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Various Artists: Bonus Mix 6
U2: Zoo Station
Aria: One
Peter Gabriel: The Tower That Ate People (Remix)
New Order: Slow Jam
Crowded House: Locked Out
Genesis: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Pet Shop Boys: A Red Letter Day (Trouser Enthusiasts Congo Dongo Dubstramental)
Spoon: They Never Got You
Ecano: Run
Juno Reactor And Gocoo: Teahouse
Jean Michel Jarre: C’est la Vie
Westbam vs Red Jerry: Wizards of the Sonic (Matt Darey Remix)
The Dandy Warhols: Bohemian Like You
Marc et Claude: I Need Your Loving [Like The Sunshine] [Dark Moon Mix]
Lenny Kravitz: Fly Away
Deep Forest & Peter Gabriel: While the Earth Sleeps
Kinky: The Headphonist
Stigmato, Inc.: Reality Check
John Mayer: Bigger Than My Body

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I hate colds.

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So once they started this show, I switched back to listening to the local classic rock favorite around these parts, KFOG. This morning the big topic of conversation was CBS’s new show, Love Monkey. Apparently, the Chronicle’s TV critic loved it even calling out the show’s secondary focus on music would be up a “Foghead’s” (a listener of KFOG) alley - although I can’t find that particular assertion in the article. The New York Times’ critic, however, didn’t like it.

Contrasting the warm fuzzies of a new show along the lines of “Sex and the City” or “Jerry Maguire” (or something - anything - more entertaining than random non-celebrity people heaping all sorts of abuse on each other) were some acerbic opinions, mostly offered by Alessandra Stanley of the Times. While there was lively discussion about different aspects of the show, the idea that the stereotypical woman does not like Bob Dylan - and that any woman that professes otherwise just pretends to to please men - was an interesting one.

Music is such a funny thing - you either love it or you hate it. And God forbid if you run into anyone who disagrees with you. Now I will freely admit that Dylan is a brilliant songwriter - someone called in to say that a female friend of his has a license plate cover that professes that Dylan is the Shakespeare of our time. I don’t necessarily disagree with that idea, although I find the medium to express such a romantic notion to be a little at odds with the sentiment. But that said, I just cannot fathom how anyone would agree to allow Dylan to sing his own songs (never mind a group of men responsible for investing gobs of money into a recording contract). This opinion was only reinforced when the DJs took a break and played Tangled Up in Blue.

Listening to a song written so beautifully, sung in a fashion that made me cringe made me wish for someone or some group to record the entirety of Dylan’s catalog - so I could listen to and fully appreciate his work (something I haven’t done for obvious reasons). Then it dawned on me - that might not be an improvement, given the industry’s penchant for getting random unknown groups to perform on tribute albums usually resulting in performances that are so unbelievably sub-par that it makes you wonder why they still do tribute albums. What’s with that?

As for “Love Monkey”, I recorded it on my ReplayTV and just watched it tonight. I have to say I like it. It’s not perfect - I agree with Goodman’s assessment of the supporting male characters and kind of cringe at some of the treatment the show gives women, but it’s entertaining and shows promise. And I’m just happy that I can stop racking my brain as to why Judy Greer looked so familiar - she played the goofy roommate Andrea in Kissing a Fool (a guilty pleasure that is interestingly commented as “Not bad for a crappy romantic comedy starring David Schwimmer” by someone on IMDB).

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Well, for all those Mac people looking to have that feature but thought they were burned by spending their hard-earned cash a little too soon, rejoice! It’s not really a hardware thing (it works for the most part on the revs of the current model lines - not so much on earlier systems), but a software thing. If you haven’t updated to at least 10.4.3, well, you’ll need to do that. But other than that, it’s just a little fiddling in Terminal. I’ve played around with it a little bit, but it doesn’t look like the number of applications has an effect on the wake time as I suggested in my comment to this blog post - before putting my PowerBook to “Safe Sleep” when I left work this evening, I rebooted into my personal account and just launched Mail. And yet my wake time increased to 1:07, so I don’t know what’s going on.

So the cool thing is that you can configure it a little bit. For instance, you can configure it to work as it does on the current PowerBooks, i.e. “Safe Sleep” only kicks in when the battery runs down. Or, if you want to eliminate the convenient timing of “Sleep” in exchange for the power savings of “Safe Sleep”, you can do that.

