Ever wonder how songs are written? Read A Hard Day's Write  by Steve Turner. It's a collection of fascinating insights into the Lennon/McCartney songs that we all know and love. When you're finished with that, come back and read The Evolution of a Song - the step by step account of my current struggles to birth a cohesive musical statement from a bubbling stew of emotions, ideas and influences. Heady stuff, no?

I don't know why, but I've always felt compelled to organize, alphabetize and catalog my music collection. The list in progress can be found here, as well as a list of recent additions and some thoughts about each.

Reading is something I don't do nearly as much as I used to, especially since what I do read these days is mostly technical manuals. Here's a few books I've read recently and some brief comments about each.

A few collected quotes that I find amusing, inspiring or otherwise worth saving and remembering.

Tech Toys:

The plastic brain. I've owned and used a series of PDAs starting with a lowly Palm Pilot Pro. I traded that in on a Compaq Aero 1550, then an iPaq 3835 (and a brief employer-financed fling with a Palm Vx) and just recently an HP iPaq 4155. Now my device of choice is a Dell Axim x50v. If you're a fan of the Pocket PC here's my humble contribution to the chatter.

Tunes to go. My portable music players have changed with the times too. I started with the ubiquitous Sony cassette walkman, graduated to a CD Discman and then the original 4 gig Apple iPod. From there I left the ranks of the Apple faithful for a 20 gig Dell DJ. Not as sleek or cool as the iPod, but it was less money than the Apple equivalent and offered .wma compatability as well as audio recording and a few other nice features. Recently I  came back to the Apple fold again with a black 30 gig iPod with video. I'm disappointed (but not surprised) by Apple's lack of support for the .wma format, but other than that, the iPod is the king of cool among the current crop of MP3 players. Video? We don't need no stinking video. Yeah, it works, but one of the ways these small, thin players get decent battery life is by limiting the use of the backlight. Since the display is constantly on during video playback, I suspect the time between recharges would be pretty short. Anyway, I'm only in it for the tunes. Why did I ditch the Dell and go back to Apple? Coolness factor aside, my eyes aren't what they used to be and I'm tired of squinting at the dim, blue Dell display. The iPod screen could double as a flashlight in a dark room - much more readable. The extra 10 gigs of space doesn't hurt either...