NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle
Next Week’s Challenge
Name a popular dessert that has two syllables, in which the vowel sound in the first syllable is a short E. Change this to a long A, and phonetically you’ll name a famous singer. Who is it?
Hint: Why bother with a hint?
According to my iTunes statistics, I’ve got 10896 songs in my music library, including the 455 songs on albums in the “Christmas” genre.
I have been listening almost exclusively to “Genius” generated playlists. The common complaint about the “Genius” algorithm is that it sucks for pretty much anything except rock and pop. However, it’s not so good for that, either. I picked “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies and got tons of “Alternative” hit songs, but in 50 songs there are 37 artists represented. I have 162 “Alternative” albums, by 91 artists. Many of them are popular! Why don’t they show up in my list?
Some artists who I should be able to use as a “Genius” seed “are unavailable”, Al DiMeola, for instance. Also Wendy Carlos, PDQ Bach, Tomita, Ravi Shankar, Astor Piazzolla, and The Beastie Boys. (I can understand not finding Beatmistress, but The Beastie Boys?!)
These are just at random. It could be that I’m just choosing songs that aren’t available, rather than artists. But if one song by an artist is available, why doesn’t it do better extrapolation?
What I want is something between “Genius” and “Shuffle” — something that will pick a random song and decide if there is something that keeps it from following the currently playing song. Sort of the best of both worlds.
By the way, I’ve played 250 songs all the way through since “Genius” debuted, from 165 albums and 112 artists. (It doesn’t seem like a lot but I don’t have iTunes running all the time; also since I don’t sync music my iPod based play counts are lost.) The most frequently played song is “Loser” by Beck because I used it as a “Genius” list starter.
From NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday:
Next Week’s Challenge
From Eric Berlin of Milford, Conn.: Take a common two-word phrase with four letters in each word. Each word has a single O as its vowel. If you add an R somewhere in the second word, the two words become opposites. What is the phrase?
Another simple answer. It’s taking me longer to write this post than it took to solve the puzzle. I understand they want lots of participation, but “challenge” it ain’t.
“Rain is an awful houseguest,” says I. “’Cause we begged it to come visit, because all our flowers were dyin’ and stuff, and Rain was all like ‘Oh no, I got other commitments’ and then when it finally showed up it stayed so long that it killed all the ’maters.”
A couple of months ago, I posted about what I put on my iPod Touch. I thought it might be informative, if not particularly interesting to give an update as to what’s on my iPod now.
One thing I’d like to point out: I am not particularly frugal (geez, I own lots of Apple gear — frugal it ain’t), but I am cheap and I really don’t like the iTunes store. This stems from the early days, when I bought a few albums and then had a drive crash and oooops! no more music and no way to get it back from Apple. I suppose it’s a little better now with the “DRM-free” tracks, but frankly I have enough music (over 10k songs) that I seldom buy any. And since I never was big on movie rentals or TV… Anyway, this cheaposity has transferred over to the App Store. The $25 iTunes credit I got with my iPod Touch case tends to be used for software updates, but I have bought a couple of games.
All that long-winded paragraph to say that not everything in this list is free, but it is all pretty cheap.
And, like before, there are mostly games. I’m not a “productivity” kind of person, so most of the business &c. apps are wasted on me. When I was poking about the App Store yesterday, it was interesting to note that games are often free or low-cost, but “lifestyle” apps are nearly always spendy. Finance apps fall slightly more expensive than games, and business apps are all over the place, but are often quite pricey.
Looking at my “Applications” library in iTunes, I see I’ve downloaded 43 items. Not all of these have remained on my iPod Touch, but I don’t bother deleting them. In fact, I have fewer on than off.
What causes me to keep something? A game that passes the time and that isn’t too easy or too hard; or an application that does some occasional (and usually simple) task well that I can’t do by other means.
Because of the length of the lists (17 on, 26 off), I’ve moved them below the fold.