This last option piqued my interest as one thing that has stuck with me back from my IT days at Bates was that “Sleep” mode didn’t park the heads of the hard drive, which made it a bad idea to move your laptop while it was sleeping (if the heads aren’t parked, they can move - which is entirely possible when physically moving it - and moving heads are a bad thing). To be completely honest, I don’t know if this behavior has changed in years hence. Doing a little bit of Googling, I’ve only come across a reference saying that sleep does park the heads on Macrumors.com - the source being in and of itself begging the validity of the statement. Apple’s support docs don’t help much, as they just cite that the “hard disks spin down”, although Apple’s manuals (PDF) warn you not to move your PowerBook soon after putting it to sleep - which implies the heads do park:

Warning: Wait a few seconds until the sleep light starts pulsating (indicating that the computer is in sleep and the hard disk has stopped spinning) before you move your PowerBook. Moving your computer while the hard disk is spinning can damage the hard drive, causing loss of data or the inability to start up from the hard disk.

Needless to say, I’ll ask at the bar when I go to work at the store on Sunday. I’ll keep you posted. Until then, here’s a little added bonus from the Googlefest: A Dashboard widget that will immediately put your Mac into “Safe Sleep”.

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Well, one of those things would be the interface between my car and my iPod. As many of you know, I love my car. I’d like to think that it’s a healthy love, as it’s not like I go down some bizarre lane of self-mutilation in punishment of accidentally scraping the wheels on a curb when parallel-parking or anything. The car is a blast to drive and is kitted out pretty well, including the lush Monsoon 8-speaker sound system (Well, make that 7.5, as I blew out one of the speakers through overzealousness in the first year. Still need to get that fixed…). As great as the sound system is however, it’s particularly nitpicky when it comes to cassette adapters.

For instance, I have a Sony adapter that it just doesn’t know what to do with - there isn’t enough resistance in the spools, so the deck just freaks out before spitting it out in frustration. I got a Monster Cable adapter a little while after getting my iPod from the store, and it’s a little better… but not really. There still isn’t enough resistance, but there’s enough for the adapter to play the iPod through - unfortunately with an extremely aggravating & incessant clicking as the deck starts to spin the spindles a little too furiously and then backs off as the resistance builds up. Curiously, I found a total piece o’ crap non-brand adapter that worked like a charm - until the cable wore out.

So with my nerves frayed from the clicking Monster adapter, I was intrigued with the new SmartDeck adapter by Griffin “You want an iPod accessory? We got ‘em” Technology. Not only does it delightfully sidestep the leading problem with their still-strangely successful iTrip product line by not using an FM transmitter, but it also allows you to skip tracks (both forward and back) by using your sound system’s head unit. Pretty trick.

Well, if it worked. I just picked up a refreshed SmartDeck from the store yesterday (paying a more agreeable $20 than the full retail price of $30) and tried it out this morning when heading out for some errands. While the clicking is blessedly absent (a simple feature that has given me pause when considering returning the SmartDeck), using either the skip-track buttons or the FF/RW buttons relays no commands to the iPod at all. Well, that’s not entirely true: it pauses the iPod while your head unit uselessly spins the spools on the SmartDeck - but I would argue that that action is on par with “nothing”.

Another curiosity that popped up is that the connection is a little too good; when playing my iPod through this connection, it’s too loud for my sound system. Yes, that’s right: Turning the volume on the head unit all the way down, it’s still too loud. And since the SmartDeck plays through the iPod’s dock connector, you can’t adjust the volume on the iPod to compensate. In a temporary solution, I changed the fader setting to mostly play through the rear speakers - but this will only work for so long as the damaged speaker is back there (it seems to subscribe to a strange condition that temporarily repairs itself when not in use, but the rattle eventually comes back) and I’m not sure what the volume would be like for a passenger back there. Curiously, Griffin outlines two Feature & Benefits that should have prevented this sort of situation from happening:

• Intelligent level control for optimal input levels
• Sets optimal volume on the iPod for best audio quality

I’m actually happy to have run into this problem, as I put a direct-connection iPod solution (getting one of the adapters that plug into the head unit’s CD changer input) on the “when the budget allows” wish list. I’m guessing that this solution will probably be too loud as well (as both the SmartDeck as well as a CD changer adapter both access the iPod dock connector), so I’ll need to also shop for a new head unit (if a new car doesn’t alternatively come into the picture).

So there you have it: The SmartDeck by Griffin is, in fact, too good to be true. I don’t know what you can anticipate in trying it in a different car and/or head unit, but I personally think that $30 is a little too much to spend to risk having the major feature of the product not work. If you do try it out, make sure the store you purchase it from has a decent return policy.

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