Surfin’: The Space Above the Field

This week, Surfin’ gets ready for ARRL Field Day and ISS pass-overs.

Whitney Houston Haunts My iPod

Whitney Houston died last weekend. I own her greatest hits CD containing 36 tracks, which I uploaded to my iPod years ago.  (My iPod is a sixth generation “Classic” with 160 GB capacity.)

With a total of 14,121 tracks stored on my iPod, Whitney's tracks represents a mere 0.25% of the iPod's contents.

I play my iPod during my 35-minute commute between home and work everyday and I usually listen in "shuffle" mode, which means the iPod randomly selects the tracks that it plays. In shuffle mode, the odds are 1 in 392 that the iPod will play a Whitney Houston song .

Believe it or not, my iPod played a Whitney Houston song every day last week during my morning commute. This morning, the first song my iPod played was a Whitney Houston song.

Weird!

Surfin’: Going Techno

This week, Surfin’ discovers a techie surprise under the Christmas tree.

Surfin’: Eyeing Apps for the Apple of My Eye

This week, Surfin’ looks to Woz’s old stomping grounds for ham radio applications.

Valentine Day

Driving home from work today playing my iPod in random shuffle mode, a song comes on just as I turned on to the street where my house is located. The song is an instrumental that I don't recognize.

As I drive up to the driveway, I glance at the iPod to see what it is playing. It was a Paul McCartney tune from his first solo LP, McCartney. The name of the song was Valentine Day.

With 12,355 songs on my iPod, what are the odds?

Surfin’: Short Bits

This week, Surfin’ is full of short stuff that is not big enough to be tall stuff.

Surfin’: iPhone Gets Software Defined Radio

This week, Surfin’ discovers a software defined radio (SDR) in an iPhone.

The Loco-Motion Revelation

Back in January, I purchased a DVD titled 1960’s WABC Radio Airchecks. In addition to airchecks, the DVD contains 75 hours of pure nostalgia from 77 WABC including “Actual Broadcasts By Big Dan Ingram, ‘Cousin Brucie’ Bruce Morrow, Ron Lundy, Scott Muni, Chuck Leonard & More.”

Seventy-five hours is a little much to listen to in one sitting, so I loaded the contents of the DVD into my iPod (by way of iTunes) and I hear random selections during my daily commute.

Today, I listened to a program in which Dan Ingram and Ron Lundy discuss the history of 77 WABC. During their discussion of 1962, they mentioned that a big hit that year was The Loco-Motion, which was written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin and sung by Ms. King's baby-sitter, Little Eva.

Both deejays were of the opinion that Carole King actually sung the song herself. As proof, Ron Lundy mentioned that he had seen Little Eva in person twice and during those two occasions, "Little Eva" was a different person.

Then they played the song.

I have heard that song countless times since it was released and until now, I never noticed that it definitely sounds like Carole King is singing the song.

Go figure!

mystery of the iPod

I am on my third iPod. I outgrew my first two because I had more music then they could hold.

My new iPod is a 160-Gbyte Classic, which I bought refurbished from Apple as a Christmas present to myself. I believe that 160 Gigabytes should hold all my music for a long time.

Although, I have added a few new tunes to my new iPod, it basically contains the same collection of tunes that I had stored on my old iPod.

Normally, I let the iPod randomly select the tunes it plays. What is interesting (my iPod “mystery”) is that I am hearing tunes on my new iPod that my old iPod never played.

Seems to me that my old iPod would randomly play a subset of the tunes it had in storage. Although the subset was probably immense, I did hear the same tunes repeated over time, but it obviously did not randomize everything because almost everything I hear on my new iPod is stuff I never heard on my old iPod.

Is my new iPod randomly playing a new subset of tunes or is it doing a better job of randomizing the collection?

By the way, for what it’s worth (or BTW FWIW), I have over 8,700 tunes stored on my new iPod. Also, my old iPod was a 30-Gbyte model.