I was tempted to include the full post I wrote about the rabbit hole that is “genres” for my music collection as a “Today I choose” post, but the reality is that it is more of a series of posts on their own.
So the TL;DR version of The rabbit hole that is organizing a digital music collection is that while I am making great progress on storing, backing up, and playing my music collection, I still have work to do to make it more shareable and a TON of work to do in simply organizing it by genres.
I’ll still need to do some more research to decide what categories “sing” to me, so to speak.
Today I choose to go down the musical rabbit hole of “genres”, and that rabbit hole is more of a full-on warren down there with tunnels and sub-tunnels. And maybe other animals that aren’t even rabbits burrowing their way through.
When I finished my post yesterday, I said I was going to take a break for a couple of days, but that was more about not being near a computer than it was about wanting or needing a break. I’m feeling pretty good about where I’m at for things, and blogging as well. I’ve got a small milestone coming up, and I’m looking forward to writing about it in my blog. But I was going to be at the cottage, or so I thought, so I had planned a short stoppage.
Yet, morning came, and J wasn’t feeling well. I had been “off” for M/T, Andrea was feeling “off” W/Th, and the cub was “off” F and now Saturday. While lots of people would have just pushed him to “suck it up” so we could go to the cottage, I try extra hard not to do that type of pushing. If it was me, I would have been trying to decide how to stay home without disappointing everyone since I’m the driver, and pushing me just makes me feel worse. So I told him flat out that we wouldn’t push him, it was his decision, and since he really wasn’t feeling up to it, we ended up postponing the trip.
Which gave me some time for more progress on the basement, but it also left me with a bit of time to play with some of my music collection some more. And out of nowhere, an old album came to mind.
The album was called Street Hits and it was put out by CBS Records, but the distributor in Canada that created the partnership? Bata. Yep. The shoe company. There are 10 songs, 7 of them by Canadian artists I guess.
We have Apple Music, and we really don’t get our money’s worth out of it much these days. We used to play music trivia while driving to work, but that is out. I do turn it on sometimes in the basement while I’m working, although I also have to keep turning it off for conference calls and frequently forget to reach over to hit play again. But with the entire library at my disposal, could I find all the songs from Street Hits?
A walk on the dark side
My older brother (by 13 years) had Deep Purple, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Meatloaf, etc. But he was older, married, lived a few blocks away. For my brother closest to me in age (by 6 years), we were living with our parents who were mainly Top 40 listeners. One of the two local radio stations, CKPT Peterborough, was permanently on the dial in the kitchen and we weren’t allowed to change the station. Nor in the car. Not that there was much else for AM or even FM to reach the Peterborough Valley area. There was one other station, CHEX, but it wasn’t a whole lot different. CKPT had a bit of the older stuff too, CHEX seemed to be newer music. But it was relatively plain pop music.
Parts of Street Hits seemed subversive in comparison.
First up was “Hold On”, by Triumph. Nothing particularly startling there, a pretty basic ballad. “Music holds the secret, to know it can make you whole…”. It’s pretty up-tempo after a slow open, but it’s not revolutionary.
Second on the list was Loverboy, “Working for the Weekend”, with everyone trying to get it right with a new romance. Again, a nice basic up-tempo song, with a bit of backbeat.
Then you hit the third song. “Wango Tango”. Ted Nugent. And suddenly you are in the NSFW category. And you don’t get three guesses to figure out what Wango is referring to…later on, when he is describing the new dance, well, both her ankles are turned out, her belly is down, and her butt is up. You do the math. But then it goes further. There’s a bit more metaphor…she is supposed to pretend her face is a Maserati, turbo charged and he’s offering fuel injection, and the music and lyrics are done in a rhythmic fashion. See where I’m going with this? No? Are you a monk? What about when he looks for a garage to store the car?
For a 13-year-old kid, it was like finding out someone had made a porno and released it on cable. My description of the song sounds terrible, I know, but the music is decently compelling, it has a strong backbeat, and more importantly, a gravelly voice that’s almost a throw-forward to eventual rap-like lyrics with less spitting or rhyme.
That this qualified as “art”, was workable as a song, was mind-blowing. But we made sure we only listened to it when our parents were away.
Goddo followed up the porn song with “Pretty Bad Boys” singing about being, well, a pretty bad boy looking for a pretty bad girl.
