I have never filled up an entire journal. I have purchased 4-6 journals hoping to fill it with witty thoughts, notes, and little drawings. I have never gotten much past page four. For some reason, I have always wanted to be the sort of person who has a bookshelf full of numbered leather journals but I can’t get much beyond week one.

So my goal is to fill my little black journal I purchased today.

BTW, I realized that blogging is a little like journaling. I also keep a txt file that is much less censored than this online forum. Neither of those outlets has the cachet of a physical artifact.

I usually don’t comment on additions to the blogroll. triplux warrants a comment though.

What caught my eye about this blog was his project, 101 Things To Do in 1001 days. While lots of blogs have to do lists of one thing or another, this list distinguishes itself by having some pretty large tasks combined with a deadline.

For example:

That is a ton of movies!

Some of his tasks are much easier, like buying a new cell phone.

I’ll be interested to watch his progress.

It inspired me to add some categories to my blog.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Speaking of Faith broadcast on MPR today. The topic today was “The Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” It’s the kind of radio that makes one really think about some of the big issues of life.

I really want to see the movie now.

I rarely laugh about other people’s spelling or grammar because I make so many mistakes. I’ll make an exception for this painfully tortured sentence I saw in an email the other day. I took some liberty to re-write the quote, both the spare the sender and to remove some specific references which aren’t germane to the grammar.

The space between the words “under” and “stand” is lifted directly from the original quote. You should know that this passes the MS Word Spelling and Grammar checker. I would file a bug, but I don’t have a day to spend trying to figure out where to send my bug/enhancement request to.

I’ll really have egg on my face if one of my loyal readers explains how this is indeed proper English.

Have I mentioned that I would really like an iPod?

While i don’t have an iPod I do use iTunes a fair amount. It’s pretty much replaced all previous apps (Windows Media Player, WinAmp, MusicMatch) for me. The reason iTunes has become my favorite player is that it is reasonably stable, has neat features for creating playlists and the store is dead simple to use. I used to like Music Match in that it had some extra features for updating MP3′s, but it seems to run too slowly for me. (I think somewhere along the way they must have jumped the shark on that software.) Music Match to it’s credit had a easy to use store, and if fact seems to produce suggestions based on your non-drm’ed MP3′s. That’s handy, a little creepy, but handy.

There are a few more things I would like in iTunes.

• Minimize to a tiny player in the task bar on Windows XP, like Windows Media Player does.
• Give me some more options for the physical (re)arrangement of my existing music.
• Web API for the iTunes store.

The iTunes store is almost too easy to use. I’ve purchased a lot more music in the last six months than I had in the last couple of years. Immediate gratification can be a bad thing.

The weekly free downloads combines with iMixes, and cross artist suggestions (people who bought X also bought Y) make it fun to surf around looking for new music.

My latest find is “Bowling for Soup“. They seem to have this over the top 80′s sound combined with a wicked self mocking sense of humour. Think the wit and humor of BareNaked ladies meets a 80′s guitar band, with a kind of late 90′s irony. Warning, if you’re easily offended by the occasional four letter word, there are plenty of songs you won’t enjoy too much. I don’t know what the radio edits sound like so your mileage may vary.

The songs that really grab me at the moment are “1985″, “Ohio (Come Back to Texas)”, and “My Hometown”.

I always have this niggling feeling when I hear new music I like; “Was this band massaged, photoshopped, and focus-grouped until it would sell to people in my demographic?” My sense is no, but the way big music works it’s hard to figure out without having hearing the band in person. It looks like the closest they come is Milwaukee, and I missed that show by a few days.

I have no idea what plays on radio anymore. the only music I listen is cd’s and mp3′s, as the radio stations are much too annoying for my tastes.

One other thing, why do recording artists have such difficult to use, flash enabled, noisy, and annoying web sites? What’s wrong with a simple blog with some mp3′s and a list of scheduled concerts guys?

I try and pay some attention to my referrer logs as well as the movable type activity logs in order to figure out why people are visiting my humble web site. For the last several months I noticed that recently a lot of people are looking for “Terrible” Terry Tate, office linebacker. You may remember this gag from Reebok commercials from the Super Bowl a few years ago. It looks like the videos have been removed from the Reebok web site. I would like to point people to the videos but, I have no idea how to contact anyone at Reebok, nor can I determine where the videos might be.

It’s a real shame that people really want to see advertisements and the company doing the advertising is unwilling to show them to people.

Reebok, if you are reading please bring Terry back and tell the fans where they can find the videos.

After some coffee and a nap, as well as a little time to unwind I am happy to report I am feeling much better.