HAPPY JAR 2025

 For the New Year (2025), I am going to try the idea of collecting happy weekly notes in a jar.  Failures and disappointments affect me more than they should, I think having happy notes will balance things out.

I consider Sunday January 5 to be the end of the first week of 2025.  The happy note will be about the re-discovery of my iPod Classic music player.  I love listening to music but haven't done much of it lately.  Sure, I have a sizeable collection of music files on my cell phone, but with all its notifications the listening experience can be interrupted.  My first music player was actually one of those iPod with FireWire connection.  It served me well but one day a leftover dish of spaghetti meatballs spilled and killed it.  It was not that healthy at that point anyway, the battery didn't hold well.  Plus, I think I already had an iPod touch.  The iPod touch was basically an iPhone without the phone functions.  It too eventually wouldn't boot up any more, I still have it somewhere around the house.  One holiday season, I decided to treat myself to an iPod Classic, bought it in person at the late TekServe on 23rd Street near Sixth Avenue.  Used it for a while then somehow I decided to just use my phone instead.  Many years later, the current phone's Lightnight connection is finicky and I can no longer easily sync with a computer.  I think it may be possible to sync wirelessly but I don't remember what needs to be done for that to happen.  It doesn't help that my Mac is old, too.  What got me really interested in the iPod Classic is that through my work with running a local Buy Nothing group that has a regular in-person meeting, I end up with an expanded collection of music CDs.  I also have some music CDs from my sister and brother.

The first thing I tried to do was to connect the iPod Classic to my Windows 11 Lenovo laptop.  It has plenty of room and is newer than the poor Mac.  Installed iTune sometime ago, now is the time to put it to work.  Nope, it didn't happen.  Either the iPod Classic need to be updated, something or other, it seemed to be too much work.  Back to the Mac, luckily it recognized the iPod easily.  Hooked up an external disc drive and away I went.  I already imported a few CDs via iTune on the Mac and enjoy them on the go.  One minor issue is the iPod has no built-in speaker so I need to have a headphone handy, or an auxiliary cable to connect to the car stereo or external speaker.

I shall title the first Happy Jar 2025 note "Re-acquainting iPod Classic".  Happy New Year!

Hay Hát Hơn Là Hát Hay

In my family, my late father was a good singer.  The talent skipped me and bestowed upon my son.  Or perhaps my son got it from the mother side.  My brother plays the guitar and learn the tunes by ears.  My wife is good at the Chinese zither, aka gu-zheng, and she got the kid into it, too.  He's good at it, he just hates the practice sessions.  I cannot carry a tune and don't play any instruments.  The only instrument I ever played was the recorder, in high school, and the only tune I knew was "Three Blind Mice", more popular known as "The Three Stooges Theme".

To make up for my apparent lack of musical talents, I made an effort to know song names and the performers.  I was much into music-listening when I came to the U.S. in 1980.  Radio-listening eventually got replaced by video-watching.  At the peak, I was watching America's Top Ten every Saturday morning and Friday Night Video.  Solid Gold, too.  When I had some money, I bought audiocassettes of The Police, Alan Parson Project, Sting, Heart, "Weird" Al Yankovic etc.  I also made use of whatever Queens Borough Public Library and New York Public Library had, all audiocassettes.  The public libraries did not have that many tapes for pop music so I ended up listening to a lot of classical music.  A chance borrowing of Hooked On Classics got me, well, hooked on classics.

Life got busy and for years I did not keep up with the music scene.  For a few years, while dating my future wife I listened to Cantonese pop music (Cantopop) as a way to learn more of the Cantonese dialect of Chinese.  Apple's campaign with Pepsi got me many "Weird" Al songs that I didn't know about, which led to the original songs, too.  The great thing with "Weird" Al is he's been around for so long, he parodied a broad spectrum of music.  Altogether, my musical knowledge was limited to the 80s, classical, "Weird" Al and whatever songs he parodied.  I thought I was pretty knowledgeable, at least with the 80s.  Then I discovered SongPop.

Name That Tune is the most obvious phrase to associate with SongPop.  The game is available on tradition computers and also on iDevice and Android.  In the game, you hear a tune and choose the correct song or artist name from a list of four.  You earn some points with each correct choice, the faster the more points.  Your opponent then get the same choices and would try to beat your score.  The winner gets three coins, the loser only one.  With the accumulated coins, you can buy new playlists, perhaps something you are more knowledgeable in.  Playlists include Love Songs, Female Singers, Alternative 90s, Movie Soundtrack, and more.  You can also buy power-up, the ability to eliminate two of the four choices to give you a better chance at guessing.

Much to my chagrin, I discovered that I am not that good at the game.  Some players are very knowledgeable and fast.  Then there are so many bands, singers,  and songs out there since the last time I closely followed music.  There's also much music before the 80s that I was not interested in.  Big names like the Bee Gees and ABBA I know some songs for but there were also the One Hit Wonders back then.  Strangely, I have not come across any Beatles songs, other than A Hard Day's Night in the Movie Soundtrack playlist.  Perhaps SongPop, the company, needs to have someone like the late Steve Job to negotiate hard to bring the Beatles into SongPop.

In Vietnamese, the phrase "hay hát hơn là hát hay" means "those who sings lousy often like to sing".  That's my case, except I like to play the game.  I try to get more knowledgeable by using YouTube and Wikipedia and it sometimes help.  With the Photoshopped playlist above, I should win more, but I enjoy the game whether I win or lose.

Jonathan Coulton

Code Monkey. Brain-eating zombie colleague. Murderous A.I. with a wry sense of humor. That Jonathan Coulton sure has some great songs on topics some people can identify with.

I first discovered Jonathan Coulton, or JoCo for short, on TWIT (This Week In Tech) podcast #133. I learned that JoCo was a successful niche marketer on the Internet. Leo Laporte mentioned Code Monkey as one of the more famous JoCo song. At the end, Leo put on the song Still Alive, which is sung at the end of the game Portal. It was a very nice tune and I decided to check out JoCo.

I finally went to JonathanCouton.com and what a treat that is. All his songs can be listened to online and there are many ways to buy them. As suspected, Code Monkey is about a computer programmer and what a sweet story it is, as he was infatuated with some girl in the office. Next, I smiled a few times as I listened to Re: Your Brain. Ah, just another day in cubicle-ville, with all the office lingo, except the need here is of one zombie colleague wanting to eat the brain of another. I already bought Code Monkey, Re: Your Brain and its French version, Re: Vos Cerveaux, and probably end up also buying A Laptop Like You ("I forgive your strange one-button mouse"... Hmm, which laptop has a one-button mouse?) and The Presidents (I love history.) I don't like the "cover" songs that JoCo made, especially when they are not as powerful as the original. Still he sure has some great tunes written for the cubicle-dwelling crowd and the geeky population out there. He even mentioned my favorite snack (Frito) and my favorite drink (Mountain Dew). Last but not least, he lives in Brooklyn! I'll keep an eye out for him on the subway from now on.