I know it is the 21st Century and all, but something today just made me feel like I was living in the future. On 42nd Street in Astoria, a good distance from my palatial abode, I took out the trusty smart phone and tapped a screen. Within seconds I was listening to music straight off my desktop, streaming like a professional through my new PLEX server, for which I bought a lifetime license at a discounted price of $119. It’s amazing already and I’ve barely scratched the surface of its awesomeness. I should be able to stream my audio and video from anywhere, like my own private Netflix/Spotify. I would tune in right now but I have no headphones handy and I am at the Bakeway, among strangers.

The first sound to come from the PLEX to my phone was from the Anthology of American Music, an eternal favorite of mine.

Wow, kid sitting near me looks like Prince. I just downloaded the complete Prince discography.

So I have much to learn about this new PLEX thing but it’s feeling amazing as hell to me. Allegedly I can upload a bunch of audio to Amazon Cloud and stream it from there, meaning I do not have to keep my home PC on all the time to be able to stream my stuff from anywhere. It’s an amazing world in which we live. This really is the future.

In lesser news I find that my vaunted Sangean DDR-63 (I think that’s the model #) is flaking out, just 24 hours after I bestowed my newfound admiration upon that $300 monster. Now it takes a half hour to start up, even after a factory reset. Maybe it’s just being moody. I contacted Sangean last night about getting Spotify on these radios. Spotify appears to be available on newer releases of my model numbers, so maybe an upgrade path exists. Maybe they tried to upgrade me from Taiwan, and that borked my system? Hmmm.

I spent the afternoon, part of it at least, categorizing thousands of .MOBI postings. I never assigned most of the postings to categories because I never learned how to do that via the e-mail gateway. Everything here is sent in via e-mail. Well, almost everything. The payphone calls are usually downloaded and processed first. Processing is rarely more than just amplifying the sound by 8000%. Most calls, as raw .WAV files, are scarcely audible. A majority are unrecoverably so and thus they never appear here at all. But the funny thing is that almost every call that comes in is automatically uploaded to the .MOBI, albeit in Draft status only. As “draft” a posting does not show up live. The dream of the .MOBI was to call from payphones and have those recordings automatically post to the site. That can be done but the call quality from most payphones is too poor to be useful. And for some reason the software I use refuses to post files when their location includes an ampersand or special character. The payphone locations are mostly in my Skype contacts, and look something like “Broadway & 31st Street, Astoria” or “34-86 Steinway Street”. The former address would be rejected by the software and calls from that phone would not be automatically posted, while the latter number would allow for the call to be posted automatically. But alas, a satisfactorily audible call from a payphone is rare, and that scarcity accounts for the death of the automatic payphone-to-.MOBI dream.

Dreams die hard, man. They die incredibly hard. That sounds like a famous line that would not be famous save for the author’s other famous works. “Dreams die hard, but they die incredibly hard.” Come to think of it that sounds like something from the old Apology Magazine I edited.

Still remembering that crackle of clarity when the music from my phone came through from my desktop. I used to stream live audio of myself playing piano (through Shoutcast) and I ran a radio station (also via Shoutcast but also IceCast and Live365) for maybe three years. So I know this is done, this streaming from your home PC. It’s not news to me. Something about this PLEX thing, though. It’s so much more professional than anything I’ve used before. I did not even flinch at having to pay for it. There was either a monthly fee, I think there was a semi-annual rate, or lifetime. I know I will get my money’s worth out of the latter, unless I die tomorrow.

One of the unexpected effects of not drinking is that I pee a lot more often, but a lot less each time. In the past 3 beers and a couple of gimlets would knock me out, but through the night at most I got up once to hit the bathroom. True, I let it roar from me like a fucking horse. Sometimes I stood there so long I thought I’d fall over. But compare that to now where I get up 2 or 3 times a night and pee just enough each time to justify the trip but nothing like before and uncomfortably more frequent… at least last night. I think I slept better this time. I look forward to summertime drinking but, to confirm what others have said: I don’t miss the bars, the hangovers, spending the money… I just miss sleeping. That Calms Forte stuff might be doing something. It is no placebo. I mean it definitely does something. I am just not sure what.

…

Dicking around with templates here at the .MOBI, making it look somewhat more professional but at this moment not intellectually connecting with the type face or the unexpectedly bright pink header image. That image is from a cheesy thing my dad got me for Christmas the year after 9/11. We circled the Twin Towers together on a cruise boat in the summer of 2000. Ah, the story of that object and my dad and my shared connection to the Towers is a long story I’ve told many times.

As for new templates, I will increase font sizes and change type faces and then go back to not actually looking at this site except when I think I screwed something up or feel a need to self-censor.  In glancing over some of this stuff I deleted a few stillborn postings and edited some others. A busy day of prestidigitational exertions and streaming amazements.

Going to the ghetto supermarket for chicken and celery.