Wild Gold & Return to iTunes

This is another music post. I was fucking spun out today - I posted recently that I was consider abandoning a replacement for iTunes, because none of the so-called to notch offerings these days, the ones I sampled being Spotify and YouTube Premium, cut it for me. One of the reasons for this is when I went hunting for a particular mix I used to have ready access to, having been cut from one of my cd's back in the day (see footnote), I found that none of the examples of the tunes on the many albums these apps had, contained the mix I wanted. Fuck. That. Shit. This was most of the reason for going to one of these things!

What compounds my situation though, and kind of forced me down this path, is when I began my iTunes journey in 2004. After downloading all my cd's, then having donated them, I no longer have access to that original music - music that I paid for (I do not do piracy). So that means if I follow the plan of abandoning iTunes and going with a streaming mob, some tunes that have been with me forever will disappear. No thanks. What further compounds this is that the tracks on my old iPod are degenerating and some just don't work anymore. Having moved a number of times over the years, I have lost my original PC-hosted database, and have to rely on what is on my iPod. Dammit!

So the other day it occurred to me, maybe I just buy a few of the CD's I loved the most and can't find online, redownload them, and stick with iTunes. I can run it off my phone if needs be, although that would involve switching accounts from work to personal, if that's possible.

Anyway, above is a snap of the Wild Gold album that prompted this search. It's got a couple of absolutely cracking songs - anthems for me really - that I love to this day. I have just ordered a copy of it on eBay. To my surprise though, when looking for it, I realise that Wild Gold has SO many versions! Seeing my one, which is Volume V, obviously there are four before it, but there are also 7 or 8 after it too! I am half tempted to buy them all just quietly. Let's see how the next few months pan out, and when I know what my next few years is going to look like, we may well just hit the button on that. Can't wait to enjoy a few of these tunes again....

Legs

 Is it just me, or does everyone split their journeys into legs? Rather than consider the whole, I have always split my travel - particularly work travel - into segments. 

Take for instance my journey to Cohuna office at least a few days per week. Leg 1 is Echuca to Torrumbarry Roadhouse. Leg 2 is said roadhouse to Gunbower, and then Leg 3 is from there to Cohuna.

I even attempted in my head to figure out the % split of the journey amongst all three segments. I always knew the first was the longest, and assumed it was about 40%. The second is the shortest, so I assumed about 25%. That left 35% for the last leg. Finally, the other day I measured this, and I wasn't all that far off - Leg 1 actual is 42%, Leg 2 is 23.7% and Leg 3 is 34.2%. Utterly useless information, but this post is about me and one of my silly little habits, so there you go.

The other trip of note that I split into legs each and every time, is from home to our new office at Colinroobie. That is a significantly longer trip, mostly very boring, and it helps to have a sense of completeness as I progress along it. That trip, Leg 1 is Echuca to Mathoura, then onto Deniliquin, then onto Conargo, then Jerilderie, Narrandera, Yanco, Leeton and finally Colinroobie. It's about a 3.5 hour trip, which is not too long, but as I said, boring.

I also kind of do this when I go to Broken Hill, which is the longest trip of them all at 7.5 hours. However I do it infrequently enough that I don't remember the breakdown of legs very well. I tend to just use the main towns, such as Kerang, Swan Hill, Robinvale and Mildura to help me measure my progress. I tend to be a statistically-minded person, so I guess this habit of mine is just in keeping with that.