Music died long ago

I discovered a while back that there's no point whatsoever in listening to the radio if you feel like some music. Every station plays the same set of songs on heavy rotation, and they're all entries for the country's "Top 40", which, supposedly, is determined by how many people decide to make Sony or Apple that little bit richer. This is the part I don't understand more than anything.

Now some may argue that my musical taste may be only just above that of a heavily sedated kipper, when you take in to consideration that I'm quite willing to sit and listen to my phone play Earthworm Jim's rendition of Night on Bald Mountain, but I look at this so called "Top 40" and I honestly can't see a single song, or "artist", that I would want to listen to other than playing through a loudspeaker pointed directly at Osama and his cronies. That'd get them out of the cave, for sure.

It was only this morning, reflecting on work that the penny finally dropped. I contributed a radio to the office with a view of increasing morale (a practice considered taboo in those days), and when it was just me and Dan in the office listening to LBC (one of the London talk stations) was quite the entertaining pastime. However this would soon change whenever any engineer entered the office, and the request to change to Radio 1 came faster than a cabby’s claxon when the light turns green. I would then mentally prepare myself for 6 hours of non-stop hits (and painful ones at that) and DJs with the personality of a meatball commenting on how much Cheryl Tweedy had to drink in the past two weeks.

But one positive side-effect to this torture was the fact that visits from the bigwigs decreased rapidly, and anything to avoid managerial intervention the in the day to day running of the office is probably to be considered a step forward (albeit it across a bed of nails). Not that the input from those individuals is entirely useless, for at times it can prove quite invaluable insight in to all manner of topics (like the reason hot tea will actually cool you down, or the release of an important bug-fix addressing the same problem as last month), but for the most part anyone with any office background will agree that when all is said and done we work better when left alone.

Which leads me neatly back to why the "Top 40" is so full of trash. Not every office has a radio, but all of them have an internet connection, and there's always someone on the team who spends a large portion of their day downloading the latest chart hits and proceeds to share his findings, quite beyond the call of duty, with his or her co-workers (whether they damned well like it or not). So the more a song will cause general management to cringe and run in fear, the better it will do in the charts.

Maybe a song that has a techno vibe to it and lyrics that include such lines as "no-one fills out there TPS cover-notes anymore", "it's my code and I'll put flashy lights in if I want to" or "don't let the server go down on me" would stay at the top longer than Gnarls Barkley. Still, it makes me feel better about my music, because it hasn't made it into the charts yet, and by the looks of things that must be a good sign.

Have to start somewhere

It's funny to think that I've been online for about 11 years now. I've gone from cruising around at a leisurely pace of 28.8kbps to suddenly rocketing toward infinity and beyond at bugged knows how many meg per second. And yet so easily we take it for granted.

Back around the time Megaman X4 was being released, someone sent me a 10Mg preview video, and I remember having to get up early in the morning to beat the slew of people trying to download their e-mail as they arrived at work, making sure it was still cheap-rate local phone calls, and watching the progress bar in Pegasus Mail crawl onward while the kettle prepared to inflict a blast of hot water on the third tea-bag that morning.

Of course, when finally the video did arrive, I had to spend the whole morning searching through magazine CDs to install the right version of Quicktime (heaven forbid I would have to download it). And all of this to catch a short limpse of a game that I wouldn't purchase anyway because I possessed neither a playstation or whatever other console it was that was soon to receive the realse.

And look at us now. We load up YouTube in a matter of seconds, type in whatever we are looking for, and then veg out as we stream without pause or hesitation a complete episode of The Office, or the latest music video by Children of Bodom. Imagine doing that on a POS 14.4k modem!

Then, of course, there's online gaming. Back in the day a group of use used to get together at a mate's house and buy pirated CDs off him, because he was the only person in a 10 mile radius who had a dual ISDN line and had bought the latest 2x CD burner for a whole month's wages. And the fun we used to ave which such games as Warcraft I, playing over a cross-over serial cable connecting two computers in the same room and having only a slight amount of lag. I didn't even imagine back then that I'd be able to fire-up my Nintendo DS, and battle it out against 3 random geezers from Japan in a Starfox Arwing from anywhere in the house.

How times have changed... Yet for whatever reason, I can still get enjoyment out of sitting in front of the TV and booting up Megaman 2 on the Nintendo. Now that's gameplay for you, and no mistake. Shame I haven't found a way to emulate my old Einstein computer, or I'd have another go at Southern Belle. Maybe this time I'd remember avoid choking the train passengers to death.

Now can anyone explain to me why I have this sudden urge to go out and hit some whippersnapper over the head with my cane?