My digits, let me tell you them.

My flight was uneventful- I conned the lovely but clueless trolley dollies into serving me an endless supply of gin and tonics, finished watching season four of LOST (probably not the best thing to do while on a plane) and slept a bit. My arse is still numb. I did, however, hear a really lovely track on one of the audio channels: the voice of Q. French electronica/funk from 1982. I heard the instrumental, but can only find the full track on the internets. Which would be here. (link goes directly to an MP3)

Seeing Fish and Jeb at the arrivals gate made for a lovely welcome to SF, and the drive back to Napa was comfortably familiar- I smiled all the way. And why wouldn't I. It's warm, friendly, and snuggly here.

First stop: Robbie and Fish's place to drop off the luggage. Second stop: American Canyon shopping center. Awesomely hideous urban desert of carpark and big, empty stores. Pure americana. And they had a T-Mobile store.

I love T-Mobile this time around. Super friendly in store, really helpful on the phone, and they even put me through to a tech who knew what I was talking about and worked with me to get the internet working on my phone. Which is awesome: unlimited data, $19/month. Suck that, Vodafone NZ.

Speaking of phones: I'm now on +1 707 812 2709. My NZ number will be out of action from the 21st, but I'll only check my messages on it a couple of times before then.

And now, having fixed my phone and waved the lads off to work, I'm going back to bed. Zzzzz...

iTunes love

I have resisted iTunes for a long time, mainly because fully half my music collection is poorly-labelled. I ripped most of my music before the internet- before CDDB and cover art libraries- and as a consequence most of my albums are sorted by the folders they inhabit, and have titles like 'track 1' etcetera. iTunes does not cope well with this. I do not cope well with iTunes not coping well.

That's all changed with the release of TuneUp. TuneUp is an iTunes plugin, and it's neatest trick is that it analyses a poorly ID'd track, sends a sample to Gracenotes for identification, and relabels your music. It can be as automatic as you like, or you can approve every track yourself.

Other functions of TuneUp can automatically download cover art, check YouTube for matching music videos, and alert you to upcoming concerts based on your collection.

It's $12.50/year, but early adopters can get a lifetime subscription for $20. Twenty bucks to effortlessly relabel all your dodgy music? Even if the company goes under, it's still worth it.

http://www.tuneupmedia.com

Oh- it's only available for Windoze right now. Sorry, mac users. Mac version is on the way...