Hand Me That Shotgun, Buddy

Man, since I ripped all my other CDs, my iPod has been SO much more interesting. Before, I had ripped about 2/3 of our collection, but it was heavily weighted towards downtempo music, since that’s my favorite. The remaining third is split pretty evenly between radio-friendly pop, girl-pop music, and stuff that Annie and I loved in high school, and can’t get rid of even if we never listen to it anymore.

As a result, my iPod (which grabs a random sampling of my library every time I autofill it) now gets a much more eclectic mix. Yesterday, I was pleasantly suprised by “Don’t Give Up On Us Baby,” sung by Owen Wilson in Starsky & Hutch, as well as “Rats” by Pearl Jam, a song I didn’t like when it came out, but I enjoyed yesterday. Just now, “Holier Than Thou” from Metallica’s black album came up, reminding me how much I used to play that album.

A couple of weeks ago, a “no personal laptops at work” policy was implimented, so I quit bringing my laptop on the train. The result was that I got a lot of reading done that week, but I didn’t respond to any emails at all. My evenings are short enough now that when I got home, I would glance at some websites, read my email, and then walk away. I just wasn’t interested in responding. I kept telling myself I’d take some time to reply to emails the next evening, but after a week, I could see that a pattern was emerging that I would only make time for email about once a week, and by then I’d be so swamped that I wouldn’t reply to everything.

I know because that’s the way I used to be, before I had a dedicated block of internet-free laptop time to dedicate to replying to email. So, now I’m back to bringing my laptop on the train again, and I just don’t take it out of the bag in the office. I’m happier this way, and my commute just flies by as a result.

Now my problem is that I’m clearly not making time to post to my blog anymore, so I’m thinking I’ll apply the same solution, and try to write a blog post offline on the train everyday, which I can then post when I get home. With luck, I can also motivate myself to post more images this way, too.

Oh, a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I wasn’t sure how I wanted to handle photo posts on the blog, now that I have flickr. I’ve decided that the best approach is to just post most photos to flickr, and leave the thumbnails in my sidebar, and then when I have a particularly noteworthy photo, I’ll make a blogpost about it, too.

Like the LAN Party V post down there. It’s got one photo in it as an attention-grabber, but there are three photos from the LAN party in my photostream. I should probably get around to writing that entry, too.

Oh! I just realized that I can make blog posts via email! I’ll have to check that out, because then I could totally combine the two problems by writing my blog posts and then emailing it to my blog. The only problem is that my email program might insert line breaks, so I’d have to clean up every entry after email-posting it. Oh well, I’ll try it out later and see how well it works.