Entries from April 2007 ↓

iTunes performance on my PC has just been dragging lately. Seriously. Whether it’s adding files, syncing stuff up, or just fixing title case, I feel like I can have iTunes open or everything else.

“This is probably because my library’s so big,” I concluded. I’ve been reading up on splitting libraries, moving libraries to USB drives, storing your library on Amazon’s file servers, and a bunch of other plans and schemes, but no real guidelines on how big is too big. (Then again, if they sell an 80GB iPod, they have to expect that people will have libraries that big, and not because they’ve bought Pirates of the Caribbean 120 times.)

Further research inspired an uncomfortable realization: Smart Playlists might maybe wreak havoc on system performance. And why shouldn’t they? If you have a Recently Played or Most Frequently Played playlist, then those are updated every time a song is played. If you have a Top Rated playlist, it’s updated every time a song is rated. And if you have a “Brit’s Greatest Hits” playlist, with Artist Name = “Britney Spears” and My Rating greater than three stars, then every renamed file checks with that playlist to see if the new metadata qualifies it for inclusion.

(Implementation note: I think you could update playlists only on viewing, or on iPod syncs, but playlist sharing and other implementation trivia might get in the way of that. I don’t know how this is stored, much less how it’s optimized, so I could be talking out of my butt on this specific point.)

I may or may not have a larger library than the average iTunes user (it looks like there are certainly power users well beyond my 100GB), but I would be willing to bet I’m in the top 1% of Smart Playlist junkies. I have created SPs for:

• Artist discographies
• Year-end Best ofs
• BPM filtering (yeah, right, for all the DJing I do)
• Diagnostics (songs with obviously bad years, no album title, etc.)
• Favorites lists
• Genre-based mood lists
• Artist “groups”, to keep musical families or record labels together
• Odd queries (which four-star songs haven’t I heard in three months? what have I imported but not listened to yet? what have I heard a million times but not rated?)
• Year-based reminiscing (rock albums from 1992 to 1995)
• Filetype filtering, because sometimes other programs really want MP3s and not anything else

My love for this feature probably borders on abuse, and the stark fact is that I have a lot of very large smart playlists that I only very rarely use, or could recreate almost immediately if it came to that. I had no idea I was suffocating it with my love. A lot of these are playlists that could be converted, after they query the database once, to regular playlists, and I wouldn’t miss much.

So that theory makes sense. Unfortunately, I can’t find a really thorough discussion of the problem beyond 2005ish, and iTunes has gone through many updates and enhancements since then. Someone described smart playlists as tiny little applications themselves. iTunes operates at an acceptable level with 100 smart playlists of varying sizes and complexities, but if you’re starting to become performance-oriented, they might be dragging your system down.

Regardless, I wiped most of the dynamic playlists from my iTunes (converting some to regular playlists), and it seems like it’s a little peppier today. Again, it is completely possible that there’s a release note with iTunes 5 or 6 or 7 that says “fixed the problems with smart playlists - create as many as you want now”, but it seems reasonable to think that smart playlists might be best used in moderation.

(I made an exception for the three gigantic playlists that fill my iPod: 20GB of recently added files, 20GB of top rated files, and 20GB of frequently played files. I absolutely cannot put my iPod into manual file-draggy mode. Never.)

So they’ve been playing the Disco Star Wars Theme on XM Kids lately. I’ve caught it maybe three times in the car this week, which is a lot, because I haven’t been listening a ton. (On the other hand, it could be part of a pre-programmed block we keep tuning into the right part of.)

Adam saw the display and said “this song is by Meh-co”.

I said “it might be May-co, or it might be Mee-co, but whoever it is, that’s who did this song”.

Becky said “who is singing this song?”

I said “this is an instrumental. There are just instruments.”

Right around the Cantina theme part, Adam helped out. “Ya wanna know who’s singing on this song?”

Becky said “Who?”

Adam said “Jackie Robinson!”

So there you go. According to Adam, the man who broke the color barrier in baseball also has the distinction of having sung on the highest-selling instrumental single in the history of recorded music.

For a lot of my career, I was only really given the “what” of my work. This needs doing, someone has to do it, and that person could be you.

The “when” of work can be really contentious. I had a music professor who said that amazing things happen around deadlines. I wish it weren’t so, but this is true. A lot of my projects that never got finished (or never got finished getting started) simply didn’t have deadlines, so I continue to this day to delay them. (On the other hand, I trust in my ability to work without deadlines, even with evidence to the contrary piling up.)

A better motivator for me is “why”. Help me understand why this action is necessary. Knowing your place in a larger process is hugely motivating: you’re not just working to get the job done, you’re supporting a system of people and plans that (maybe indirectly, but maybe directly) rely on you.

GTD tries to wean you off of “when”. You do it when you can, when you have energy, when you’re where you need to be, and whenever you get a chance. But one thing GTD reinforces is “who”: mostly, it’s you, but if you’re not the best person to handle it, you have to delegate. (Sometimes “who” comes down to “not me”: just saying “no” is kind of delegating, and it’s super important.)

Working from home on two days a week has brought a sharp focus on the “where” of work. I feel very limited by the things I can’t do on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, but I suppose we all have to deal with people who don’t share our schedules or our office spaces. The “where” of work changes more than all these others every day.

The reason I’m writing all this, though, is the “how” of work. I have new responsibilities, and I am feeling terribly under-supported. I have questions that only experts in my field could probably answer, and my team doesn’t reach out to help me. I am trying to get up to speed with books, forums, and training, but I still am not sure how to do a lot of the things that I know the “what”, “where”, and “why” of.

Beyond that, there are things that I really do know how to do, and work comes to me with a “when” and “how” attached. There is no quicker way to make a smart person feel micromanaged than to tell them exactly how to get their work done. I wish I could find a balance across my domains right now: some days I am completely lost on the road, and other days I’m insulted by the map I’m handed.

I have a hard time with the use of the word “proverbial” as “very commonplace or popular.” Like in this entry on Brand New (one of my new favorites) about the new MSNBC logo.

It succeeds in doing so and forcing you to stop trying to think about what M S N B and C stand for, however, the continued uncapitalization of corporate and brand identity — further enunciated by the proverbial Web 2.0 logos — favors form over substance, and eventually all logos will be blobby, friendly, meaningless avatars of their original meaning.

What proverb would that be? (”Bettr™ late than nevr™”?) But I checked it out in the dictionary, and that’s meaning number 2.

It still pops out at me. In my presence, you better be referring to a proverb when you say proverbial.

I was just moved over to the DBA team at work. It’s work I’m somewhat familiar with, and I’m being given a lot of time to absorb the new playbook before I’m thrown into the game. Or I guess they won’t be using me on clutch third downs until we’re closer to the playoffs. This metaphor isn’t really going anywhere.

LazyDBA is a mailing list, one I’ve found answers on in the past. Their web archive is terrible, but I thought I’d give it a shot. I signed up with my work address. It took about a day to realize that I’d rather be using Gmail, with its conversation view and organized replies.

So I unsubscribed, and signed up with my Gmail address, but I never got a confirmation email. I tried again, and then again the next day, and let it sit a week before I gave it another shot. No dice. I came to find out that they might be blocking hotmail and yahoo accounts. I signed up with my nordquist.com address, and boom - got a confirmation right away.

Rude. First, their site doesn’t say anything about blacklisting the largest email providers. Second, isn’t it just common sense to validate the form? Don’t tell me that you’re actually sending a confirmation when you aren’t.

I suppose this policy helps them weed out abusive people, but to simply deny service to EVERY Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail user is just crazy.