dreaming

Usually my dreams are very boring, but recently I've had dreams in which things actually happen. Very odd.

Last night I had a dream in which I was a member of the police, or a detective, or something. After some investigation, it turned out that my crime-fighting partner was guilty of a series of crimes; and moreover that he had set up a time bomb somewhere. I confronted him, and he told me that he would only tell me where the bomb was if I would take a picture of him and post it on the Internet. We had a fight and I ended up getting tied up and left hanging upside-down from the ceiling. I tried to take a picture of him with my camera phone, but it wasn't working for some reason. The criminal was torn, because he didn't really want to set off the bomb, and he could tell that I was really trying to fulfil his request. Finally, with the clock ticking down, I managed to post a picture and he told me that the bomb was at the house of a woman who had been somehow important to the plot in a way that I no longer remember. He then escaped. I freed myself from the rope and sped towards the bomb location, calling the police on the way, and then ...

well, I don't remember what happened next, but it must have been something damned exciting, don't you think?

iTunes playlist note

This is based on a suggestion mmcirvin made a while ago, but has been updated slightly to take into account a new iTunes feature.

Create a smart playlist (the simplest way is to hold down the 'Option' key and click on the little gear at the bottom far left of the screen; you can also go under 'File' to 'New Smart Playlist' and use the following settings (or variations on them):

---

[√] Match [all] of the following rules:

• [Play Count] [is greater than]: 6
• [Last Skipped] [is not in the last] 1 months

[√] Limit to [1 GB] selected by [least recently played]

---

Depending on how much music you have, you may want to set the minimum playcount higher or lower, and 1 gigabyte may be too large or too small.

The purpose of this playlist is to collect music that you used to listen to a lot, but that you haven't listened to recently. (The bit about 'play count' captures the first part, and the 'least recently played' the second.) One problem I've had with this sort of playlist is that if I'm using it to populate 'Party Shuffle', for instance, and a song pops up that I don't feel like listening to now, then even if I skip over it it may pop up again after a little while. The 'Last Skipped' bit means that once I skip over a song it won't reappear in the playlist for another month, which is quite welcome. (That's the new iTunes feature I mentioned.)

I hope someone finds this useful!

a missed opportunity

Tonight CMonti came by for practice, and we played music for tomorrow's show for about an hour until 8 pm. Then he said, "You know, there's this song I've really been wanting to play at the Tazza open mike: 'Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other'."

I have that song in iTunes, so I played it a few times, we figured out the chords and lyrics (the latter with the help of the Internet), and we put together a passable two-guitar version. Then we headed over to Tazza, looked for parking for a while, found it, and headed in.

By this time it was slightly before 9 pm and all the open mike slots were full, so we stuck around for a few acts, then took off.

While leaving, we encountered:

* refuz, who noticed me leaving and came over to say goodbye.

* Chris Rosenquest, who apparently had earlier posed semi-nude for a RISA calendar (I think; some calendar or other, certainly), an incident which he referred to as 'the biggest mistake of my life'.

Earlier, when I arrived at Tazza, I encountered:

* A guy who asked if the thing I was carrying around in a guitar case was a guitar, and then exaplained that he was a heroin addict who had lost $400 in a four-day blackout, and that one of the cars on the street was his, and that he also played the guitar, and that if I gave him some money he would give me his license. (He was a little scattered, as who wouldn't be?)

Do you think I should order one of these?

http://www.cafepress.com/buy/haller/-/pv_design_details/pg_1/id_7531543/opt_/fpt_/c_360/

(If you go to the Cafe Press website and type in your own name or handle, you too can find strange pseudo-personalized stuff! I had two results: http://www.cafepress.com/buy/haller/ but the other one was more boring.)