the unexpected delights of iPod shuffle

The very next day after Alex wrote "See? See? I told you so" about the genius of itunes shuffle, I had my own iPod shuffle moment. It was like this: the fredshouse crew was driving back from San Luis Obispo; we had my iPod running in random shuffle mode (and yes, still stuck with the Belkin FM transmitter, no AUX solution in the truck, sigh), so we were having lots of interesting combos and segues like Oakenfold -> Cowboy Junkies -> Coltrane and so on. Then seemingly out of nowhere this female voice says:

"Hey you guys, I wrote this song for you [laughs], so check it out..."

Next thing I know, Halley's singing "Barlow's a brand new blogger" as I'm blowing down the 101, WTF??? I mean, I'm pretty used to hearing music I don't expect in shuffle mode, but this was a total cross-media dislocation, a blog post playing on my iPod in my car. It was a very weird, very funny digital life moment.

Well it's pretty obvious that when I rebuilt my iTunes library it snarfed up all the audio files in the quicktime temp directory, where Halley's little Christmas confection had slept since I listened to it months ago. And when I synched up the iPod, it dutifully sucked in all the new tracks, including the Barlow tribute.

Anyway I had some complicated explaining to do after that, to my non-blogging, non-itunes-enabled family. A comic moment in its own right... ;-)

Now playing: Jorma Kaukonen | Blue Country Heart | Breadline Blues

Posted by Gene at April 19, 2004 11:30 PM | TrackBack