It’s Days Like These That Make Me Happy*
Posted 7 months ago at 5:57 am. 0 comments
Turns out I don’t need much in life and some days most of the things in life that make you happy come along and make what started out as an ordinary day into one that puts a big smile on your face. Don’t need big parties or grand schemes or loads of money to make me happy … I’m a simple girl just need sunshine, freedom, laughter, music, wine, stars, candlelight, food on the barbie and friendship and most of that you don’t even have to buy.
My day got better as it went on as meetings I was supposed to have melted away leaving me with a working day to concentrate on my tasks in my own time frame without interruption. Even better I didn’t break anything. Headphones on I worked my way through a Moodle upgrade listening to the full Gladiator soundtrack on Spotify upgrading to Premium on the way. Much as I absolutely agree with giving blood (when mine decides it wants to come out) I didn’t want the Give Blood advert spoiling my music stream any more. So now I have a world of music at my finger tips simply and instantly (and their upgrade and payment process was simple and instant – oh joy).
Then surprisingly I find Microsoft are doing something interesting to make me late leaving work. Hello Education Labs a kind of marginal space for interaction between Microsoft and the education sector. Their first offering is a plugin that integrates Microsoft Live services into Moodle: access to email, messenger and single sign on using a Live ID. Kind of interesting if you are a Moodle developer whose users complaining they don’t get Moodle messaging and whose email team is just about to outsource all student email to Live@edu. It’s even licensed under the GPL and has already been downloaded 1011 times. It’s gone on my product backlog. Still old habits die hard – click on the RSS feed to subscribe to Education Labs updates and yes it will launch and subscribe you in Outlook without giving you the option to use any other reader without good old cut and paste. Boo.
Home time towards glorious blue skies and a warm summer evening and for the first time in a long time an evening with nothing planned, no responsibilities – more of that freedom. Actually not true I did have some things to do last night so apologies to all who have asked me to do things I was supposed to do that I ignored – the evening just unfurled in a more chilled direction.
Now my Australian housemate has lived over here for 20 years – I’ve been her friend for 12 and it’s probably a good thing she is going home in 2 months because when I got back was she outside firing up the barbie taking advantage of this rare summer evening delight. No. She was sat inside cooking roast pork in the oven. Talk about role reversal – thank goodness she’s still baiting me about the cricket otherwise I’d be really worried.
Chores done, wine poured I’m out there throwing some sweet red peppers and seas bass onto the barbie and eventually tempt her outside for 2 hours of wine, conversation and exploring music joy as dusk falls. I love Spotify – legal access to all the music you could want evening’s like this demonstrate its genius. We didn’t know what we wanted to listen to we just went from track to track exploring artists, themes, decades, memories – the whole lot a soundtrack to our lives and friendship. We started with Erasure and The Innocents (1988) and ended with Elvis. In between we challenged Spotify to play us Australian classics (it failed on the whole) and had a debate about which was the best version of Angel of the Morning (I went for The Pretenders Jen for Jill Johnson although I do like the Blackman and the Butterfly version which isn’t on Spotify and the German version is absolutely hilarious).
Recent research suggests the 14-24 year olds aren’t falling for Spotify because they want to own not stream music. This is kind of a false dichotomy, because unless you are the originator of music you never actually own it. You purchase a license to listen to it for your own personal use. Whether you choose to store a licensed copy of a manifestation of it on a local device or storage medium yourself, or let someone else do the storage and stream it will probably become increasingly redundant particularly as streaming services become embedded in devices themselves. For the work of art in the age of digital reproduction licenses and links matter more than bits.
* Days Like These – The Cat Empire
