Idle Time

I made this for Mom and I to listen to last year on the way up to and back from my aunt and uncle’s house for Christmas. Now, I share it with you.

The order of the songs is deliberate. I ask that you listen to them in this order.

Some of these are iTunes links, some are Amazon links, and some are free songs and/or albums.

Title	Artist
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas	Harry Connick, Jr.
It Came Upon A Midnight Clear	Frank Sinatra
Wizards In Winter (Instrumental)	Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Deck The Halls	Mannheim Steamroller
The Little Drummer Boy	Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)	Slow Club
Oh Come Emmanuel (free)	Aliqua
Oh Holy Night	Richie McDonald
Greensleeves	Gary Hoey
The Night Before Christmas *	The Smithereens
Must Be Santa	Bob Dylan
Feliz Navidad	José Feliciano
Jingle Bells (free, on the 2002 album)	Adam Kempa
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen	Mannheim Steamroller
Silent Night	House Of Heroes
Sleigh Ride (free, on the 2003 album)	Adam Kempa
Christmas Canon	Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Carol of the Bells	The Bird And The Bee
O Come All Ye Faithful	Amy Grant
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) (free)	Blue Skies for Black Hearts
The First Noel	David Archuleta
God Rest	Gary Hoey
Deck the Halls	Mario Lanza;Henri René and His Orchestra
Twelve Days of Christmas	Mexicani Marimba Band
Greensleeves	Vince Guaraldi
O Holy Night (free, on the 2009 album)	Blasé Splee
The Nutcracker, Op. 71, Act 2: Character Dances (Divertissement) – Dance of the Reed Pipes	Kirov Orchestra & Valery Gergiev
We Three Kings (free)	Blondie
Little Drummer Boy (free, on the 2005 album)	Canada
Joy To The World	Symphony Brass of Chicago
Silent Night	Johnny Cash
Ave Maria (yes, ripped from YouTube—I’d buy it if I could)	Barbara Bonney
This is the point at which the program properly ends, but it has four more tracks— which we might call “bonus tracks”—to pad out the time to two hours.
The Little Baby Jesus (free, on the 2009 album)	American Mars
El Bells (free, on the 2003 album)	El Boxeo
Silent Night (free)	Vandaveer
Countdown To Christmas (free)	Glam Chops

The total time is 2 hours, 2 minutes, and 38 seconds.

The iPhone Application Graveyard is now closed.

I’ve been meaning to do this for months; I’m just now getting around to doing it.

I have a few reasons:

The Graveyard has served its purpose.

The iPhone App Store today is more open and more free than it originally was. The rules are now available to App Store developers, and several apps that Apple previously either rejected or “pocket rejected”, most prominently Google Voice, are now available in the Store.

I don’t know how much of this is attributable to the Graveyard and how much is just Apple having figured these things out, but to whatever extent the Graveyard is responsible, it has done all it can.

The Graveyard can do no more.

Apple’s made very clear that they intend to “curate” the App Store. It will never be a completely free, do-as-thou-wilt market like the Mac market still is, and I have no hope that Apple will ever make the iPhone App Store optional like the Mac App Store will be.

I see no way that the App Stores can ever be more free without losing that curation factor. And it is a factor—I can’t ignore that Apple checking every application probably, hopefully filters out some effluent from the influent stream.

I don’t update it.

I’ve got a dozen different things to do that are more important than updating the Graveyard.

I want to work at Apple.

Cold, hard reality is that I want to work for Apple, and they will not hire a person that has a page on their website decrying their policies. (Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t expect them to.) This isn’t the only reason why I’m killing the Graveyard—everything I wrote above is true—but it is one of them.

So, this position is now open.

If you want to keep the Graveyard alive, you can do that by taking it over.

The Graveyard is implemented as a couple of plain-text hand-edited databases and a Python script that converts them to the web page (as a static HTML file) and Atom feed (as a static XML file). This is how the Graveyard stayed up in the face of being Fireballed, Macworlded, etc.

You can keep it that way, or you might turn it into a wiki. I leave the choice to you.

If you want to take over the Graveyard, email me. I’m sure you know my email address by now. I’ll send whoever I think can best run it a zip archive of the data files and Python script.

You may also be interested in the Application Submission Feedback site. I don’t know who runs it, but it’s a great guide to what you can’t do in the App Store.