I took part of Mr. Tanana's advice and checked out emusic.com recently. It's a great deal to my mind--100 free downloads to start, then $9.95 per month for up to 40 downloads a month, (and the important part) cancel at any time. I've been downloading a lot of songs ranging from the ridiculous to the only somewhat less ridiculous. (At least their store doesn't need some fixin'.) I've found some '80s throwback faves, some odd covers, and a couple of complete albums by bands I already liked. I also now have a favorite Finnish surf rock band.

I still have 53 downloads, from an exceptionally quirky catalog; I've exhausted the prior set of suggestions, and am open for more.

I also have a question that I leave to the expertise and ingenuity of my readership. The first 3.5 gigabytes of music I put on my computer were burned off CDs and went straight to My Music. I played them in Windows Media Player. Then I downloaded iTunes. The first time I opened it, it transferred a small but not insubstantial (15-20%) amount of the 3.5 gigs into its own memory, without affecting the My Music folder. However, everything I've downloaded from iTunes itself and now from emusic seems to be available in iTunes but not WMP.

The question is this: is there any easy way to make all of the music on my computer accessible to one or both programs? I'd rather make it all accessible in WMP, but I'd glady settle for making it all available in iTunes. Suggestions?

ESPN Classic has been showing a lot of old NFL team highlight videos lately; if they keep it up, I may not leave my apartment the rest of the summer. What's great about it is that they aren't so much showing champions, but teams that did pretty well--playoff teams, but not championship teams. For instance, I just finished watching the 1981 Giants. I know about the '81 49ers, I know about the '86 Giants, but learning about this level of team is exactly what I like. The running of Scott Carpenter, the passing of Scott Brunner, etc. Add in the fact that it's just at the point where you get the classic NFL Films music, while also mixing in a little bit of '80s synth cheese. "Broncomania" (from 1986), and the 1980 Browns and Falcons, were great for exactly the same reason (replacing Carpenter and Brunner with William Andrews and Brian Sipe, of course).

If I could take over ESPN Classic, the lineup would be simple--old NFL Films, um, films; old games in their almost entirety (and by old, I mean that I would include stuff from before, say, 1998); maybe keep the Sunday night movie; and of course, Cheap Seats. That's it, that's the list. Never again would the network be besmirched with SportsCentury features, and certainly not of athletes who have retired in the last 5 years, or worse still, haven't even retired yet. People it's simple--it's about the games, and when it's not about the games, it's about old NFL Films. I don't even understand how someone could argue with me on this.

So for reasons that are beyond me, one project at work today involved finding the latitude and longitude of American hospitals. There are a zillion websites out there that claim to have detailed latitude and longitude info, but the quality varies from mediocre on down. Someone, though, got the bright idea that many hospitals have heliports, and so websites collecting airport info might have them, and it was a great idea. Most hospitals do show up. Anyway, the point of this post: if you are going to get so sick or injured that you need to be Life-Flighted, stay the hell away from Kentucky and Tennessee, which do not seem to follow this trend at all.

Based on the referrals sidebar, the orange hasn't scared away too many folks. Yet. I haven't decided whether this template will stick or not, and if it does whether I'll manually go in and mute the orange a bit. But I was tired of the old one, and particularly certain lacking functionalities, such as the ability to easily link to a particular post. I had played around with some of Blogger's templates, but with one major problem--I consider the comments to be a crucial part of the archive, and I couldn't figure out how to move over to Blogger's comment system without losing the old ones--plus I couldn't figure out how to incorporate my current comment system into the Blogger templates. This template was actually built for use with backblog, so it won out.

I know that the kiddies aren't exactly beating down the doors to hang out at public libraries, but this might be an over-reaction.

I began my role as an orientation leader for our summer starting class today. I'm not comfortable with the idea that I'm an authority on the law school or any such thing, but at least none of them ran screaming from the session; we do what we can.

I spent many, many hours this weekend with the local (and otherwise) quiz-bowl crew in an exercise known as play-testing. "Play-testing" consists of either simulating games or merely reading outloud question sets, for several purposes:

• Testing the questions grammar and readability
• Fact-checking when something sounds fishy
  
• Testing for difficulty and age-level appropriateness (i.e.: eliminating the questions about deviant sexual practices and R-rated movies from the high school packets)
• Making snarky comments about the people who wrote the questions.

