Sunday 11 September 2005

In praise of iTunes

I suppose there are various programs that could do it, but I chose to use iTunes, and I find it more wonderful than I ever expected to have all my favourite music on tap and playable in random order at the press of a button.

Currently I have more than 1500 tracks in my iTunes library, and they're quite carefully selected: in most cases I don't include whole albums but weed out the tracks I'm not so keen on. If a track comes up that I'm just not in the mood for at the time, I can easily skip to another one, but I don't need to do it very often.

I've gone off the whole idea of playing music an album at a time in the old-fashioned way. I prefer my own private radio station, which gives me constant variety but never plays a duff track. It sounds great. I haven't enjoyed music so much for a long time.

Thursday 8 September 2005

Floods and tornadoes

Yesterday afternoon we had a bout of heavy rain. It didn't cause us any trouble. But in nearby Sitges there was serious flooding; in some streets, parked cars were swept away and piled on top of each other. Underground garages and car parks were flooded, plus the estate agency in which Ana works, although it's not underground.

This sort of thing has happened to Sitges more than once before in the years I've been here. It seems exceptionally vulnerable to flooding and I wonder why nothing seems to have been done to correct that vulnerability.

The area was also visited by a number of tornadoes, which did some damage to buildings and vehicles, though we didn't see anything of them. Aircraft were damaged at Barcelona Airport.