Amitabh Jotwani

All right so this morning I set my IM status to “Just found Nirvana today” and it caused a stir. I am not kidding, it really did. There’s something about people. They are really nice, mostly at least. They seem to notice all the weird things you do, but they don’t say a thing. They give you a benefit of doubt. They keep doing that over and over until that one day where you over stretch your luck and do something really uncanny. And then they question. What? Why? Where? How?

That is what I think happened to me today. I keep doing weird things but today I got all the permutations right. All the stars in the sky were just perfectly aligned and I hit the nail on it’s head with that IM status.

I swear I received a dozen curious pings from long lost friends and from the universe beyond, asking me who Nirvana is? Am I getting married to Nirvana? Is she the one? or is it the dog I never had? No…No..and No..

Let me clear a few things first -

Nirvana is not a female; no not a male either. Nirvana’s not a dog or a pet of any other kind. And I am not getting married - to Nirvana.

So with those speculations laid to rest, let’s begin my short story to clear the fuss. To make it more riveting, we’ll call it the Nirvana story. But let me warn you, you need to be either a passionate geek or have enough patience to understand the emotions and intricacies of this story.

Oh good, you are still reading. I didn’t scare you away. We can begin then -

I had been waging a constant war past few months trying to free up space on my 80GB MacBook. It was a constant battle. I was getting tired of having to clean up my hard drive every now and then so I could accommodate some new and really really cool apps (not to mention the iPhone SDK that weighs close to 1gb every beta release).

Now not that I did not know what the problem was. I knew it was the huge amount of music, photos and videos I have, I just didn’t know how to resolve it. I wanted to dump the gigantic 10gb music folder from the MacBook but I wanted the music to be available when I wanted, where I wanted. I guess I wanted to have the cake and eat it too! It was bugging me. It was driving me crazy. And just when I was about to pull my hair out, I found it. I found the perfect solution. Long story short, I now for the first time in the last 6 months have 18.56gb 17.45gb (that’s right it goes fast) of free space available.

I moved all my music from the MacBook to my home pc thus freeing 10gb. I then installed this really really cool app¹ which lets me share my music library over the internet through iTunes. So I now have access to my iTunes library sitting on my home pc from anywhere in the world.² It works like a champ. I am loving it. That’s Freedom, Peace, that’s Nirvana in a nutshell!

So ladies n gentlemen, that’s the long and short of the IM message you all saw this morning. It was just me really really happy. It’s too naive, too daft, too simple, too weird, too..I know, I know….it’s all of them and that’s what makes it wonderfully awesome!

1. SimplifyMedia.com [↩]
2. You need iTunes and SimplifyMedia plugin installed on both the computers [↩]