Philonoist.net

As my girlfriend will attest, I have a plethora of junky music that clogs my iPod. It’s almost embarrassing: a lot of the songs are holdovers from my “I need every song in existence” period. (I’m looking in your direction, Hootie and the Blowfish.) Lately, I’ve been asking myself: what’s the point of having 60 gigabytes of music on your hard drive or mp3 player if you don’t listen to 80% of it?

At any rate, I got it into my head today that I wanted to listen to some music, and perhaps start the process of eliminating some songs from my iPod. Reducing clutter on an mp3 player is the same as reducing clutter elsewhere in your home: it’s one of those things that requires an unemotional, unattached view. (Or, you know, you can just wait for the zombies to arrive and start chucking your LPs at them. That’ll separate the wheat from the chaff real quick.)

One big problem: my apartment is configured in such a way that it’s a pain to hook up a USB hard drive and my speakers to my laptop. Oh sure, I guess I don’t need my speakers, but listening to anything except the aforementioned Darius Rucker et. al using lappy speakers is a crime against musianity.

My parents gifted me a crummy old workstation*, appropriately renamed on my local network as “busted”, from their now-closed medical practice. It’s been holding the floor down since I moved in as a future Ubuntu linux box that I haven’t gotten around to reformatting, one of those rainy day projects for a couple of months down the road. It’s not a terrible computer, and it’s really just a big hard drive away from being a decent FTP server. Unfortunately, the apartment is configured in such a way that it’s a pain to hook up a monitor to this computer.

I haven’t gone the entire four months I’ve been here sans music, of course: when I wanted to listen to some music, I either plugged my iPod or busted into my slick TV with its monitor port and mini-audio inputs. The problem of course, is that it sucks to have to get up and walk over to change the song when Toni Basil’s “Mickey” starts playing.

This is what’s great in theory about VNC: I can connect to the computer using a virtual display on my laptop where I’m doing my work, make some quick edits to the playlist, and go back to work. The memory hog that is iTunes isn’t using up cycles here on the lappy, and I can ostensibly get more done, especially as iTunes tries to find nearly 3000 album covers.

VNC can be crappy depending on which instance of the software you’re using. I’d been using RealVNC and found the performance sluggish at best: good enough for when we needed it for our SCOPE project, terrible now. The RealVNC viewer is probably OK, but the RealVNC server choked on just about anything I threw at it.

Then I discovered UltraVNC, and once I had quit jiggling with domain settings (busted may be old, but it’s a WinXP box) by disabling the MSLogin junk, I hopped right on… and the general navigating around Windows performance was just as good as if I had been sitting in front of busted itself… (Of course, busted and my laptop are both behind the same firewall, so there’s not a lot of net traffic to deal with. YMMV). Or so I thought.

Busted is just that: an old, busted computer: I didn’t realize how old until I pulled up the Recycle Bin and found some stuff marked for deletion in 2004. So iTunes the memory beast will work on busted, but it won’t necessarily work well…. and especially not well when it’s trying to dig through 11000 songs. My preliminary tests on busted had been with only a couple dozen songs or so at a time. So I have access to my library, but only in ones and twos.

Of course, there’s other media programs out there, and moving to Ubuntu would let me do the exact same VNC without the windows cruft. But the prospect of doing more jiggling outweighs the want of listening to some music. Sigh. Looks like I’m stuck with this POS music and POS computer until I get my new iMac or MacBook.

I only wanna be with you………


*The fan on this sucker kills me. Any suggestions on how to quiet it down?

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