Smile

I am having one of those technologically challenging days, when nothing computer-related seems to want to work right. I tried to update my iTunes and my iPod by neatly classifying all my music into genre-based playlists, so I no longer had the jarring experience of switching directly from Pink Floyd to Handel while playing my iPod. But now I'm having trouble shuffling songs within the playlists -- my iPod seems to want to shuffle everything, in all the playlists, or nothing at all. Very perplexing.

I was entertained while working on my classifying, though, because iTunes already puts music in certain categories -- and they can be very bewildering. For example, Percy Faith's "Theme from 'A Summer Place' " (which I do have on my iPod, and I quite like, thank you very much) is listed as "New Age," a genre that hadn't even been invented when that record came out. KD Lang is automatically labeled "Country," no matter what she's singing. Sometimes The Beatles are "Pop," and sometimes they're "Rock." And the soundtrack from the Shirley MacLaine movie "Sweet Charity," from 1970, is classical.

Whatever.

Flickr is also misbehaving, requiring me to upload photos one at a time for some mysterious reason. And I had some trouble backing up some music and videos to CDs and DVDs. Hmmm...

So let's all just take a moment to smile, shall we? If you need a prompt, how about this photo? You gotta love someone who bothers to draw a smiley face on a squashed piece of gum on the sidewalk.