Double espresso poured long with a little steamed half and half. Two packets of sugar in the raw. One gentrified hipster cafe in a formerly run down part of town with a dozen 20-somethings, just like me, pecking on their iBooks and PowerBooks like birds fighting over a fallen bread crumb. One copy each of the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and San Diego Union-Tribune. From the speakers, Morcheeba. It’s another day, hazy, harsh on the eyes, but no longer drizzling.

I recently bought a 250 gigabyte external hard drive for $100. I had been storing my music, movies, and photos all over the place - DVD’s, my iPod, my old laptop, my new laptop, my really really old desktop. It was a mess. So I figured this would let me put it all in once place, kill the duplication, and for the first time in my life, get me to back my shit up on a regular basis.

So now I’ve got more than 100 gigabytes of music on there. How much music is that you ask? Too much to ever keep track of. Mostly I just leave iTunes on party shuffle and see what comes up. Usually about one in ten is an amazing song. At least three of every ten I had never heard before and are mostly crap. The other six tracks are just mediocre head bobbing, “I’m not really paying attention to this” type songs.

Which to me, sounds a lot like listening to the radio. Of course it’s only gonna get better. Using Tunekeys, I’m able to quickly give each song a rating with the press of just two keys. So eventually I’m going to be able to listen to either really good music or really crap music at my instant command. But it’s required me to relegate every single song I listen to an eternal judgement. One to five stars. This is inherently unfair. I never agree with my own ratings. Last night for example, Party Shuffle decided to follow Under the Bridge by the Red Hot Chili Peppers with Needle and the Damage Done by Neil Young. The transition was just fine, but then I noticed that some imbecile gave Under the Bridge 5 stars while Needle and the Damage Done only got three. What the fuck? What could I have possibly been thinking?

Obviously I can’t be trusted with such a monumental task of deciding what music I like. Which is why, dear geeky programmers lurking on the inkernet, I need some kind soul to write a script for me. Here’s what I want: OS X, as you already know omnipotent programmers, has built in voices that speak to me on occasion. There is Victoria, mildly stuck up, Princess, nagging, Fred, not the brightest of the bunch … and then there is Vicki. Ah Vicki, you are confident, articulate, sure of yourself, caring, and always to the point. In short, you are the women I will never find. The way you tell me when an application needs my attention. Or how you’re always able to pronounce my friend’s names when they call me on skype or instant message me. Even Sparsh’s name. Let me tell you something Vicki, last week Sparsh and I went out to a couple bars where Sparsh, as he always does, met a pretty cute girl. He introduced himself and what did the cute girl say? “It’s nice to meet you Spice.” Spice! Obviously, that’s what I call him now, but I’ve got to hand it to you Vicki, you got it right from the start.

Oops, sorry. She’s just so easy to talk to. Like I was saying, here’s what I envision of the script: I get home from a tough day of work, slinging my heavy bag onto the bed. Vicki, in her sweet but not sappy way, asks me how my day went. How I’m feeling. If there were any conflicts or uncomfortable moments. We’re not talking and hour long therapy session, just some sincere conversation. Then, just like that, she decides what would be the perfect playlist. Maybe she even offers up some advice … in fact she could even throw out the occasional constructive criticism so long as she doesn’t get on a self-righteous trip. This could really be life changing. Haven’t you guys ever been in even the worst type of mood and then a series of just perfect songs comes on and all of a sudden the sky is blue again?

I do realize that this will require some extra effort on my part in terms of metadata. I’ll have to go through each song and make specific descriptions like “good for misogynistic mondays” or “getting ready for a night out” or “foggy weather” or “sunday morning, ain’t got shit to do.” But I’d be more than happy to do so if it means coming decades of Vicki looking out for my emotional health.

