I just deleted everything on my iPod.
And when I say everything, I’m talking about a lot of everything. This is the classic 160 GB iPod and it was almost full. How much music is on an almost full 160 GB iPod?
If I were to listen to my iPod 24 hours a day, seven days a week it would take me nearly three months to hear it all. That’s not counting podcasts.
How did we get here?
I developed an interest in music later than many people do. Or rather, an interest in music discovery and collection. It wasn’t until midway through high school that I was interested in buying albums (outside of the Space Jam soundtrack), and at that point it was mostly current stuff. It was my first year of university that I got my hands on Rolling Stones’ 50 Greatest Artists of All Time (now 100) issue and started working backwards through rock and roll history. From there, I was insatiable, finding list after list and searching out discographies of great artists from Pink Floyd to Sly and the Family Stone to Dr. Dre. I did this through a combination of purchases, borrowed discs, garage sales, hand-me-downs and… other means.
As my access to music grew, so did my collection. For a while I managed a college station library, which meant previewing a lot of work and many free download links. Sites like the Hype Machine, Bandcamp, and Soundcloud also made it easier to discover and collect free and nearly-free music. And so a decade on… 2000 hours worth of music of every imaginable type.
Then what happened?
The other day, I was listening to one of my favourite albums (Sandinista! by the Clash, which is great) and I was looking forward to hearing one of my favourite songs (“Police on My Back”, which I used to teach Chinese students the days of the week in English, back when I was an ESL teacher and my iPod connected me to home) when the song was skipped over. I went backwards, and it was skipped over again. I tried starting the song midway through and the iPod froze and rebooted. After a bit of trial and error, I discovered a portion of my massive music collection had been corrupted/deleted, and more seemed to be going every time I tried to fix the problem.
If there had been any logic to which songs were going, that would have been one thing. If it was just the “B”‘s or just songs added in the last few months, it would have been easy enough to rebuild. But it was random. A few songs off Abbey Road, one off Stankonia, a single here and there. Not only was stuff going missing, but I had no way of anticipating what was missing- or what would go missing next. My options were to either have a whole bunch of possibly incomplete albums and a rapidly depleting collection, or reset the whole system. I reset.
No backups?
It’s not as if I had never anticipated this happening. In fact, it had already happened to me, once before, only this time it was a busted screen rather than a screwy drive. On that occasion five years ago, I had diligently transferred my iPod’s entire library onto a set of about two-dozen DVDs and then transferred them back onto my replacement pod. The whole process took a few days.
I had since transferred that DVD backup system onto an external drive, but as luck would have it, that drive had just died a few months earlier (cheap brand, lesson learned). I hadn’t yet re-backed things up, and so here we were. If I wanted to rebuild the collection, it would take a few days of transferring things from DVD onto disk onto iPod.
What’s the point?
Before making the decision to delete everything off my iPod, I weighed my options about how to go about preserving my collection. And then I decided to do some research. I made a smart playlist that would show me how many songs in my collection I had listened to more than ten times. The answer?
34.
That number didn’t get much better when I reduced it five or more plays. Even the list of songs that I had listened to more than once is relatively small- 3,080, which sounds like a lot until you realize that’s only about ten percent of my entire collection.
This number isn’t entirely fair, because I would have listened to a good number of these songs by other means: on my computer, the original disk or, increasingly, streaming services like Rdio. But that being the case, what on earth is the point of cultivating and maintaining a library of tens of thousands of song files that, statistically, I’ll never listen to?
I used to treat my iPod as a deep-dive kind of device. Even if I didn’t want to listen to the complete works of Otis Redding or the best of Pearl Jam now, I could foresee a point when I would want to, or I’d be somewhere with someone else who wanted to, so it seemed worthwhile to rip it onto my iPod just so I’d be covered. But that was in a world where streaming music services barely existed.
Today, the reality is that most of my experimental listening happens in streaming form. I listen to new singles and lists using the Hype Machine, exfm, CBC Music, and music blogs. I listen to mixes and lists on Mixcloud and Soundcloud. I listen to albums on Bandcamp and Rdio. Rdio, especially, has become a replacement iPod since I can sync stuff for offline listening if I’m going on a roadtrip or out of an internet zone. The point is, I have access to far more catalogues and albums and singles via legitimate streams on the internet than I ever did on my iPod or even my computer. In fact, for all I know my iPod had been corrupt for half a year, because that was probably about the last time I listened to music on it prior to last week.
