So, first, a tragic tale: some time ago–let’s see, I was still in building six, on the south side of the building, so this would have been in late 2005 or early 2006–I put on The Amps Pacer in the afternoon, went home, and came back the next day to find it… still playing. I realized that winamp was set to repeat, and I immediately stopped it and went to last.fm to see if all of the tracks were being scrobbled, and sure enough, there they were. I was at my desk, so I just picked some new music and went on with my day, not really wanting to deal with the problem. I figured I would use the profile editor to clean it up later. (don’t anticipate)

When the week rolled by, the Amps had skyrocketed to number 5 in my playlist, and now every song on pacer was in my top 50. I had let it play 36 times overnight. I went into my account to try to find the profile editor… and I couldn’t. The profile editor was just gone. I was upset, but it didn’t immediately occur to me to check the forums. If I had, I would have seen that there was already a great amount of talk about what to do in this situation (my kid sister listened to Britney Spears on my computer, HELP!). Instead, I sat on my hands and did nothing for some additional weeks. When I finally did get into the forum, I discovered that it is possible to remove tracks that have been recently scrobbled, say within the last two weeks, but by then the opportunity was gone.

Now, over a year later, the last Amps song has dropped out of my top 50, and the band itself is down below 10. There are still some oddities: the Amps rate higher than The Breeders? Higher even than The Pixies? I have one Amps record, they should be languishing right around The Kelley Deal 6000, not up near The Weakerthans, or The Court and Spark.

But it is awfully nice not to see that big block of Pacer songs at the bottom of my top 50 tracks anymore. Awfully nice.