Sunday's Child

Pandora

I love my iPhone.  Like Mary Poppins, it is practically perfect in every way, but sometimes I find myself wanting to hear music I don't have in my mp3 list (but not willing to pay the 99 cents in iTunes), or struggling to find just the right mix of songs (but setting up a new playlist can be so inconvenient).  Just the other day I was wishing there was a way to combine radio with my iPhone.  Lo and behold, today I discovered Pandora.

Pandora is a free(!!) service that streams radio over the internet, learns your preferences because it allows you to rate the songs you hear, and now has an app for the iPhone that uses the 3G network!  I actually knew about the PC version from several years ago, but live streaming audio takes up a lot of bandwidth so it was quickly exiled to the forbidden list by the firewall people at work. 

You download the app to your phone, and then start your own new "station" by giving Pandora a seed song or artist to start from.  As songs play, you either rate them "thumbs up" and Pandora adds more music you might like to your station based on that song, or you rate them "thumbs down" and that song is never played again.  You can set additional seed songs on that station to get more variety, or start a completely new station for a different type of music. 

The tradeoff for free music is a 15 second commercial once every two hours, and an occasional popup banner over the album cover art.  Totally worth it to me, but if that bothers you, there is also a paid subscription you can sign up for that will make your iPhone/Pandora experience totally ad-free.

Isn't technology great?

Either I'm really hard on headphones...

... or they just don't make stuff like they used to anymore.

On the way to Paris last year, the guy sitting next to me accidentally stripped the connection pin clean off my good Koss headphones as he was getting out of his seat.  (They were plugged in to my arm rest, and his leg raked by on the way past, and there was a weak point where metal met plastic.)  Fortunately, this was near the end of the eight hour flight over, but it left me without music for the ten hour flight back.

Now, I expect a lot from a pair of headphones.  They must completely cover my ears, be big enough for my head, have good sound quality, a long cord, in line volume control, NO noise canceling feature, and preferably be collapsible for travel.  Being without headphones when I travel is an inconvenience.  Being without them at work is bordering on a national emergency.  Threat level orange, people.  Here's why:

1) Music is in me.  If I'm awake, there is a song in my head.  Usually it's the last thing I heard on tv or the radio, but sometimes it's more annoying or creative than that.  Right now it's "You Are the Music In Me" from High School Musical 2, because of the first sentence in this paragraph.  When I'm at work, it's inconvenient to have to spend brain cycles generating the song of the moment, and I can gain a little more space in my head for programming if I do an override with music from my iPod.  I generally listen to the same song on repeat, and it just blends into the background.
2) Cube environment.  I have very VERY good hearing, due in part to the comparatively small number of rock concerts I've been to in my lifetime, so every little noise attracts my attention.

Because of those two factors, I probably spend four to six hours a day with headphones on.  It's gotten to where I feel funny writing code unless my ears are covered.  Needless to say, after the France incident, I had to replace the Koss ones post haste.  The selection at BestBuy left much to be desired, but I did find one pair that met most of my criteria.  That was in April of 2008.  Last week, a problem developed:

 

Yes.  That is a stress fracture.  I had to take a deep breath and count to ten when it happened.  I went through my mental catalog of glues and epoxies, trying to think of a way to repair the break.  Perhaps a splint of some kind?  After about ten minutes of denial, I hit Amazon looking for a new pair, and found these.  Welcome to the family, new pair of Sonys.  You probably only have a year to live.

New Music

My very favorite band, Third Day, has a new album out.  Click here to check out their recent writeup on CNN.com.  With only one exception*, I LOVE this album.  I think it's their best, and since it's their ninth, that's saying something.  Click here to go to Amazon, which will let you hear a preview of each track.

There's only one way to listen to this: LOUD.  Driving along with this in the CD player, volume turned up so that the music fills up the whole car makes me simultaneously smile, bob my head, and sing along at the top of my lungs.  If you happen to catch me in traffic on West Little York doing this, please try not to point and laugh.  I'm rockin' out.

Track 8, "I Will Always Be True", even features cowbell, which most things in life could use more of.  (Some of you know what I'm talking about.  Everyone else go here, or type "More Cowbell" into Google.)

Track 9, "Born Again", which features hauntingly beautiful vocals by guest artist Lacey Mosley, could be the next "I Can Only Imagine" if they would go ahead and release the single for radio play.

*Track 10, "Give Love" is the one bad track on this album for me.  I don't know what they were thinking with the twangy arrangement, but I loathe it.  When I burned a copy of the CD for my car, I left that track off.  Still, one bad track out of fourteen is not bad at all!

My Manatee Mondegreen

According to Wikipedia, a mondegreen is "the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song, due to near homophony, in a way that yields a new meaning to the phrase." 

There is a song by Brandon Heath called "Give Me Your Eyes" that is fairly popular on the Christian XM station these days.  I like it.  I admit, I sing along in the car.  This is the chorus:

Give me your eyes for just one second
Give me your eyes so I can see
Everything that I keep missing
Give me your love for humanity
Give me your arms for the broken hearted
Ones that are far beyond my reach.
Give me your heart for the ones forgotten
Give me your eyes so I can see

I know all the correct words to this song, but when I'm singing it in my head later in the day, instead of "Give me your love for humanity", I think "Give me your love for the manatees" EVERY TIME. 

I'm relieved to know there is an official word for this affliction, and that it has been legitimized by inclusion in the dictionary.