A curated collection
Coincidentally, just before I made my corrupted iPod discovery, I had opened the closet that contains my physical music collection for the first time in months, maybe longer. And I was blown away by what I saw. A ton of great music that I had basically forgotten about. Classic albums that everyone knows about to personal favourites to CDs picked up at local shows and from friends’ bands. Music that I loved and hadn’t heard in… forever.
All this- my personal favourites- had been drowned out in the sea of discovery. Mostly the internet, but also my ridiculously large iPod collection. An iPod full of songs I had listened to once or not at all, hiding the music that holds some sort of personal meaning or memory.
Starting fresh
And so I hit delete, and am starting fresh. This time, my iPod isn’t a dumping ground for anything and everything I might want to listen to. It’s not as if I’m going to stop listening to a ridiculous amount of new music. I love discovery, and there’s lots of stuff worth discovering. But my iPod is going to be a place for revisiting my favourites, music that I want to listen to not for the first time but for the fourth or fifth time.
I’m also going to make sure I have a better backup system in place.
Further Reading:
John Brownlee, Why I Stopped Pirating Music
Sophie Heawood, Music Has Died
Hannah Donovon, Everything in its Right Place
Hashtags have two purposes.
The most useful is to organize tweets by subject. This helps other people interested in the subject find it, and helps facilitate a wider conversation.
This can be something geographical like #cityofPG (Prince George) or #yyz (Toronto), or it can be a category like #bcpoli (British Columbia politics) or #TIFF13 (the Toronto International Film Festival).
The other use of hashtags is to provide some form of commentary on your tweet. Think of it as a parenthetical aside or a footnote or even an emoticon. You might Tweet a joke and add “#justkidding” to indicate your tone should be taken as humourous.
If you are not using it for either of those reasons, there is no point.
For example, #why would you do #this?
There is no conversation happening around the word “why”. There is no community of people talking about “this”. It is a random string of tweets that have no relation to each other. It also provides no context to what you are saying. “Why” holds the same meaning as “#why” and is less annoying to look at.
If your #tweet looks like #this, you’re #doingitwrong.
I like following local government. I have been known to livetweet city council meetings, even when I wasn’t being paid to. When this video came out, I can’t count how many people sent it to me. It’s a good video. It’s tongue-in-cheek, yes, but it also demonstrates that if presented properly, decisions being made at council meetings can be just as dramatic as any other form of politics. They certainly affect your life.
But let’s face it, it’s not always easy to sit through a couple hours (or more!) of a meeting, even if it is only every two weeks. This is why I’m a big fan of the council webcasts. Every meeting is broadcast live online, and they are then archived and accessible afterwards. I’ve often put on meetings in the background while doing other chores, and now that I’m working an early shift and sleeping during the meetings, I’m able to check in on the major discussions the next morning. They are up and ready to go by 5 am, maybe earlier. They are also indexed, so you can jump to whichever discussion you want.
Prince George, like all cities, faces a fair amount of criticism for what it does and how it does it. Sometimes I provide critiques of my own. It’s a part of democracy, and I think these critiques are important. But I also believe in giving praise where praise is due, and this is one area where Prince George shines. On-demand, indexed and timely access to the decisions made and discussions had by our elected officials– it’s a very useful tool, and one I’m glad the city provides.
Link: Prince George city council webcasts
At its core, my job is to collect and share stories.
Those stories are about lots of things. Sometimes it’s controversial political decisions. Sometimes it’s the weather. Sometimes it’s somebody saw an emu on a road where emus really don’t belong.
Loosely, there are three key criteria that help get a story on the show. First, it has to be interesting. Second, because we are a regional show, we view things through a regional lens- do listeners in northern B.C. care about this? Why? And finally, it has to be timely. Why are we doing this story now?
That last criteria makes a lot of sense. We are, after all, a current affairs show. People want to hear things that reflect the current state of things. They want to know what’s new.
But sometimes it’s frustrating. You’ll hear an amazing story from someone… and it happened three years ago. Sometimes it can be repurposed, but most of the time it just doesn’t fit.
Enter “The Story Exchange”. This a new series we’re airing on Daybreak that aims to take those great tales and rescue them from the “not newsy” column. Basically, if it meets the criteria of “interesting” and “northern”, we want to get it out there.
I’m excited for this series. I’ve already recorded a couple of interviews with people who have great stories that I don’t think would ever fit on the show in a traditional sense. Yet they are fully entertaining and, in a way, give people a fuller sense of the northern B.C. “experience”. It’s also, in my mind, the pinnacle of what radio can do- great storytelling, strong first-person narratives.
You can find the Story Exchange here and here. I hope you enjoy it.
It was maybe seven years ago that I started using the internet for anything besides MSN messenger and Limewire. I don’t remember the order of joining Facebook, MySpace and Blogger, but Blogger’s the one I miss.
