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I’m struggling to come up with a good plan for my music listening during the day at work. Right now:
I listen to a lot of music on the PC using iTunes which contains all the free CDs I get from Sony; MP3s I have bought from Amazon; free music from Starbucks (tied to my iTunes account). Listening off the PC is quite convenient and isn’t using up charge off any portable device.

All of my music, however, is on my iPod, significantly more than is on the PC and contains all of the above, every CD I own, and a lot of music that I have purchased from iTunes. Over the last few months I’ve found I listen almost exclusively to the PC rather than the iPod and when I think of something I want to hear on the iPod I find that it’s often uncharged.

And now I have the iPhone which currently has no music on it. It seems silly to me to have two music playing devices taking up space and weight in my bag but 26GB of music into an 8GB iPhone obviously does not go. And yet clearly I’m only listening to the same few MBs of music so it should be possible to come up with a good set for the iPhone and leave the iPod at home.

Making this more difficult is that the iPod syncs with the Mac Mini at home, and has all the music on it. The iPhone syncs with my Macbook Pro in the apartment which has no music on it at all. So to get things working is going to require a lot of copying, syncing, authorising which just seems like a lot of work.

Nothing is ever simple.

Yes, the patron Saint to rule them all is celebrated today and, er, nobody gives a damn. At least very few Englishmen do these days though there has been talk of forcing a celebration on the country, try and get some patriotism going.

The astute amongst you will notice that the picture in this post is not that of St. George but, rather, Paul Weller, of The Jam and The Style Council fame. Whilst many revere Paul McCartney as the hero English song-writer, I’d rather listen to anything written by Mr. Weller, who I think is tragically overlooked by those looking to celebrate the English singer-songwriter.

Being a disco child I wasn’t a huge fan of The Jam until the early 80’s when Paul was already heading towards the more soulful tunes that characterised the Style Council. Beat Surrender is one of my favourite songs ever, and now that I’m older I find I enjoy the early The Jam songs much more. And Introducing the Style Council is some vinyl (or MP3 collection if you must) that everyone should own and enjoy.

Except it’s Thursday and I’m too sick to make my own puppet theater this week. Yesterday was the Brit Awards, the UK’s premier pop music award show (and since UK pop is the world’s best, make that the world’s premier pop music award show) and I’ve spent some time digging out clips from YouTube. I am sure these will all soon be deleted due to their undeniable copyright infringement so get them while you can.

I love this one: The Klaxxons and Rhinna do “Umbrella”, cool lasers too.

Mark Ronson won Best Male award or something, despite the fact that he doesn’t do his own stuff:

And in case you didn’t get enough Amy, here she is solo. I love her to death but when she sings live it’s like she sings her own random timing and the band has to be adept at changing tempo to match her. And in both this performance, and the one above, she seems obsessed with the length of her skirt.

Finally, you might be saying “what about Kylie?”. Yeah, she won International artist and performed but frankly she looked horrid and it’s a terrible song (if you can call it that) so I’d rather we just moved along….

at your annual Company meeting, two employees are chosen to sing a karaoke We’re Not Gonna Take It and Dee Snider comes out from nowhere and takes the stage with them.

Now I didn’t know the guy was still alive!

And seeing him all glam’ed out, I’m still not sure.

I’ve decided to while away my boring weeknights by learning to play an instrument. In school I played the cornet for a short while, I think I could play Oh When The Saints by the end of it, but that’s about it for my musical career. So, the question is – what to play? So far I have it narrowed down to the following:

1. flamenco guitar – I love flamenco music so it would be cool to be able to play it
2. banjo – there is some great banjo music and today I heard jazz banjo which was uncanningly awesome, and there is something about the banjo that appeals to my sense of wanting to do something a little different
3. mandolin – they’re small, sound good and are supposed to be amongst the easiest of the stringed instruments, and my wife really likes it
4. saxophone – I really wanted a sax when I was a kid and I still do, but the type I want to play is very expensive, tough to learn and just seems impractical.

So I’m going to think about it for a while, but not too long or I will end up doing nothing: I know me somewhat. Maybe we’ll see mandolin.guapacha.com in the near future??

Go to this link at BestBuy.com and order 4 $15 iTunes gift cards, and only pay for three of them. Better still, shipping is free and (in CA at least) no tax to pay!

Too bad I don’t know anyone who just bought a new iPod and has a birthday coming up.

A few things out today you might want to spend some pennies on:

• Casino Royale on Blu-Ray and DVD
• Amy Winehouse’s new CD, Back to Black
• God of War 2 for PS2, the followup to last year’s game of the year

See you at Fry’s?

Props go out to the following artists who I am currently jones-ing on majorly. Ouch, my iTunes balance!

• The Gotan Project Funky, hip hop, ambient, who-knows-what-else styled Tango. If this music doesn’t make you want to put a rose in your hair or between your teeth and get a groove on then you are officially dead. Check out Santa Maria (Del Buen Ayre) (iTunes link) for a taste.
• Amy Winehouse Now my UK readers are saying whatever because she has been huge back at home for a while now. Here in the US I think she’s virtually unknown (only one track on iTunes), but her latest album is released in a week or two and you should check her out. You Know I’m No Good (iTunes).

Hmm… so I’m typing all this out for you good people when I had a sudden thought that I’d heard some of the Gotan Project before…. a little digging around and voila! Way back in Dec 2005, the honourable jschwa had them as a single of the week. All the more reason to add him to your RSS feed, the man got some style.

An absolute classic from the 80s, grab the full 12″ version if you can find it – Venceremos by Working Week. Great latin club beat and a protest song to boot so you can feel double good getting your groove on. The following video is not super quality but any time Tracy Thorn sings live is ok by me.

P.S. Watch out for Tracy’s new album at the end of Feb. Yeah, probably only in the UK but it sounds good from the previews on her myspace page.

Today, Apple announced a whole slew of improvements to the ipod lineup. Just a few of interest:

• New 80Gb model, 30GB now $50 cheaper
• The new shuffle is so small its almost invisible
• iTunes will download the cover art for every album you own, no matter how you obtained it
• Movies now available for download
• and coming Q1…. iTV….