I am in the process of creating the most difficult playlist of any I have ever attempted. It is difficult because it is so huge.

My new Nissan Juke has a USB port to which you can attach an iPod, iPad, or iPhone, or in my case, a USB jump drive. I had a couple of 8GB drives sitting around, but I thought hey, why not get a great big one and have pretty much my entire library in the car with me? Looking at my iTunes library, however, I see that I have just short of 8000 songs, many of which I own because I never bothered to throw them away, or I wanted to keep them but never really listen to them.

Thus, the rub. I am now looking through 7888 songs and deciding what I want in the car, and how I want it organized. Artists that I have solidly liked for a long time, everything from Third Eye Blind to Led Zeppelin, are easy, since I have long established an “Artists I Like” folder. It’s the “Odds and Ends” playlist that’s taking days.

The technology that makes this possible went from amazing to holy crap amazing recently with the introduction of very, very tiny jump drives of huge capacity. Mine is the 32GB SanDisk Cruiser Fit, the body of which is almost entirely the USB connector port itself. 32GB is approximately eight times the capacity of my first computer at my office, a PowerMac G3 with a 4GB hard drive and 256MB of memory. I also read somewhere that a modern smart phone has more computing power than the entire Apollo space program.