Top10 Nerdy Controversy

I'm going to start rolling out the Top 10 list, also known as the CD that I would carry with me all the time in case I got stranded on a tropical island with a CD player and an unlimited amount of batteries. The list itself is complete. However, when I went to burn the disc itself, I ran into a serious problem - the tracks I picked would not fit onto one CD in standard CD format.

Now, this is a problem for two reasons: 1) I wanted to stay true to the spirit of the list. Specifically, I thought it was important to keep the set on one CD. When we are working on these kind of lists, the limit we set is important. A top 10 list with 12 songs on it rings hollow to me. The interesting part of this exercise is making the hard choices, and if we allow extra songs on the list, then the list itself is tainted. So having 10 songs that all fit on one CD was important to me. The other problem: 2) Since I am iPod-less right now, if I want to enjoy the list, I would need to burn the disc on a CD. If all the songs don't fit, I have to leave tracks off the final production CD, which would be lame for obvious reasons.

So I am cheating, but I think it is ok. I am still keeping 10 songs (although I am including a couple of extra tracks due to the solution I came up with). But I decided to burn the CD in mp3 format. This method means there is no problem fitting all the tracks on one disc (a regular CD could fit 70 or more mp3 tracks). And since most CD players being sold these days play mp3 CDs as well as regular CDs, the format should not be a problem for most equipment I come across on a tropical beach. The main issue now of course is that why keep it to 10 songs? Since the mp3 format would allow as many as 70 songs to fit on one disc, why not just do a top 70 disc? Well, I am not doing that. I'm sticking to 10, and that's that. It's a nerdy controversy after all, so there is no need to stop the exercise altogether.

The picture with this post is from the trip we took to the North Shore with Emily and Jonathan in the fall of 2006. On our way back, we took a short hike at Gooseberry Falls. Very good times!