Variations on a Theme by Scott Adams

I love iTunes! I have downloaded hundreds of songs. I got some of them free from the Pepsi promotion and my friends have given me gift certificates. Sometimes I download the free song on Tuesday. I went through the entire Billboard Lists from when I was a little kid and made a Shopping Cart full of songs I want to purchase when I have more disposable income.

Somebody is always asking about a song for this or for that. This is a great place to find them. When I need a song for a slide show, something always seems to fit. If none of my songs work, that is an excuse to go shopping at my favorite on-line music store.

You don’t have the equivalent of three days worth of music stored on your computer and just let it sit there. I listen to my music whenever I can. I have a set of speakers and a subwoofer that sounds pretty good. I play the music mostly at low volumes, so having that third speaker for the base is nice. Being a gadget man, I also bought one of those Griffen Power Mate knobby things to use for the volume. $49 is a lot to pay for a knob, but what other vices do I have? Did I mention the cool blue glow?

The lights in our cubicle office are on one of those motion detectors. If you don’t move around, or of the motion detector doesn’t see you, the lights go off. They go off all the time. At first it was kind of annoying. But now I have this cool blue glow from the bottom of my volume controller....

I play music in my classroom too. There are studies that show that students respond well to music. Duh! This is called a “learning style.” Of course, to be fair, the studies are mostly about classical music, and my students want to listen to rap and hip-hop. So, we compromise, we listen to what I want to listen to. What I call, “The Best Music From the Life of Mr. Nichols.” Take it or leave it. Sit down, be quiet or I am going to play more songs from The Carpenters!

The desktop Mac in my cubicle at school plays music almost all the time. My friends in our department cubbies have said they like to listen even when I am not there. So, I leave it on. I refer to my cubby as “the radio station.” When the latest version of iTunes came out with Party Shuffle, I was impressed. It was perfect for programming a nice mix of songs for the whole day. While having a cubicle had always made me think I was sort of living in a Dilbert Cartoon, turning my cubicle into a radio station solidified it.

Oh, there were some adjustments. I have a bunch of Christmas songs on there, so I just took them out of the playlist. Don’t get me wrong, I could listen to Charlie Brown Christmas every day, but my listeners don’t share my taste. We at “WJON, the voice of cubicle G14 -2” try not to alienate our neighbors. I try to be a good neighbor, I turn it down if I know somebody is on the phone. I also encourage everyone to turn it down or off if it is bothering them, but nobody really has complained. They seem to be resisting the blue glow...

This next part is what probably separates me from the rest of the herd. I couldn’t leave it alone. Once I got to thinking about my little cubicle radio station, I had to have more. The next step was obvious. I needed a DJ. I needed to make announcements, dedications, hip DJ stuff. The possibilities were endless.

Since I couldn’t be there the whole time, I realized I needed to record my voice and save it as an MP3. I had an external microphone in a big wad of cables in one file drawer, because that is what we computer guys do. I had played around with iMovie a little and knew I could make a voice over track for a movie. Then I could export that. I even had an article about how to do that. But, I didn’t really need a movie, that was overkill. I remember thinking, “This is Apple, there has to be an easy way of doing this.”

I do not play music. I do not read music. I only play my stereo. I have no reason to want to record my own albums. But still I was able to use GarageBand in about 3 minutes to record my own voice and export the track to iTunes. I made joke announcements. I made long distance dedications. You know, from cubicle one to cubicle three... I did some news and weather. Weather is easy here in Central New York. Mostly cloudy, chance of precipitation. I had fun. I put them all on the play list and they just come up in the course of the day’s programming. It was too easy!

That is the power of a “killer app.” Something so powerful you didn’t even know you needed it. Even people who don’t think they want it, need it. Is that cool or what? The guys at Apple deserve some sort of reward for seeing into the head of John Q. Public and giving us stuff we didn’t even know we needed, cool tools to use with our cool toys. And a tip of the hat to the folks at Griffen. Now if I could order a Powermate that glowed green...