Our first DJ stint in years was a success. The block party turned out be more of a hang-out-with-your-neighbors-and-enjoy-the-day event than a get-up-and-dance party, but that was fine. We had lots of music for such an occasion.

The debut of the laptop as the central processor for the music had some bumpy moments. The infernal mouse pad was set to count multiple taps as clicks, and by taps we mean mere touches. Unwanted clicks interrupted a couple of songs -- good thing no one was up and dancing at the time. I was ready to plug in a standard mouse, but found both the USB ports filled with the stand-alone hard drives -- d'oh! I had a splitter, but there was no time to fuss with it as the party was already in progress.

Getting Windows Media Player to find and index everything on the drives (which are normally hooked to a desktop) was a far more drawn out and mysterious process than it should have been. (A good example of crummy Microsoft software.) And with the bright sun over your shoulder, reading a small laptop screen can be a bit of a challenge. On the whole, some additional planning and practice would have been beneficial.

All that said, the beautiful tunes flowed for hours, and folks seemed to enjoy them. The thanks we received felt genuine. We got some free beer, great burgers, and all kinds of other fine food out of the deal. Even better, we met cool people we didn't know before, and caught up with some old friends. And the family enjoyed an afternoon and evening out in the sun. We're going to miss summer.

One wonderful feature of letting the computer do the work is the ability to string together a playlist and walk away from the "booth" for a while. If you're lucky and all the files are on reasonably even volume levels, you can wander around and get in on the rest of the party. Alas, some of our rips of early CDs are mighty wimpy on the volume, and that meant multiple trips back to the source to level things out manually. An amplifier with a remote would have been a good idea. It goes on a list with several ideas for next time, which we hope will come before we forget them all.