The Difficulty of Too Much Music

It is a nice problem to have, really. But it does represent a problem at times because the sheer mass makes it hard to find music I want to listen to at that moment. This is partially because Richard and I both have music on iTunes and some of our tastes are very different. But I would guess that half or more of the music in iTunes is my own and I have quite a varied taste. And the categories are imperfect. Not every one of the 357 songs that have ended up classified in the "classical" category is the same. And making a playlist can be time consuming work with 3823 songs to pick from. That's more than a month of music. And then I could listen for another 3.7 days just to my audio books. All this stuff takes up 28.33 gigabytes of space on my 234 gig external drive (not to mention another couple gigs for books I removed from iTunes but have yet to delete entirely). Thank heaven that I put it there rather than on my computer's main drive. It has also made it much easier when moving from one computer to the next.

The thing is that after spending an evening categorizing things I don't feel the satisfaction that I did back in the day making a mix tape to listen to in my car or something. Perhaps there is a dissatisfaction with not having a physical artifact of what I've done. Or it could be that my playlists are just not very good.

Is Opportunity a Relative of WALL-E?

Opportunity, one of the two Mars rovers, is still going strong. They're both still going but Spirit is colder and still has to cope with a jammed wheel that only lets it go backwards, despite this it has rolled over 500 meters since then (7.5km in total). The luckier Opportunity has gone a huge distance in the nearly five years since it landed on Mars January 25, 2004. As of September 2nd it had gone 11.79 kilometers (7.33 miles). Very impressive for an inexpensive little project (at $800 million the two rovers together cost about 65% of the average cost of a Space Shuttle Launch) that was planned to last 90 days if things didn't go well.

Now NASA plans to head to Endeavor Crater (not to be confused with the already visited Endurance Crater) about 12 km from Victoria Crater, the place Opportunity left at the start of this month. Will it make it? Hard to say. But given the results so far I would not bet against the craft at this point. And if it does not... the statistics so far are pretty impressive. This is good value for money.