John Borwick’s blog

For $5, I registered Synergy, a program that interfaces with iTunes. It puts up MTV-like introductions to songs and lets me assign hotkeys to various actions.

As I’m low on screen space anyways (even running space), I appreciate not having to switch contexts to find iTunes and hide it again. You see, I use the 5-star rating system built into iTunes for my smart playlist:

“Old, But Not Horrible:” order by least recently played, use only songs with zero stars or with at least three stars

Anytime I hear a bad song, I can now hit cmd+option+shift+1 to assign it one star. (That’s my key choice, not theirs.) It stops playing and I go on to the next songs. Along the ways I’m putting more good songs into the most rewarding playlist, “Top Rated.”

Hack This Site is a fun time-waster. I got to level 12, but not past it. I’d appreciate any help you can give me

Lauren and I went to Barnes and Noble this weekend.

I saw this neat book: Zen Guitar. I flipped through it. I like how the book encourages you to do things with your “whole mind.”

I’ve been learning how to play the guitar. Lauren is letting me borrow (and re-string) her electric guitar.

Right now I’m working on Buckets of Rain by Bob Dylan.

I’m using Jeff’s book, The Guitar Handbook by Ralph Denyer. It’s really good. I think it will even teach me some music theory. The irony for those who know my parents should be apparent: I’m going to learn theory from a book.