Today, my new thing was fairly tame - I created a new ringtone for my iPhone using their new ringtone creation dealy. Apple has partnered with the record companies to find a way to make you buy your music all over again… in even shorter increments. They’ll let you make certain music tracks into ringtones.

Now, I’ve always held the belief that the more “clever” you think your ringtone is, the more annoying it actually is to everybody else. I stick to the classic “ringtone-that-sounds-like-a-telephone-ringing” sound. But I figured I’d give this a try, so I looked in my library. With over 80 gigs of music, I found that only a dozen or so tracks were “eligible” to be made into ringtones. I chose a Gorillaz track and it was fairly straightforward - I could pick what slice of the song I wanted, and then pay 99 cents and it was mine.

Mission accomplished - but that doesn’t stop song ringtones from being annoying. You know how everybody scrambles to shut it off when their phone rings? I don’t want to be that guy. I went back to the Telephone-sounding ring.

The cranky old man of technology,

–opus