If you don’t know, Blogger was (and is) a free service for hosting, well, your blog. This was all pre-Tumblr and Pinterest and Twitter and all that. It was hugely popular, but only a few people I knew had blogger. Maybe a dozen. It was all very manageable. Each blog was bookmarked, and every few days you would open them up to see if there was a new entry. Usually there wasn’t, but there would be a new one from someone at least once a week.
It didn’t feel like “social networking” or “writing” or anything like that. It felt like catching up with what was going on in someone else’s lives. These weren’t even necessarily the people you were closest with, but you were close enough, and the blogging formed something of a community. There was no “dashboard” or “newsfeed”- you had to literally visit each site, and see what designs, sidebars, and fonts they used. Get to know them.
Something got lost along the way. Facebook got bigger and bigger, of course, and Twitter took off, and now it seems like no one blogs personally anymore, they all do it for professional reasons. Even my own site is written more for the stranger visiting for the first time than it is for friends and family. Most people, of course, have abandoned the idea of blogging altogether, using social networks instead.
Can we go back? I’ve thought of pseudonyms, private blogs, things like that. I like the idea. But I don’t know how to implement it. I don’t even know if anyone else even feels like this is a problem. I mean, I still blog, but most people I know have abandoned the idea altogether, using social networks instead. Maybe that’s enough. Twitter is great. Facebook, as much as people love to hate it, is going strong. I enjoy the small community I have here, and new networks like Medium and Svbtle are offering interesting ideas. But when I think back to Blogger, I feel like something’s been lost along the way.
A few months ago I decided to start making mixtapes again. The rules were they would have to be limited in time (just like physical tapes), the tracklists would be set (no shuffling), and there would be no narration. Doing this digitally, I cheat a bit by mixing the songs together more than was possible on cassettes, but other than that I want to recreate the form and experience the classic cassette mixtapes I used to make in high school.
And appropriately, that’s what this mixtape is about. I have been out of high school for ten years now, so decided to take a trip down memory lane exploring music of the time. These are not my favourite songs of the era (though I do like them all, quite a bit), and they aren’t the most popular (though they were popular). Instead, these are songs that I think exemplify the type of music being made and heard from 1998 through 2003. It’s kind of a weird time for music– the big things of the nineties were just ending, but the garage rock and uber-producer pop and hip-hop that would define the next decade weren’t quite underway, either.
You can stream the mixtape below or on Mixcloud and download it as an mp3 or ogg file.
I’ve optimistically subtitled this “Volume One” because in the lead-up to making this I rediscovered many, many songs that could easily fill out a whole new mixtape, and maybe will, one day. In the meantime if you’re looking for more nostalgia (or history?) you can see what I was working with in this massive Rdio playlist.
If you like this, you can check out my other mixtapes here, and find my campus radio show at almostmainstream.com.
Regular visitors to this site who have refreshed their cache recently will have noticed some changes to AndrewKurjata.ca. There are actually quite a few things I’d like to say about it, and plan on doing so in the coming weeks, but for now here is a brief overview of the basic philosophy and thoughts behind it.
1. Influence
This change isn’t an overhaul so much as an evolution. The last time I did a redesign, I had just discovered responsive web design through the Svbtle network and Marco.org, and my focus was on making the experience of reading this site consistent across devices. Since then, I have been studying a number of other sites and how they work in order to make this one even cleaner and easier to use.
While still looking at Marco and Svbtle, the other sites that I used as reference points for what a nice site could look were, as follows: ShawnBlanc.net, BrooksReview.net, DaringFireball.net, MattGemmell.com, and Medium.com. To my mind, all of these accomplish a goal of creating an destination where the act of reading what is written is elevated above all else.
2. Readability
Matt Gemmell in particular was influential because of his post titled, appropriately, “Designing Blogs for Readers.” In it, he outlined his case for what makes a good site, and I tried to implement most of what he said because, frankly, it’s true. In particular I focused on the following:
I’d recommend you read his post if you’re sitting down to design a website. The point is, I wanted to make this site a place that you feel comfortable sitting down for a while.
3. Navigation
One item from Matt Gemmell I’m going to focus is the notion that navigation should be easy. I used to have eight items in my header bar — blog, about, contact, subscribe, mixtape, tumblr, twitter, and etc. I have tried to hone that down, settling on what we currently have – blog, about, best of, and bonus. These are, I think, the four key places I’d like people to go.
Blog is where we are now. It remains what it became some months ago– a place for my original voice. Mostly longer form posts, but a few smaller things as well, like this and this. The point is it should be stuff that it is authentically “me”, whatever that means (future post).
