GregHowley.com

Now that I have a new mp3 player for my podcasts, I can use my old one at work to listen to music. Today, I put the whole thing on random shuffle, which for some reason I never before realized that I could do. That's shuffling 1858 very random tracks that I've uploaded over the past six years. I was somewhat astounded by the sheer randomness of it all. And I hit a number of songs I'd forgotten ever having uploaded, including a couple American Idol songs from the likes of George Huff and Jasmine Trias that I'd downloaded via BitTorrent when we were living in New York. I filtered out the classical music - I'll listen to that on its own - it doesn't blend well with the rest of this.

To give you a sample of the mind-blowing randomness that I've been experiencing, here are some of the tracks that my player has been dealing me.

• Modern Love - David Bowie
• Conjunction Junction - Schoolhouse Rock
• The Sound of your Voice - 38 Special
• You're Older Than You've Ever Been - They Might Be Giants
• Romance - REM
• Stuck in the Middle - Gerry Rafferty
• As the World Falls Down - David Bowie, from the Labyrinth Soundtrack
• I'm Alive - Jackson Browne
• Call Me - Blondie
• Navras - The Matrix Revolutions Soundtrack
• Serenade - The Steve Miller Band
• Elwood Decker - The Bobs
• New York Minute - Don Henley (World Trade Center tribute remix)
• High Hopes - Sammy Hagar
• I Want an Alien for Christmas - Fountains of Wayne
• Man of Constant Sorrow - Soggy Bottom Boys, from the O Brother, Where Art Thou Soundtrack
• Care for Me - Elly K
• Private Eyes - Hall & Oates
• Paradox - Kansas
• Blue Dress - Depeche Mode

I would've made that list shorter, but I kept feeling like I needed to include just a couple more songs, if only to prove that I'm not a David Bowie fanatic. Alas, things did not improve. I never realized I had so many soundtracks in my player, though.

I DJ'ed my wedding off of this mp3 player, and I'm sure there are still tracks in there that I wouldn't want to listen to. I certainly haven't listened to Schoolhouse Rock or the Labyrinth soundtrack in years. I was hoping some Beatles or Eminem would pop up. Or the 15-minute version of Rappers Delight. At least I got my favorite Steve Miller song. It's interesting though to listen to music I haven't heard in years. But when they started chanting oh shawnti oh shawnti oh in that song from The Matrix, I couldn't help thinking of Beyond Good and Evil.