NP: Various Artists, all the MP3s in the root music folder (MP3)

The guy on the El was holding a shopping bag from some guitar shop in Greenwich Village and a pair of cowboy boots. I couldn't quite tell from looking at him if he used to be some sort of rocker and was just getting old, or if it went the other way around as a vain attempt to recapture youth. I give it about even odds.

One of the things I didn't realize I had missed over the last two years is the high-volume people watching that comes with a daily commute. So far, the timing has worked out to make the trips mostly painless, and I did manage to leave in time to not be late in all instances this week, despite three late nights for gigs. And I said "leave in time to not be late," which is different than actually getting to work on time, courtesy of some Brown Line shenanigans yesterday morning.

Picking up these headphones certainly helped. I had used them a bit on the way to the Sandwich Music King gigs, but this week put them into heavy rotation, at which point I decided that the medium-sized earbuds weren't fitting all that great. The nice thing about these is that they give you two other sizes to swap out, and the small ones sit in my ears much better. Although it's still a little tricky to find that sweet spot where the bass really kicks in.

The gigs this week certainly made things interesting, but I also think that any slowdown at work was affected by not really having anything to do yet. We've been learning about the business all week, and I don't yet have the data nor the tools with which to analyze the data. So it's a lot of reading on the industry, which is fairly interesting, in the sense of being a new and emerging market online. We'll see if dealing with all this encourages me to make changes to the site, or has the opposite effect, which is what happened when I last started making a living in the Web world.

Speaking of interesting gigs, the less said about Thursday night, the better. Something about the stage at Duffy's just lends itself to insane volumes, and I can't remember ever having my ears bludgeoned so hard by just acoustic guitars. And I know I've championed the whole "rehearsal is overrated" cause, but it has its limits.

One of several goals for today, in the two or three hour window I've actually got to do anything, is finally spring-proof the office and other parts of the apartment. Over drinks early last night, a co-worker commented that perhaps paperweights would make a good gift idea for yours truly, but he clearly hasn't seen my desk. Drinks with co-workers. That's another one I haven't done in a while.

"I guess that's why they call me, they call me the working man." -- Rush