And then Straight Lines took us back to a love ballad called “Letting Go”. WTF? “And the hardest part of love is letting go…”.
On to Side B
Right, an album. So after five songs, you had to flip it over. 🙂
Ozzy Osbourne kicked it off with “I Don’t Know (Live)”. He was playing for the first minute to his fan base, and honestly, I couldn’t care less. It sounds like satanic worship music, or what it was pretending to be anyway. But after that, the next four minutes is a decent song with a pretty aggressive guitar-led set of riffs. It lags a bit in the middle, but the rest? Not bad.
Judas Priest’s “Heading Out To The Highway” was next, and it wasn’t much of an addition to the album for us. If I’m honest, Ozzy wasn’t much either. It’s okay, just not very compelling.
Then you hit Rough Trade, which has a pretty aggressive band name that a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily even understand, but the song is called “All Touch”. And you could listen to its metaphors and similes for a long time and still have no idea what exactly the song is about. “Splintering fragments of conversation, Never got down to cold hard facts, All touch but no contact”. Casual sex? Missed connections? The start of a break-up? When you read the lyrics, you see it seems more like drama between lovers or a cat-fight, where the fight is all verbal (all touch but no contact). It was like something I had never heard before and it was the only reason to listen to the B side.
“Follow You There” by the Queen City Kids (who had opened for Ozzy apparently) was okay, but nothing special.
And then we close it out with Harlequin’s “Thinking of You”. Another lily-white love ballad. It sounds like something that should be sung by Billy Joel.
It was one of the weirdest albums we owned, and I don’t even know what made us want it. We made a special trip to the Bata shoe store in some mall to buy it, it was $3.99 and we asked our mother to get it for us. We had to have seen it advertised on TV, but it wasn’t like we knew the songs really. But we wanted it. And every weekend, that album was in our rotation.
But it isn’t like you make a mixtape for your Walkman and throw Wango Tango on there. Trust me, I know, because I did just that, and if you’re not sitting in a kitchen listening to music blast with your friends, but instead are walking around in the sunshine delivering papers and listening to someone’s face being a Maserati, it’s just plain out of place.
Tonight, after Jacob went to bed, I pulled up the menu and searched. All the songs are available on Apple Music, even the Queen City Kids one. Heck, I even found a picture of the album cover online (a FB page for a bunch of radio audiophiles talking about old albums had mentioned it).
I mentioned the other day that my “reorg” state for my office, basement, etc. was getting to me, and while taking a break to cleanse the palate, or making progress was good, they’re minor mitigations for a larger malaise.
I don’t want to oversell how bad things are, I’m doing okay, making progress. A major phase will be done by next Friday I think, another by the following Friday, and fingers crossed, all of it by the end of September. A true reason for celebrating Thanksgiving, so to speak. 🙂
But I was feeling like the basement had become a construction site, not an office where I work at my normal job.
Tonight, I decided to sort a bunch of stuff around, move some major pieces from A to B, and be ready for the end of Phase I and the start of Phase II (although the numbering is getting confusing to me, I don’ t know what my phases are anymore). In the end, it’s workable. I’ll take some photos to add to the long piece when I do my before / after post some time in early October.
It looks and feels functional. Andrea and I even sat on the couch tonight for a bit in the middle of another project just to relax and enjoy the quiet and slightly cooler basement. Without the A/C on, it’s mostly livable down here! I hope I feel that way when winter comes.
And it should help my brain manage the “renovation” / “reorganization” stress.
Today I choose to clean up my reorg space to make it more usable and less like a construction site. I’m also going to take Saturday and Sunday off from posting, a clean weekend break.
Jacob is good at certain things like chess and not as good at other things like team sports. That’s not a normative statement, nor a complaint, just a note that he won’t be joining a lot of obvious group activities that a lot of kids do and that are easily part of elementary and high school. He enjoys them, but not so much for competition. Finding activities that he likes to do more frequently, beyond board games with the parents, will always be a work in progress for him, as it has been for his parents.
