, but when writing, how can any of us write about anything else but what we know and what we have heard? We write about what we know and what we feel. We write from our own soul and our own heart and we share what we’ve seen through our own eyes and what we’ve heard through our own ears. We write from the inside out.
It’s funny what you find yourself needing to buy when you move from warm to cold climates. One of the things you think you can get away with avoiding is gloves. That’s a mistake. Whether you drive or commute via public transit you need a good pair of gloves. When I started searching for a pair I ended up purchasing the North Face Krestwood E-Tip gloves and have been really disappointed with how they work with touch screens. They have a seam that rounds your finger tips and unless they’re a really tight fit you end up fighting to interact with a touchscreen even though they have “E-Tip Technology” built in. I’ve often found myself ripping them off in frustration to use my phone for 2 minutes and then put the gloves back on.
I look at my alternative everyman predicament this way. By letting go of what you thought was going to happen in your life, you can enjoy what is actually happening.