Soundcheck Sunday: Shawn Colvin, “Polaroids”

If late August was the time of The Northern Pikes, September seems to be the month of Shawn Colvin (and Paula Cole, but that’s a Soundcheck for another week). We’re fast approaching what is easily my favorite time of year around here, with the shortening days, the turning leaves, and the bright afternoon sunshine; Shawn Colvin is, for some reason, inexorably linked with all of this in my mind. So this month, I’m going to show off some of her best work.

Sked changes

United Airlines has killed my favorite flight. This was the flight formerly known as UAL055, the afternoon flight from San Francisco to Kailua-Kona. It worked on so many different levels: it allowed for connections from their afternoon departure from Victoria, and it meant there was a one-stop option to the Big Island that got me to Hawaii in less than 8 hours. It was great — it was ridiculously convenient and on-network, always a bonus when you’re thinking hard about mileage accumulation for your favorite frequent-flyer program.

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Transition Notes

I took possession of the a new machine today, the first really new machine I’ve bought in donkey’s years. I say “really new” because this is the first time I’ve had any protracted exposure to Windows 7 — the Vista machines at work don’t count — and the new box is so far ahead of the old box that it’s kind of scary how much stuff has changed since I bought my last notebook. What I ended up with was a Dell XPS 15, more or less as tricked out as you can get and not spend an insane amount of money, and ye gods, is it ever fast.

The changes have not all been for the better. It is apparently very difficult to buy a machine without a chiclet-style keyboard these days (thanks, Apple!); I minimized the pain by buying a machine with the same layout as my Vostro 1500, so I don’t have to learn where any new keys are, and so far it seems like I’m able to type just as quickly on the new box (artemis) as I was on the old box (hallie). Since we all still type, multitouch mania notwithstanding, this is a pretty critical thing to focus on, and so I am relatively pleased that not only is typing on artemis almost as easy as it was on the old one, it now comes with a bonus keyboard glow (yay backlighting). We’ll see how the multitouch trackpad works — I think I’m going to have a tough time adapting to the two-finger scroll Dell has selected, and would be a lot happier if I could re-enable edge scrolling.

Some stuff is nice: The HD screen feature on the XPS 15 is so worth the $100. Holy crap. I installed “Modern Warfare 2,” a game that made the old box chug along even with the resolution turned down, and cranked it up to the full-fledged 1920×1080 resolution, and discovered that, once again, first-person shooters running at really high resolutions with butter-smoothness induce nausea in me. I guess the next step is to go out and rent some BluRay discs so I can see what it really looks like — then go out and buy a BluRay player for my giant TV in the living room. Or maybe we just plug in the HDMI cable to the notebook. I dunno. The sound on this box is phenomenal: notebooks should not come with a subwoofer, but this one does, and it sounds great.

Libraries are apparently the new big thing, and from a conceptual standpoint they make a degree of sense — the average user shouldn’t really need to worry where her files are stored on a machine; grouping by function and form makes a lot more sense, unless you’re old and cranky and used to managing things like large audio collections manually. This made sense back in the bad old days when I was building playlists in Winamp and organizing by directory, but I’m not sure it’s reasonable anymore. Regardless, it took me the better part of five hours to get half of my music library moved over and into the new iTunes instance — thanks to a combination of changes from Microsoft and Apple’s totally help pages.

Ultimately, I ended up having to do a find-and-replace on the iTunes XML description file: the library used to live in “\Documents and Settings\My Music\iTunes\” under XP, and under Win7 it lives in “\Users\whoever\Music” — which isn’t handled well. It would be easy if you could export your iTunes library to an external device and then re-import the whole shebang, but it turns out you can’t do that without consolidating the library in one place. (Guess how much fun this is if you’ve got 2.5 GB on one drive and another 15.something GB on another, and less than 6 GB of free space on the primary? Yeah, can’t do it. Guess what Apple’s suggestion is: “delete some files and make space.” WOW. THANKS.)

Anyway, I think the upshot of this is that I’m going to just let iTunes manage everything from here on out. For the foreseeable future, this is how things are going to work in the computing world, so I might as well get the painful transition part over with and be done with it.

Dear application developers

Continually popping up dialog boxes informing me the system is going down in 31 minutes, and that I should clean up and log off, every time I send data to the server does not, in fact, help me clean up and log off in 31 minutes.

Could be worse

Japan Times: Hosptals turn away patients at record rates

A record 16,381 people in serious condition were refused admission by hospitals three times or more while being transported by ambulance in 2010, up 3,217 from the previous year, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.

The agency said Friday the rise came because hospitals still aren’t prepared to receive an increasing number of elderly patients amid the graying population.

Among the reported cases, 727 people were rejected 10 times or more, with a 60-year-old man in Tokyo rejected the most, 41 times.

I need to keep this in the back of my head the next time I hear someone complaining — or I am tempted to complain — about hospital delays and wait times here.

Cheer down

“Is everybody happy? I’ll soon change that!”

  • Globe and Mail: Truth, justice, and becoming un-American. “A series of tough new U.S. tax laws, designed to root out Americans hiding money offshore, is suddenly prompting many expatriates to consider the ultimate act of national repudiation – becoming un-American. In a move set for 2014, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service will require foreign financial institutions to identify all accounts held by Americans.” In Soviet Russia, state own you!
  • David Sirota, Salon: The New Let Them Eat Cake. “10 shocking, illuminating moments that prove just how out of touch the powerful really are.”
  • Julianne Hing, ColorLines: Raquel Nelson and the Aggressive Prosecution of Black Mothers. “After the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an article raising alarm about the dangers of jaywalking, instead of, say, the dangers that poor urban design pose to transit-dependent families, the solicitor general decided to prosecute Nelson for endangering her children. Earlier this month an all-white jury of middle class folks who admitted they had limited experience taking public transportation in the area found Nelson guilty of second-degree vehicular manslaughter and reckless endangerment.”
  • Fortune: What’s wrong with the airlines? “To say that the airports at San Francisco or Los Angeles are less squalid than Chicago is faint praise, for the difference is so slight that anyone passing hastily through would notice no real improvement. Almost all U.S. airports are utterly barren of things to do. The dirty little lunch counters are always choked with permanent sitters staring at their indigestible food; even a good cup of coffee is a thing unknown. The traveler consigned to hours of tedious waiting can only clear a spot on the floor and sit on his baggage and, while oversmoking, drearily contemplate his sins.” Guess the date on this article!
  • And finally, I listened to this podcast while watching the fourth and fifth innings of this game, at the same time as I was working out at the gym. Which might represent the single most depressing combination of things I’ve ever had to do in my life.

I’ll be back with more depressing news later. Need to refill my Prozac and Jack Daniels.