Music Appreciation

I’ve just finished loading our CD collection onto the new hard drive. The grand total: eight hundred thirty-six albums. 41 gigabytes of data. I could listen to it for a month straight, twenty-four hours a day, and still never hear the same track twice. Some of them were already loaded onto my desktop system, but I’ve still been feeding CDs into the drive practically every minute I’ve been on the computer for the past couple weeks.

It’s odd, but I find that I now appreciate a number of songs that played constantly during my youth, but that I couldn’t stand then. The songs haven’t changed, nor my reasons for disliking them in the first place, so I must have.

Of course, that mechanism works the other way too. For example, you can still occasionally catch the original Transformers cartoons — the exact same ones that seemed so fascinating to me when I was in my early teens, but that now seem so shallow and trivial.

Anyway, now comes the really hard part: going through all of them and creating playlists of the ones that I want to hear regularly. 🙂

“Strategy Letter VI”

Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame, has been in the computer industry for a long time. He’s also a smart fellow who knows how to write, and he has just posted an insightful article on where it looks to him like the computer industry is headed. If you’re in charge of your software company’s strategy, or have the ear of someone who is, or are in software development at all, take my advice: read it and think about it. You really can’t afford not to.

“5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do”

Computers can do a lot — some form of computer runs practically every piece of technology nowadays, up to and including your toaster. But they can’t quite do everything that Hollywood thinks they can.

(Call me gullible, but I was able to suspend my disbelief for most of those, enough to enjoy the movies. Except Independence Day… that scene pretty much ruined the movie for me.)