About is one that I’m having some hesitations about. I understand that it’s useful to keep the navigation options low, but I worry that I’ve squeezed too much into this section. It’s essentially the entire navigation section of the site- we have my bio, resume, contact information, the blog archives, the design options, search, subscription information, and sitemap. I’ve divided into sections, but it still seems a bit long. For now, though, it is what it is.
Best of is something new. I’ve been thinking about the lifespan of things on the internet, and how to surface old content I think still has legs. I’m going to assume that a certain number of people coming to this site every week are new. And that being the case, I’d like them to see what I consider to be my best work- the key reasons they might want to poke around a bit. It contains my favourite/most popular blog posts, as well as some of my favourite radio pieces and a few of my other projects.
Bonus is another new section. It’s actually my tumblr, which used to look like this. I’ve now redesigned it to match the rest of the site and integrated it into the overall design. The notion is that I can scratch my itch to linkblog without drowning out my more original pieces in a sea of outbound links and photos. We’ll see how that goes.
4. Me
On that subject, I’d had some frustrations with the limitations I felt like I had when it came to posting over on this main page. This used to be my catch-all blog, one where I posted personal anecdotes, photos, and links to interesting things. But somewhere along the way I had a few popular posts and felt like everything I put on here had to have some sort of mass appeal. To break that down, I opened up the code so that in addition to having posts, I can categorize things as statuses, links, photos, and quotes, much like Tumblr. If I get to be on national TV or I lose a pet, I should feel comfortable sharing that information here, if I feel like sharing it. These new formats help, because I can integrate them into the main site without them going into the articles feed. They can be treated as they are: personal moments that aren’t full-fledged blog posts.
5. Sharing and comments
The use of share buttons and comments is among the more divisive in the website-design world. On the one hand, they increase audience engagement and sharability, on the other hand they can look crass, cheap, and interfere with the overall aesthetic appeal of a site. I decided I would use both, but sparingly. To that end, I’ve created what I hope are tasteful buttons to tweet, email, or facebook share posts. I’ve also kept comments. But I can turn the appearance of those items on and off for every individual post. This means that if I am sharing something that I don’t really feel needs comments, there won’t be any there. Same with social sharing. Conversely, if you see a comments section, that means I am actively inviting comments, as opposed to mindlessly posting with the comments section just sitting there. Below we have one post with comments and sharing on, and a status with them off.
And on that note, the comments section is open on this post. I’d like to hear from you if there is any aspect of this that doesn’t work for you, or changes that you think should be made. Ultimately, it’s my site, but I can’t anticipate every use case. As I said, I’ll be writing more about some of these changes in individual posts in the future, but this is a rough roadmap of what I’ve done and what I’m going for.
There tends to be perception that the real action is in national and international news. There’s certainly a profile that goes along with the stories that make headlines around the world, but I’d argue that it doesn’t affect the quality of the stories.
I’m just looking back through what we’ve covered on Daybreak this week. On Monday, we started with the possible defection of a Cuban baseball player. Tuesday we talked about the possible need for an overhaul of the B.C. Ambulance system, something we followed all week. Wednesday we were talking about the privacy implications of a pay parking system that could be coming to Prince George and a new microbrewery inspired by the gold rush, Thursday had a dinosaur skeleton being airlifted by helicopter and this morning we had strange sounds descending on the city of Terrace. And those are just some of the stories we had on our show- there were many more, and many many more we didn’t get to at all.
You could say this is because we’re a regional show, but I can tell you that once you start digging around any location or topic you will find a wealth of stories to tell. And here’s a secret: those stories that make headlines around the world? They started out as local news. Then someone found them.
It was just about one-and-a-half years that I resigned from my role as station manager of CFUR Radio. At the time I had been doing two jobs at once, and knew that if I kept it up, I wouldn’t be doing either position justice.
After stepping down, I joined the board and took part in hiring my replacement. I was pleased the person we chose because they had ideas and a skillset that was outside of what I possessed, and I knew they could take CFUR in a direction I could not.
Many months later, I am excited by what I see going on at CFUR. There are projects and enthusiasm and ideas that I don’t think would have happened if I had stayed on as the station manager. My replacement has created an environment and a roadmap that is different from where I would have gone, but is still completely in line with what I think a campus station can and should be.
I took CFUR to a point where it could move forward and I’m happy with that. I’m even happier that I then passed it on to someone else and let them run with it. Every time I see the success CFUR’s now having, it’s a valuable lesson. Sometimes the best thing you can do is trust someone else to do the job.
