Lately I’ve been stressing about making sure everything is running smoothly for a new music ensemble we’re kickstarting at Minnesota Brass: MBI Winds. While things are generally going smoothly, there’s always concerns from week-to-week: filling our remaining positions, facilities, and staying on budget.

I found myself losing sleep and having high anxiety about it all, and especially about things I couldn’t control. Despite having put together a fairly extensive meditation program for River Valley Sound (728 Cadets winter winds program), I wasn’t putting any of it into practice for myself.

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With all new Apple i-devices moving to the lightning connector, I’ve found my alarm clock with it’s 30-pin dock connector has reverted to it’s 20th century radio-only state of use. I suppose I could use an adapter, but it seems like a great way to break something (by adding a longer lever).

Then I remembered I have a 6th generation iPod nano sitting in a drawer. You know, the one that looks like this:

Image courtesy PC Mag

But with older iPods that exist outside of the “App” and jailbreak realm, there a beast to contend with: iTunes. Continue reading

With the Minnesota Orchestra back in business (and now with their music director re-hired), Jessi and I purchased a subscription package of concerts to attend. With the orchestra pulling out all the stops on their repertoire, we wanted to attend almost all of the concerts. But that was unrealistic.

So when we couldn’t attend concerts that we wanted to hear, we could listen to them on the radio. And if we couldn’t listen in, there is the radio stream, which I could capture.

Radio stations have for the most part made streaming easy. Some have made attempts to secure their streams from easily being captured by using proprietary protocols like RTMP. But it remains that a stream is still a stream, and it can always be saved. It may just take a greater or lesser degree of difficulty.

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There’s a valuable resource available to students, starving artists, savvy entrepreneurs and everyone else that often goes unused and forgotten: The Public Library.

Let’s face it, books (and other media) are expensive. While others think of Amazon first for books, I look to the library.

The American Library Association and the Dewey Decimal System date back to 1876. But in the age of smart phones and streaming media, we sometimes forget that we’re paying for this service (via taxes) and we should be taking full advantage.

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