Stephen Skory

I got a mailer today from a publication, the La Jolla Blue Book, which lists local businesses. They’re taking some demographical statistics of their readership (which are the people they send the book to – for free). I had no intention of filling it out, until I saw this line:

Let me emphasize: I cannot truthfully check any of these boxes. What’s astounding here is they didn’t even consider that someone might make less than $25,000 and live in La Jolla, but they spend a whole checkbox on the $100,000 to $1 million bracket.

My new Krups waffle maker (thanks Melissa & Mom!) comes with a warranty card, with a similar demographic-culling intention.

Since Krups sells their products nation-wide, they have to cover all income ranges, which are quite a bit different than La Jolla. I’m thinking maybe I’ll fill out the LJ Blue Book form now, but make my own box so I don’t have to lie about my income. That’ll show ‘em poor people live here too!

I have a playlist on my iPod that automatically updates to include the 25 songs that have gone the longest without me listening to them. (Huh. Can you think of a better way to put that?) I made it some time ago on the idea that songs would migrate there, and then I’d look at the list and listen to something neglected. It doesn’t actually happen that way. Today I noticed that the songs at the top of the list had been unlistened to for over three years! I think the time would have been much longer if it hadn’t been for an iSight-firewire related hiccup that forced me to reformat the iPod sometime in mid-2003.

I bought my 20 GB 2nd Gen iPod in January 2003 at the Macworld show. According to the Wikipedia page linked previously (a dose of NaCl crystal, of course), since I last listened to these songs, 65.5 million of the total 67.6 million iPods have been sold. Put it another way – these songs have sat unused on my iPod longer than most people have even had their iPods.

Below is a graph of Apple’s stock prices over the last five years, since the introduction of the iPod. When I first heard the name, ‘iPod,’ I actually thought it was pretty stupid. Perhaps that’s why I’m not in marketing. The red arrow shows when I bought my iPod, when Apple’s stock was below $10. As always, Apple’s death was right around the corner. Coincidentally, I purchased a good deal of Apple stock around this time, which I have yet to sell.

What were these songs neglected for so long? Well – a few of the longer and slower Dave Matthews songs and some of Stevie Wonder’s poorer licks.