Craig Norris, who is the host of the CBC morning show in Waterloo, received a complaint this weekend about his outlet not being at an indie music show over the weekend. He responded on Facebook, including this line
“Simply, we can not be everywhere. It’s impossible. And, frankly, it does little good for us to be at a show and report on it after the fact. Much more impact is made if I can facilitate pre-awareness for the show!”
From time to time, I’ve received/heard complaints about my own media outlet not being at events to cover them as they happen. I’m sure anyone whose worked in any sort of newsroom has. The truth is, most of the time we would like to be there. But it is impossible. There are only so many people, so many hours in a day, and so many hours on our show.
Everything happening north of Quesnel is competing for room on the program. This includes arts, sports, politics, and community events, plus some more provincial, federal, and national news. That’s a lot to get to in two-and-a-half-hours a day, believe it or not.
I once had someone ask me why we didn’t cover more of a certain type of event. I simply gave him a list of the stories our staff had pitched that week that hadn’t made the final cut of the show due to time constraints (including an interview with a high-profile celebrity who was in town). There was quite a bit more understanding after that.
I don’t get upset or frustrated if people complain about a lack of coverage, because it shows they are paying attention and care about what we do. But it’s worth explaining the limitations we- and all media- have once in a while. And then try and do better.
This past week I worked on two stories about people trying to take parts of the city of Prince George that already exist and make them more usable.
The first story was about the civic plaza. This is, hypothetically, a public square of sorts. It’s outside the civic centre, downtown library, and art gallery. But even though it gets used for special events here and there, most of the time it’s a spot people walk through to get somewhere else. I go there fairly regularly since my office is nearby and it has a bench with a little patch of grass that I like to eat my lunch on– but that’s about it for usable greenspace. Here’s a picture, for reference.
The second story was about the Hudson’s Bay Slough. This is a wetland located near Prince George’s downtown. Turns out it’s a unique ecosystem with lots of potential for nature-lovers. It’s quite something, because you have views like this right in the middle of the city. Unfortunately, it’s located between a busy street, a trailer park, and a part of the city sometimes referenced as the hood, and if you want to walk around it as a loop you have to go through all three, giving you views like this, as well. So it’s also underused.
In both these stories, people are trying to take these places and have them reach their full potential. The city has commissioned a redesign of the plaza called The River (concept here, picture here) in an effort to make it more of a gathering place, and the Prince George Naturalist’s Club is working to turn the slough into a major attraction, complete with boardwalk, nature center, and a hope of improving the neighbourhoods adjacent.
I’ve learned enough about the history of Prince George to feel confident that for a significant portion of its growth it was designed with a freeways and malls mindset: people would drive places from their homes to wherever they had to go. Certainly this wasn’t true of everything, but it’s not hard to see how spread out things are.
Now there seems to be a push to undo some of this spread by reassessing what assets are closer to the core of the city and how to make them better. We’ve had the Duchess Park plan, taking a big ol’ field and putting in a playground, dog park, and BMX trail in a neighbourhood where there really wasn’t much of anything- and I can say that every time I’ve gone by it, all three have been packed. We’ve had a small wave of new businesses opening downtown, many by new businesspeople who seem to have an attitude of “why not?” and being met with what seems to be a fair amount of success. And now we have projects like these ones, taking places where few people go and figuring out how to make them usable. It’s like a giant remake of the city, happening piece by piece. And it’s fascinating to watch.
Also, I just stole some of my wife’s toast and it was so good that now I’m making my own. Have you tried toast? It’s delicious.
Also, I just stole some of my wife’s toast and it was so good that now I’m making my own. Have you tried toast? It’s delicious.
Ad nauseam
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September 11 2013 | ∞
Prince George has a lot of tennis courts. Until recently, there were 63 maintained courts in the city. For comparison, Kamloops has 26 and Kelowna has 27. I got those numbers from the city’s core services review process. The process suggested 63 is too many, and council agreed- on Monday, they voted to reduce the number of maintained courts to 34.
I had noticed Prince George seems to have a lot of courts for its size- and the comparison to Kamloops and Kelowna reinforces this. Why so many?
Here’s one possibility (completely unverified) by a frequent commenter named “gus” on the website Opinion250.
And using the same form of history, here’s 250 commenter P Val:
I’m fascinated by the notion that we once had lineups to use the tennis courts in a city that has more tennis courts than most. The courts are still there, but that level of play obviously isn’t. I live near a court that is staying open, and have never had to wait to use it- even for games of hockey that use the whole thing. So what happened? I’m interested in hearing from you in the comments, or on twitter.
Filed under: cities, Prince George | Comments Off on The rise and fall of tennis in Prince George?