For Jacob, I have tried to encourage his writing, but since he doesn’t seem have a natural outlet or desire for his stories, it goes in spurts. I suggested that perhaps he could do book reviews, however brief, since he loves reading so much, and to be candid, I wish I had a record of everything I have read in my life. Obviously we won’t capture J’s early years very accurately, but he started a list this year and I think he is over 100 so far. Not a bad start. I’m thinking of doing it up as some sort of certificate or something he can put on his wall, but it too is a work in progress.
He likes designing board games, and has done two camps for it, and I need to get back to helping him actually create a solid quality prototype (we did one a few years ago called Jacob’s neighbourhood that we all enjoy playing now and again, mostly for some of the humour we put in it but it was rudimentary compared to a couple of his other games). I’m hoping to nail some stuff in the next few weeks and give him a version for Christmas somehow “secretly”.
So those are two areas that I would like to build on. He’s assembled some stuff, he’s done a few crafts with Andrea, a few courses here and there.
But a few months ago, he got a new iPhone for his birthday, and I’ve encouraged him to take some photos with it. He is willing to do some on his telescope at some point, which will be an interesting outlet for him, I hope, yet I was pleasantly surprised when he was at the cottage recently that he took some good shots of sunsets. No prompting from me, he just took some decent shots and sent them to us by text.
So, we’ve been chatting here and there about what to do with his photos, in part to encourage him, and in part just to display them, and tonight we doubled down together, sorted some 100+ photos by date, and then upon review, chose 4 that he quite liked. We uploaded them to CostCo, chose one for high-end canvas printing to see how it turns out, and three more as prints, and sent them off. The canvas one will take just over a week, maybe ten days; the prints are ready tomorrow afternoon. And he wants the prints as soon as they are ready (actually, I suspect he wants to take the prints with us to the cottage to show to people). Are they the BEST SHOTS EVER? Hardly. But they’re decent and HE took them himself.
I need to tweak some of the settings on his phone for higher-end images if he’s going to be enlarging some of them, but they were decent first starts. I’m hoping the tangible prints will encourage his ongoing interest. I would LOVE to see Jacob take a strong interest in photography over the next few years, even if only a hobby for the future. If he chooses not to, no problem, but in the meantime, I’ll reward his budding interest with some printing costs to help encourage him along the way.
Today I choose to encourage my son’s creativity for photography.
Famous last words could be added to that title — “…for the last time…”. When I upgraded and revamped my whole site awhile ago, and converted everything over to the latest version of WordPress which includes blocks, one of the pieces that I left unresolved was what to do about the gallery layout for my photo gallery. Thousands of photos are in the database and on the site, and I’m not editing any of those.
No, what was on the block for possible editing was the actual pages for individual galleries. I’ve been slowly converting from an old site running Piwigo over to WordPress anyway. The old site had 2005-2013 or so; the new site conversion had made it through 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 (general), and most of my wedding photos (with the honeymoon still outstanding). A huge whack of files to be sure, but again, only about 12-15 gallery pages per year for 4 years. Call it 50-60 pages.
The problem is that the new site config did not work very well with my old pages (the first 50-60). I had dumped a specific video plugin that wasn’t loading consistently correctly, and I wasn’t even sure I liked the various layouts and colours for the pages. Not to mention that there’s an upgrade to the individual galleries themselves to make them more WordPress v5.5 compatible.
The “right” solution is to bite the bullet, fix the 50 pages and move on. And since I truly mean for this to be the last time I go back and revamp any design stuff, at least not by myself (I could pay someone someday, I suppose, if I did a major overhaul), I want it done right.
So while I run the site and do all the work for the photo gallery, I like to pretend that I am sharing it with my wife and son. Which means — lucky wife that she is — she gets to have views on the layout and how it looks for those pages.
I did a quick layout, sent it to her about 3 weeks ago, and silence. She was busy at the time, forgot about it, finally remembered it and sent me views about a week ago. Today, I took the time to go back, open a page, review her comments (bigger, more prominent prose) and make the changes. I then tested it on a couple of pages, designed a reusable block so that I can make all the pages look the same going forward, found an easy way to make a tweak to an existing layout so I don’t have to reset a whole bunch of stuff, and saved it. Andrea approved, I’m ready for future production.
One page down, 50+ to go. I’ve also figured out a way to correct a bunch of other photo issues I was having, so even the workflow is improved. Nice.
Today I choose to revise my gallery layout, ready for replication for other months / galleries.
