Ear Buds and their many Technical Difficulties

You know those Apple ear buds?  They're okay.  Mine are too big and people can hear what I'm listening to from five feet away. 

Recently, the grey rubber around the speaker of each bud started to peel off (that's how old they are).  After a while, I got sick of it and removed it because I don't want little rubber pieces floating through my ear canals and into my brain.  Not only would that damage my hearing, this blog would inexplicably become dedicated to the scent of rubber.

So the other day, my family and I headed up into the mountains to canoe.  I took my iPod and started fiddling with it at the gas station.  Since the protective rubber, which holds the speakers to the neck, is no longer in place, I can remove the speakers and pull them away from the neck.  This drags the cord through said neck in the process.  I did so out of sheer boredom.

I can honestly tell you the rubber is there for a reason, and a good one at that.  It holds the ear buds together, and keeps all sorts of assorted garbage away from the wires and such contained within the bud.  Garbage like link, dirt, and earwax. 

Needless to say, ear buds go in ears, where earwax is.  I cleaned the inner rim off with a tissue and restored the yellow color to factory-condition Macbook white. 

After fitting the speakers to the necks again, they promptly fell apart in my hands.

A word of wisdom: if you don't have grey rubber to protect your ear buds from imminent decay, earwax does the job just as well.

The Problem with iTunes

After using iTunes for about three or four years, I've decided why it's unappealing to me.  For one thing, when it's just playing in the background, weird songs come up that I would never listen to under normal circumstances.  They're mostly odd instrumentals, Christian pop, and kiddie songs which have been purchased over the last few years.  Most were bought by my brother, but I'll admit I played a part in it, too. 

Another thing I don't like is that it's hard to expand one's library.  I rarely use the iTunes store because I automatically feel stressed when I step inside.  I'm not sure why.  Therefore, I resort to grabbing mp3 tracks off YouTube and importing them to the iTunes library.  That's a long process, though; one must find the song they want, convert it to mp3 format, and then import it to iTunes.  Plus, a lot of videos have copyrights on them which block the converter. 

So, it's a very long process to get an mp3 track into iTunes.

I think I'll stick with Pandora.  That's not to say Pandora is much better, though.  Users only get a limited amount of skips per hour, and every time you skip a song/change station, you must watch an annoying advertisement (Their current fad: dolphins talking about planes).  And, you have no control over what you listen to next, so you can sit there for hours and not hear that one song you want to.

That leaves me with YouTube.  While it's possible to build a playlist of videos that will play automatically, the creation of that playlist is time-consuming and it's hard to find high-quality videos. 

Of course, there's also Playlist, but I'm not going to touch that.  Talk about your user-hating sites.

To sum it up, I don't use iTunes because I wear out the right key on the keyboard skipping bad music, Pandora is annoying, YouTube is time-consuming, and Playlist is garbage.

I have no idea what I was trying to convey with this post, either.

Drunk Driving and Duck Heads

Hello and happy Monday, my followers! 

Despite the late hour, I am determined to keep my Monday schedule at the cost of anything--not that you can fine me if I'm late. For once, I have a good excuse--I was learning to drive.  In fact, I'm fairly completely almost perhaps sure that drinking and driving is illegal.  Driving and drinking, however, will most certainly put one in jail. 

We made posters in class.  My team's was really crappy.  It did what it was supposed to do, though: covered a blank spot on the wall.  Unfortunately, I have to look at that thing the other two days I go in for class.  At least it's not a photo-poster.  That would be painfully ironic.

Moving on to other matters.

The other day, I found some felt in a drawer.  There were two white pieces, each cut into the same circular shape.  I found two pink pieces as well, which were a little smaller but still circular. 

Long story short, I sewed a duck head.  It was originally going to be a neat little doll, but once I sewed on the eyes, I realized it looked nothing like a doll. 

The thing is, I have no more felt to make a body.  So, I think I'll get more and make it a platypus head instead.  I don't want to make wings.  I really don't like wings.  I can't sew them, draw them, or fly with them.  That's disappointing.

So there's a platypus head in my drawer right now.  It's kind of neat, but I bet it's the last thing people expect to find when they open a drawer.  I certainly don't expect to find any kind of head in a drawer. 

I also learned I hate sewing machines.  With a vengeance.

Seven

This is my seventh blog post.  That's pretty good.  Seven is a nice number.  When I logged on to Blogger today, I was my seventh page view.

A few days ago, it occurred to me that I have a pretty spoiled brain.  Not only does it get to do what it loves (mostly writing) for a good chunk of the day, it has its own blog.  Most of the time, blogs belong to people.  This one, however, belongs to a brain.  Mine.

I wonder what it would be like if someone else had my brain for a short period of time.  I don't think they could handle it.  Even I can't handle it.  For one thing, this poor brain-babysitter would have to put up with constant streams of creativeness, most of which manifest themselves in ideas that, if made into movies, would be really horrible movies.  You might make three cents off the movies in my brain.  Maybe less.  Perhaps you'd simply lose money.

These streams of creativity would be interrupted occasionally by dumb quotes, pictures of cows, and the rare "oh my gosh what day is it I've got to update that blog I have on Mondays because that's the deadline I set for myself and I'm not going to change it because I need to keep it because it is a deadline nonetheless and what am I going to blog about this time nothing is happening in my life that's worth blogging about and if I just typed about my stream of consciousness that would be really boring and people would stop reading my blog and that's not good at all and plus my stream of consciousness is probably very long and winding and  bumps into a lot of walls and who would be reading it and why am I still thinking about this I'll just do it Monday" panic attack.

Anyway, so far my brain is welcoming (post 1), enjoys current pop music (post 2), listens to said music on the radio (post 3), likes to draw parallels (post 4), hates posters (post 5), ponders utensils (post 6), and enjoys pointless summaries (post 7; you are here).

You might say I have a reader-welcoming, music-listening, radio-addicted, parallel-drawing, poster-hating, fork-pondering, post-summarizing brain.  Say that ten times fast without taking a breath.

But again, this is my seventh post.  That's an accomplishment.

Were my blog a calendar, it would be a week long.