There you are—stuck at a dinner party, or at an open house for your neighbor kid’s Bar Mitzvah, or dragging yourself to a professional “networking” event, or you’re sitting with your skis in Aspen’s Silver Queen Gondola for the 14 minute ride to the top of the mountain with a couple of German foreign exchange students. If an uneasy silence or retreating from live human interaction with your nose in your smartphone is not the considerate thing to do in these situations, you are faced with the challenge of talking with real human beings.  Conversation was, and still is, a universally acceptable way for people to pass time.  Get acquainted.…

A rocky road through a fantastic landscape. I own a music collection that has migrated over the years from vinyl LPs to CDs to mp3s, and has more breadth than depth, e.g. 50K songs from 4K artists, with no end in sight. I realized, sadly, that my trusty iTunes library of owned songs and my iPOD were facing the end of the line, and that I needed a source of new music. The major streaming services are nearly identical in capabilities but I settled on Spotify, because of broader device compatibility and since more friends and family were already using it and sharing playlists. Spotify offers upwards of 50 million…