The iMac, iTunes, and a Coincidence

Yesterday I left the iMac in sleep mode. When I came back, the SCREEN WAS BLACK!! Sniff, sob. Ken and I dropped everything, got it in the car, and rushed it to the Apple Store. It reminded me of when the kids were little and would suddenly get sick; how we would quickly take them to the doctor. Anyway, something is wrong, it will be in the computer hospital for a few days.

So we rolled out our old PC and that's what I am using now. Frankly, it's a bit like walking around with a pebble in my shoe. It's probably faster than the Macintosh, but what a difference in user experience! Last December when we got our iMac it took about 2 hours before I turned into one of those obnoxious Apple fanatics.

One of the things I like on the iMac is iTunes. Of course, it's available for Windows now, and some of my PC friends like to use it for organizing their music.

I am a loyal customer at the iTunes Music Store and have been thinking about how this has changed my music shopping. Say that you are buying a jazz recording -- with CD's you compare discs, think things like "well, there are 2 cuts on this album I like, 3 cuts on this other one." With iTunes, it's "gee, that's a great old standard. I wonder who has done it. Hmmm, this Sarah Vaughan sounds good, but maybe I want an instrumental." Next thing you know, you have followed your stream of consciousness browsing to a song that you play on repeat for days.

Something like that happened last week. I was thinking about Miles Davis's great album KIND OF BLUE. One of the cuts is "So What" and I was wondering who else had done it. I hit on a 1960 recording of a trio with Shelley Manne on drums, Ray Brown on bass, and some guy named Barney Kessel on guitar. Very cool, very spare -- I love it! I decided to see if I could find out more about Barney Kessel and found his obituary on the web -- he died on May 6 at the age of 80. I hope that I am just the first of many more fans who find him this late.