I’ve gotten in the habit of playing music on my big stereo via iTunes running on my Mac. A handy remote control for this is the Apple-created iPhone app called “Remote”. it looks like an ipod on your phone, but it’s controlling an iTunes running on a Mac over the network. It works well enough, but not perfectly. Lag time between waking up the iPhone and being able to control iTunes is in the neigborhood of 5 seconds, which is an eternity when you’re used to instant digital gratification.

Installed an Audio Link in my car. this adds an ipod dock connector in my glove compartment. It keeps the ipod charged, and also pipes the music through the cd change connector on the back of my head unit. The car thinks the ipod is a cd changer! (which has cd with thousands of songs on them) the steering wheel controls will change tracks, and the head unit itself can select between the first 5 playlists on the ipod, as well as fast forward and rewind within a song.

turns out nine inch nails is tied with depeche mode as my favorite band. here’s my top 10 highest rated bands. the number is how many songs by that artist made it into my top 82 songs: nine inch nails: 8 depeche mode: 8 madonna: 5 van halen: 4 tori amos: 3 beastie boys: 3 alice in chains: 3 aerosmith: 3 the white stripes: 2 prince: 2

I’ve had an ipod for a while now and knew about the ‘my highest rated’ smart playlist, but it was just a few days ago that I actually looked at it. sometimes while listening to the ipod at work, if a good song came up I’d rate it somewhere between 1 and 5 stars. I’m pretty conservative with the 5-star rating; to get five stars, you have to be a song that I expect I’ll never get tired of.