Use Smart Playlist in iTunes to Improve Audiobook Experience

I have a terrible memory and like to listen to audiobooks on my iPod. So as you may guess, I sometimes lose track of where I left off when I stopped listening last. While the iTunes software is good at bookmarking the stop-off point within a file, I tend to forget which file I was listening to. So to solve the problem, I use the smart playlist feature within iTunes.

The book I am currently listening to, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaimen, has 19 MP3 files. I setup a smart playlist filtering by "Album is Anansi Boys" and "Playcount is 0". I sort by chapter number and am ready to go.

Instead of listening to the book from the Audiobook section, I listen from the Smart Playlist. When I finish a file and move to the next one, the read file is removed from the list (not from the iPod though) and I know each time to listen to the topmost file.

I hope this is helpful to you since it has made my audiobook experience much better.

Paradigm Shift Regarding Digital Organization

Many geeks have seen the writing on the wall as the philosophy of organizing digital assets is evolving. I believe this is mainly due to advances in search algorithms as seen by Google, Apple and others. Can tagging and dumping be the new means of efficiently organizing digital assets?

My "old" means of organizing everything from word processing documents and spreadsheets to digital photos and music relied heavily on folders and subfolders (and more subfolders) in an attempt to categorize each item for easy retrieval. I just never knew when I would need that syllabus from a microbiology class from the fall semester of 2003. Unfortunately, when using this method can take awhile to find items, but it is usually possible to find them.

If you scan my computers' hard drives now, you will find a folder for academic work with subfolders for each class and subfolders archiving for each semester, etc. If you look in my personal photo directory, you will find folders for each year (since we went digital as I have not made time for scanning of older prints) and subfolders for each month within. Same with email archives and music and videos. I think it is safe to say that most of us who do not have a desktop with 500+ icons on it have some sort of folder hierarchy working for us.

For the last few months, actually since I switched to Gmail as my primary mail aggregator, I have made a concerted effort to change my own philosophy about organizing my digital materials. When I look back, I was already doing it (unknowingly) by using iTunes and iPhoto. Lets start with iTunes.

If you use iTunes and navigate into the iTunes music directory, you will probably notice a folder hierarchy which uses artist and album folders. While this is not really any different from the above mentioned method, it is within iTunes where the magic happens. Each song is (or can be) loaded with metadata including title, artist and album, but also a series of other keywords used for organization. Genre, year, bpm, groupings, etc. all can be filled in and used to search for specific songs and more importantly to create Smart Playlists. If you want to have a workout playlist, maybe you choose songs with a high bpm, if you are wanting a "live" experience, you can create a playlist with only live tracks. This is what I am talking about as the new way of organizing - tag items with relevant keywords and use better search tools to organize them on the fly.

iPhoto works in a similar way by organizing photos by event and/or keywords in addition to the metadata supplied by your camera (exposure info, time, date, camera type, etc.) Creating smart albums for uploading to Facebook or Flickr become so much easier than looking through each photo in a folder structure.

Now I find myself using the same type of organization with email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and pretty much all digital assets (which aren't already in an archive folder that is). I use Gmail as my primary aggregator of many accounts and the google philosophy is to tag and dump into an "all mail" local and them create search strings or smart folders to retrieve targeted mails. One example is my use of the tag "Action" in which any email that come in which needs to be resolved later (see inbox zero from GTD) gets an "Action" tag. when I have time to address these messages, I simple click on the "action" tag link and all of the messages show up onscreen. When the item is resolves, I simple remove the tag and it is archived. This works because Google has such a good search engine.

Now add this idea to documents and productivity can go way up. Apple's OS X has a really good indexing search engine (Spotlight) which searches text throughout each document as well as any keywords you assign. This is even easier than assigning tags, since I usually just rely upon text strings to find documents. If I am looking for the syllabus for microbiology in fall of 2003, I can just search "syllabus 2003 micro" and I will get a list of files which have all of those words in the title of body of the document. Unfortunately, this does not work as well on Windows systems (I am forced to use Windows XP at work), but I have installed google desktop and it is better than Windows search.

In conclusion, I still hold on to the folder hierarchy system for my old files and many new files on my hard drive, but am turning to using search to find the files instead of folder diving. I do tend to use less subfolders now, and it is still important to be sure and tag items well. If you find yourself intrigued by this paradigm shift and are moving towards this tag and dump method. Just ask yourself if you prefer to do the work on the front end (tagging) and save time in retrieving files or would you rather quickly save files and spend more time looking for them later.

Bills, Schools, Dance, Christian Wicca and Ashley wants me to start dating again.

Charter Cable has now proven to be a "normal" cable company. They had actually been pretty good for us. The price was good, the installation painless and repairs after the storm handled well. Of course this was too good to be true. Cathy noticed an extra charge on our bill last month for "DVR installation and Service" ($15). Well, since we never authorized this service and do not use it (in fact didn't know it was there), Cathy called and they agreed to credit the charge. Well, imagine our surprise (not) when the same charge was found on this month's bill. Their explanation this time, "You have a DVR cable box installed so we thought you were using the service." HUH!!!!

It turns out that the installer had put in a DVR capable cable box (needed for HD content) because he thought they were out of the normal boxes. This was mentioned to the home office and was OK for 5 months. So now we are told that we have to exchange the cable box and then they will credit it back. It seems that many utility companies have these complex (and mostly automated) billing systems which cause their customers grief.

Open house for the new school year was yesterday, so we went to Ryan's school first and "met" his teacher (same as last year) and picked up paperwork. Later in the evening we went to parent orientation at Ashley's school and found out new policies and met Ashley's 2nd grade teacher. It turns out the first fundraiser starts on the first day of school. It seems that the entire year is just one big fundraiser sometimes.

Ashley's teacher is quite ambitious, but seems confident that the students will progress quit quickly this year with reading, writing, math and science. Cathy and I are excited about the curriculum with a major focus on science and critical thinking development. They are having school-wide science themes including field trips and are teaching many subjects with a "how does it work" approach rather than the traditional "do it like I do it" approach. We will keep you updated throughout the year.

We also stopped by Dancers, Inc. in Decatur yesterday to sign Ashley up for ballet and tap classes. It has been a year since she has danced, but we are sure she will catchup quickly. While sitting in the car waiting for the girls to come out, I noticed an interesting building located right next to the dance studio called "Shadows and Light". The artwork was eye-catching on an extremely vanilla building, but it peaked my interest. An internet search yielded the following description:

Shadows and Light Occult Shoppe - shadows and light carries supplies for the entire magickal community specializing in New Orleans Voodoo, Ceremonial Magick, Christian Witchery, and Neo-Paganism. There are many paths to enlightenment.

A further search found the owner "Gypsy Nancy" was also a guitar player in the band "thejudasgoat" and a Christian Wiccan. Not only was I completely surprised to see an occult shop in the heart of the bible belt, but now had been introduced to this religion. Wikipedia list the definition of Christian Wicca as the "syncretism of Christianity and Wicca which uses the organizational and festival framework of Wicca while professing belief in the teachings of Jesus." and is credited to John Michael Greer's 2003 book The New Encyclopedia of the Occult. I have to admit, I am quite intrigued.

And lastly, as we were getting ready to go to the open house, Ashley uttered the quote of the week as far as I'm concerned. She had a small bottle of hand sanitizer from Bath & Body Works and asked me if I wanted some. I said "no thanks" and guess what she said?

"Oh come on Daddy, it smells good. It will attract more girls for you!"

I thought Cathy was going to fall down.