Like any good thing, one can have too much play-testing, but the questions themselves can't. So we bit the bullet and did all 21 rounds. The mitigating factors were the snarkiness, the company, and watching all sorts of interesting sports on mute from deep, deep digital cable channels. At one point we learned, for instance, from the crawl on CSTV that something called Limestone College is in the Division III finals in, well, something; we also learned, sadly, that they are the Limestone Saints, not the Limestone Cowboys.

Thanks to the Canadian contingent, we also learned some interesting facts about everyone but DEK's current or future alma mater.

The strangest part of this weekend, though, will actually be next weekend, when we get to read all the same questions to high schoolers from around the country for real. Play-testing plus moderating for real makes for a weekend-long case of deja vu.

Finally, I have to relay this evening's discovery LJ style.....

Current mood: Super-excited that I found my sublettor's Weird Al box set
Current music: King of Suede/Polkas on 45

No, the law review application didn't kill me; make me stronger? we'll see.

What is making me stronger is that I'm spending a lot of time in the gym, as hoped. One of the strangest things I've noticed is this. In L.A, both at USC and 24-Hour Fitness, they played a lot of the types of music you might expect to hear in a gym--hip-hop and rock, up-tempo, psyche-you-up type music. Here, two of the three gyms play no music at all; it's eerily quiet at times, but you get used to it.

The third gym, the IM Building, does not play music in the cardio rooms, but does in the main weight room. The thing is, they play a soft rock, "best of the '80s/'90/and today with no rap" station--the type you might expect a middle-aged secretary in a bad job to be playing at work. Occasionally it works--Crowded House's "Something So Strong" was strangely apropos--but for the most part you end up with the type of morose songs that make you want to put down the barbells and go sit somewhere and whimper. Within the last week I've heard "In the Air Tonight," "Come to My Window," and "Let Her Cry."

You might think this little story was going somewhere, but no. I just needed to vent. Carry on.

Finished journal applications...no more law school obligations for the summer...up very very very late doing so last night...watched another "are you from Neptune?" movie (Jaws)...played super dweeby bar trivia (hey, you got your Star in my Wars)...will sleep the sleep of the just...very very soon...

Just before leaving for the summer my roommate (well, now ex-roommate) asked me what I wanted to accomplish this summer. At the time I didn't have an answer beyond a flippant, "sleep 12 hours a day and watch a lot of movies." But I'm glad he asked the question, because it got the thought in my head that I should try to accomplish something meaningful this summer, even as I try to decompress from a busy year and prepare for a busier one. So today I decided.

25 pounds.

That's right, by the end of the summer I want to weigh 25 pounds. No no, 25 pounds less, that's it.

It's an ambitious goal, but the last time I had a really strong run in the gym, I lost 21 pounds from Labor Day to Thanksgiving 2003. There's no reason I can't duplicate it.

I haven't lost any pounds so far this summer, but I have been to the gym 8 of the past 9 days, and I know I'm starting to make progress because I noticed today that I'm starting to have biceps again. So that means I've exchanged at least a little bit of fat back into muscle. This is important, especially because the winter semester was bad for me; after the first month, I never made it back to the gym at all.

My final result for 1L year? I broke exactly even; I lost 10 pounds in the first month, and then spent the rest of the school year putting it back on. Considering the availability of buffet-style food all year, that's OK. But now it's time to get back to work...

He forgot about the super-annoying Sprint "one minute, two minute" lady, and he may be over the top a little bit with the baby thing, but this guy is the most compelling anti-dime advocate I've ever come across. OK, yeah, and the first.

On an only slightly less strange note, the best title to ever come up on my Launchcast station has to be I'm Downright Amazed at What I Can Destroy with Just a Hammer. The same guy has a charming little ditty arguing against the appropriateness of Native American sports nicknames, entitled If You Own the Washington Redskins, You're a Cock. And finally, the best song I've ever heard containing the word dekaliter: (Lord, It's Hard to Be Happy When You're Not) Using the Metric System.