So last week I listened to a great deal of BBC radio music. I had forgotten but the reason I went with BBC over local stations was because iTunes wasn’t working and so it was very difficult to get the local stations to play on my computer. BBC has a built-in player that does all the work for you. Then yesterday I went to play an online Christian station that I listen to on Sundays, but they must have changed something because I could no longer listen to it through the website. I had to do it through iTunes…but of course, iTunes didn’t work. The problem was that some of the iTunes program files were not available to me as this particular user. I had to go add myself as someone who can read and write the files…and then suddenly the problem that had plagued me for months was gone! The glorious thing we call iTunes opened. I like iTunes mostly because of the radio stations. It has so many radio stations already available, I can choose talk shows (conservative, liberal, state-sponsored, anarchist, libertarian…), jazz (old, vocal, instrumental, modern…), classical (baroque, opera, romantic, Bach [yes, there’s one radio station that just plays Bach]…) and the list goes on. Instead of manually choosing all my favorite songs and then playing them over and over every day, I just turn on a radio station and let it go. I don’t have to skip over songs I’m tired of, I really don’t have to think about the music at all. It frees up my time. And I don’t have to have an internet window open, which means there are far less distractions when I’m working (can anyone say, “Facebook”?). And that’s the free market. What was music like 100 years ago? I know that in the 30’s they were just coming out with radios (yeah, everyone listened to FDR every week, poor people)…but now we thousands of radio stations available from all over the world (I’m listening to Venice Classical Music right now)…at our fingertips. And this is in a quasi-free market…I know that it isn’t a truly free market. So what would technology be like if we got the government out of the market all together? Now that’s exciting to think about.
For lack of something else, I will “spill the beans” on something I’m working on. Perhaps I’ve mentioned this before? Hopefully by early spring 2011, I will have a book out. It is a collection of short stories (fiction…not some long lecture on why we should have liberty or an exposition on the life of people in eastern Mongolia in 1468 A.D.) that I’ve written over the past couple years. Two of them have been previously published on this site, the other one is still in draft. So, just keep that in mind…I had to start advertising now. I’m very happy to be so close to publishing my own book…and I can’t wait to see what the cover looks like, it promises to be very beautiful. Watch for it then, early 2011.
All for now, much to do today, as there is every day. I seem to add things to my to-do list in some sort of perverse habit of wanting more to do than I could ever possibly complete. But I’ll try my best!
