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Mar 15

A Lesson In Betrayal and Humility

by Chris Billows in Spirit Speculations 1 comments
What can one say about the earthquake and tsunami that has hit Japan? Very little. It is all very humbling and scary to witness the raw death-dealing power of the planetary body that is supposed to house and sustain us. What will happen next? We will see more earthquakes because that is the way of the Earth. We can also be assured that various marketers and religious leaders will find a cynical way to exploit our fear and questions to their own benefit. There are already a slew of books talking about 2012 being some kind of a apocalyptic date. (I had to chuckle as I was browsing these kinds of books at a local store and along side the various 2012 books was one that talked about the end of the world being in 2009). :-p For the record, here is a list of all recorded fatal earthquakes. It proves that while the Earth gives us life, it is also a ruthless betrayer. We are just guests in its home and the host is erratic and prone to fits. Earthlings beware.

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Mar 01

Lesson Six.One in Using iTunes: Creating A Playlist To Queue Music

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 0 comments
My first Playlist that I will share with you is about queuing up music to be played. This kind of playlist may not be necessary if 1) you don’t believe in rating your music, and 2) you don’t have that many songs to queue. I have over 20,000 songs, so managing what I am going to play requires some planning. Also, being a bit of a obsessive type I find organizing things to be a source of enjoyment for me. 😉 First of all, create a Playlist in iTunes by going File > New Smart Playlist, then name it. I called mine ‘Rating Queue”. iTunes prompts you with a new window asking how you want to filter the music in your Smart playlist. Use the following filters: 1) Plays is less than 2 (This is important since I listen to songs at least twice when I rate them. Sometimes, I will rate a song as soon as I hear it, other times it will be the second go around). 2) Media is Music (this filters out movies and podcasts and audio books). It will look like this: Now, if you have thousands of songs, your new Smart playlist will have […]

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Feb 15

Book Review: The World in Six Songs by Daniel Levitin

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 0 comments
An ambitious title if there ever was, The World In Six Songs by Daniel Levitin, attempts to explain how music is so integral to human evolution that the entire human experience can be mostly summarized in six meta-songs. Daniel Levitin captured lots of imagination and excitement with his previous book ‘This Is Your Brain On Music’ so expectations were relatively high. Unfortunately, he did not deliver on two levels: 1) This book was not as well received as his first book, and 2) This book did not accomplish what it claimed to do. I have always been intrigued when I see writers attempt to take a complex topic and try to simplify it. Daniel Levitin makes his own attempt by saying that entire human experience can be captured in six different songs: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. Each has a different function, but all serve to bind us together and make us stronger as a species. He reinforces the truism that music is what makes us human. While I can’t disagree with him, music is only one function that makes us human, an important one, but not the only one. I can’t help but feel that because Levitin […]

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Dec 27

Enjoying iTunes via Statistics Year 2

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 3 comments
Last year at this time I posted about how it is possible to analyze your iTunes library and generate some statistics about it. Well, another year has come and gone and I have been listening lots to my iPod Touch. I have discovered and rediscovered a ton of great music and love how iTunes helps me to organize my hobby. I use two different programs to run the statistics. The most polished one is called SuperAnalzyer and it creates some wonderful statistics and graphs. SuperAnalzyer PDF Document The other program is a fabulous little script written by Scott Yanff. iTunes Statistics Text Document These statistics were taken late December 26, 2010 of my personal library. It is a snapshot of a year of iTunes use and listening. After listening to a song a couple of times I will assign a rating to it. Some changes of note: 12,626 songs has grown to 21,108 songs with over 8,400 songs being added to the library. This is kinda a slow down mostly because I had imported most of my CD collection in the previous year. I have also begun purchasing albums and songs through iTunes so the physical CD collecting is going […]

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Dec 05

Why Economics Trumps Democracy

by Chris Billows in Political Ponderings 2 comments
There is talk that the Euro will become obsolete because the European Union is close to becoming insolvent. Well, I don’t think that will happen since governments can just print more money to keep afloat and deal with inflation by implementing price controls. This creates other problems and only delays the inevitable problem of a massive trade deficit and declining productivity since investors and job seekers will begin to flee. We are seeing the debt tragedy unfold first with Greece, now Ireland, and soon to be Portugal and Spain. All will need other European governments to bail them out because they have spent more money than they bring in. How can so much short-sighted behavior take place in countries as diverse as Ireland, Greece, and the Iberian Peninsula? The terrible answer is that this was done over decades and perpetuated by both conservative and socialist governments. Perhaps the conservatives spent a bit less than the socialists, but nobody ever rectified the fundamental deficit. Basically all governments regardless of ideology gave the voters what they wanted: A bloated social and corporate welfare system that ignored debt and fundamental productivity. Democracy worked and now voters have ended up financially bankrupt. Social Democracy […]

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Nov 12

The Relationship Between Cost and Value

by Chris Billows in Mental Mischief 0 comments
If you have the balanced relationship with money, you see it as a means to an end. Money is a tool that gives you control over your life and more money can give you more control over your life, but to a limit. How we spend our money determines the value of what we experience in life. In a very real way, money has two facets. Its cost to buy the things we want and the value of what we are get. The problem is that we spend lots of time thinking about cost and very little if any about value. In my job I deal with giving out people money to provide their own care. It works really, really well but there are always people who try to get away with stuff. I have had clients spend the money on things that fall outside of the boundaries of what we allow. When this happens, we ask for the money to be paid back. Why? Because there is a double cost to them misspending the money. 1) The monetary cost. The money that was given out is gone. 2) The value cost. The value gotten for the monetary cost is […]
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