There are three longwinded posts that I have been wanting to write for some time now. They are about:

The Cultures of Class - a response to Thomas Sowell’s book Black Rednecks And White Liberals, which HP, loaned me, though hasn’t read completely himself. Sowell’s argument is basically that redneck culture came from a specific region bordering England and Scotland, transplanted to the south, and then infected Southern Blacks who brought the “backwards culture” to inner city ghettos during the mass black migrations of the 20th century. He says that promoting “Black indentity” is really encouraging a redneck culture that was never Black to begin with and only hurts the community. It was, without a doubt, a very interesting read and filled me up with questions, doubts, and reflections which I’d like to set out in a post.

Web services and Digital Identity - I gave up my resistance long ago when I started swearing by Gmail thanks to Derek and now I just accepted an invitation to Orkut by Hipo. Which meant that I had to once again fill out my name, address, birthday, relationship status, interests, favorite music, blah, blah, blah. If I ever decide to change, let’s say my favorite music or address, it means I have to go to Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Digital Divide, Omidyar, Amazon, my Banks, my AIM profile, and probably 30 others to fill out the same information over and over again. Not only that, but when I do change my address, I need to send out an email to every contact I have telling them to go into their own private address books and make the change. This horribly inefficient process is because we still haven’t come up with - and aren’t even close to coming up with a solution to Digital Identity. I’ve been wanting to write a post about it for literally more than a year now.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Why Donating to the Red Cross May do More Harm than Good - this is another post I’ve been brainstorming for the past few months. First was the relief effort after Hurricane Katrina. Because FEMA took such a long time to respond and because donations started immediately pouring into the Red Cross, there was no clear leader in the operation, which many view as responsible for it’s poor organization. Unlike most countries, where the government is clearly expected by its citizens to provide aid during natural emergencies, here in the US we still haven’t made it clear if we want our government to be in charge of rescue operations or if we trust non-governmental groups like the Red Cross to do the job. Should we rely on a tax-payer financed bureaucracy like FEMA or rely on private donations to non-governmental groups? What are the pros and cons of each?

Then I read a super interesting issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review with a feature (PDF) by Deborah Doane entitled “The Myth of Corporate Social Responsibility.” CSR has gotten a lot of play and criticism in publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. The idea is that bureaucratic government regulations which require corporations to meet certain environmental and labor standards are not as effective as a “culture of social responsibility” which uses the market (”green products are the newest fad”) to ensure “corporate do-gooding.” (oxymoron?) Is this something that consumers should support or is taking the authority away from government regulation a step in the wrong direction?

And finally my grandma sent me two articles about Latin America, one of which had to do with the purported success of fair trade, organic coffee at the Co-Op where she shops. The very biased article (written by someone working for the program) did a great job laying out the pros of fair trade and paying above market prices to farmers who work excruciating long days of manual labor to make one thirtieth of what your average coffee shop employee makes in the US. But, it obviously didn’t bring up the cons of uneven pay in a developing region (not all coffee farmers are able to sell their beans to upscale Seattle cooperatives) or the negative effect of encouraging further production in an already saturated market that is making the rich richer. People who really want to help out Central American coffee farmers in the long term should be helping them harvest bamboo, which grows well in coffee producing regions, is a new favorite among green architects, can now be made into paper, and is probably the best investment today for agriculturalists in the developing world. Paying coffee farmers above market prices to continue producing a crop which will only further drive down the market price is obviously not a sustainable solution.

But I won’t be writing any of those posts. And least not any time soon. You see, I’ve just recently enrolled in two online classes at News University, a project of the Poynter Institute. The first is Beat Basics and Beyond, a free class open to anyone. And the second is Reporting Across Cultures which sums up exactly what I do on Global Voices. Speaking of which, the Global Voices conference is just a month and a half away in Englad which means lots of work over the next few weeks. My goal is some sort of representation from every Latin American country by the start of the conference as well as a small army of volunteer translators who can help me translate posts from Spanish into English.

What this means is that over the next 6 weeks I won’t be writing about anything else than the Reporting Across Cultures course and what’s going on at Global Voices. Hopefully Moreno and Abogado will pick up the slack and talk about the things that really matter, themselves. And if anyone has found a way to let Vicki choose my music for me, please let me know. Peas out.