Saturday, December 27, 2008

Holidays Rule

The Holidays were different for me this year because I live in Kansas City. When I lived in California I would be part of the rush of merry revelers traveling home for the holidays. This year I hosted Christmas Dinner at my apartment. And instead of waking up at my mom's house Christmas morning, I layered my pajamas and jaunted across the neighborhood with presents in tow.

But I do like the formal consistency of the holidays. Everyone gets all dressed up to find their people and have a good time.
I made my annual mix CD to exchange with the Fam. It's a way of keeping up. This year's mix features many familiar voices and celebrities including Conner Martin, Dylan McKeever, John Acquadro, Max Bennett-Parker, Spencer Owen, Thor Andersen, Tyler Martin, Walt Bodine and Yours Truly.

I've witnessed two holiday miracles in the last couple days. First, it is suddenly warm enough to go without a coat. And second, this bike is still in front of the apartment. I don't know who's it is. It's been parked there with confidence and no lock for at least 2.5 weeks. It makes me want to leave all the doors unlocked, the windows open and the computers outside.

And if I haven't given you a wintery hug this week because you are halfway across the world remember that distance isn't relative to our bodies. We are jumping the network.

Jamie

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5 comments:

  1. my family had the same gold crowns. the secrets out. we ALWAYS have crowns!

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  2. Jamie, I've been listening to your holiday mix here as a sort of soundtrack to my housesitting in SF. How did you make it and put it up on the blog?

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  3. Gosh! Thanks for listening!

    I used the program SoundStudio for Mac. You can download the fully functional free trial here...

    http://www.freeverse.com/apps/app/?id=5012

    First I made a new empty sound file in SoundStudio. This is where we will build our mix.

    Then for each song I...
    1) Open the MP3 in SoundStudio
    2) go to Edit: Select All
    3) go to Edit: Copy
    4) Switch to our mix window
    5) make sure the playback pointer is where I want the new song to drop
    6) go to Edit: Paste

    Once all the songs are in the mix I...
    1) go to File: Save As
    2) Set the file format to "MP3 Audio" (i encoded mine at 128kbps)
    3) Name the mix file
    4) and Save!

    I put my mp3 on the web server that's under the bike-desk in our apartment. If you want, i could set you up to add files to your own directory. http://designerinteractions.org/rachel/

    If you prefer something less raw, I bet there are lots of free podcast hosting services. You could also probably find a cool mp3 player to embed into your blog posts.

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  4. Hi Jamie, Thank you for the mix! Is the first song Max, Spencer, and Tyler? What is this from? I like it!

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  5. Yep, the first song is Tyler, Max and Spencer in perfect symmetry. It's a cover of "Wild Horses" by Tyler's heartthrob band Prefab Sprout.

    KC to Santa Cruz, I'm listening from a distance. But it was meaningful for me to hear such an even collaboration. It feels like a real trio with three front men.

    As this is a holiday mix, maybe the first track represents the gift of the three biblical magi. We are all the child.

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