fine whine

I was sifting through my CDs tonight and a little tidbit about me popped back into my mind. Before I was attempting to write things down I did a lot of things that remain mostly forgotten until a moment like this, where something just pops back into my head.

Anyway, my freshman year in college was a big one for me, at least when you look at my CD collection. That year I'm pretty sure I continued the yearly doubling of my CD collection.

I'm serious. I went from having about fifteen at the end of my freshman year of high school, to about thirty the next year, to just over sixty, to just over 120 at the end of high school. Those last two numbers come to mind readily as that year I somehow won two matching 60 CD towers and filled them quickly. Midway through the freshman college year I bought another one the same height but unfortunately not the same design. After that I gave up on individual slots and picked up some plastic units that held 200 each (50 to a shelf, four shelves) that could be taken apart and rebuilt easily for moving.

In two years I'd outgrown them as well. I've long since stopped the annual doubling, and I haven't done an official count since 2001 (when last it was around 615 or so) but now I don't have them on anything at all but instead they are in three large boxes (and spread around the house also, one here and two there) in my living room (I'm working on shelves for them, really. Just not right now).

Anyway, tonight we watched United states of Leland, and a lot of the music in it sounded pretty familiar. Sticking with it to the end credits, I discovered that one of the tracks was "Undone" by Imperial teen. I'm pretty sure I own one of their albums, but I didn't know if the one I had was the one from which this song was taken, so I tried to find it. I couldn't in my couple minutes of quick scanning, but two hundred CD spines is a lot to look at, upside down no less, and it wasn't that important for me to find the disc. I can always look it up later.

While putting them back, though, I glanced past my small collection of Lightning seeds discs and recalled briefly my detective work on the song "You showed me".

You see, before I was a connoisseur of cover and remake songs I hadn't known about the Turtles' original of the song "You showed me", but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was listening to internet radio, via some service that has long since folded no doubt, when a couple seconds of a song triggered a memory of another one. The song I heard was "Turtle soup" by DJ Food. Every so often there was this orchestral bit that sounded just like a riff in a song used on the MTV show Daria. In the episode about (ironically named) Alternapalooza, the song "You showed me" was played long enough for me to evidently remember hearing it at least half a year later.

For that matter, I'm pretty amazed to be remembering all of this now, having all but forgotten it until tonight.

Even then I had the internet at my beck and call, and it wasn't long before I tracked down the Lightning seeds track. Moments later I had downloaded it (these were the days before Napster, so I likely found it with oth.net on an FTP site) and within a week or two I'd ordered or bought a used copy of the CD. It was another month or so before I went back online to figure out the meaning of the title of "Turtle soup", and then it was a matter of time before I cashed in on some coupon or other to get The Turtles present the battle of the bands from Music Boulevard or CDNow.

And that's my story. I hope you weren't expecting this to have a point. I just like to reminisce, even if it is over something so trivial as why I own a CD.

And in unrelated news, now I've done it. I beat X-com: UFO defense for something like the fifth time, and now that I've got that particular monkey off my back I can get back to the stuff that matters. Like the novel that I'm, oh, 48,000 words or so behind on writing.

Lacking anything better to mention, I'd like to take a moment to complain about my computer at work. More specifically, I'd like to complain about using it, as one of my issues is with Microsoft Outlook and another with Last.FM and yet one more with my Wordpress pages and web email.

First, my AutoCorrect doesn't work. For a long time I'd disabled it completely without incident, but lately as I send out more emails I find myself signing them with THanks, MIke and that's unacceptable in a professional environment. Unacceptable to me, that is, as I am constantly barraged with emails rife with typos and the wrong names and all sorts of errors (heck, I've sent one or two myself lately). It just bothers me to make such a fat fingered mistake, and so consistently to boot. Enter AutoCorrect--it was designed for situations just like this, right? Too bad it just calmly ignores my double capitals, even when I have specifically entered every possible permutation of "THanks" down to "TH" and still it mocks me with its inaction. There's no possible way this can be user error other than spending a little too much time on the SHIFT key.

As for Last.FM I've grown somewhat tired of hearing the same music over and over. I'm unwilling to make the effort to listen to new music, though, despite that being the main object of the service; that is, to introduce new music to people based on what they already like (and dislike). I think I'm just to finicky, or just too lazy to go back and hit "BAN" every fifth track or so when they try to slip in some bad reggae or worse.

Also irking me in a vaguely computer-related fashion is the recent onslaught of spammers trying to slip links about casinos, porn, grey market drugs and roulette table plans (I kid you not) onto my pages. They're wasting my server cycles and my own cycles as each one generates an email and a link I must click to destroy them. I'm looking into adding some WordPress plugins to take care of them, but I only care so much.

What's the fastest way to get to the hospital? Stand in the middle of the road.

Today was something of a rough day for me. That so-called joke was courtesy of me, circa some fifteen years ago.

As I go slowly through the boxes of my childhood stacked in my "computer room" I've come across a number of odd and interesting things. I found high-bounce balls that have cracked. I found incomplete model cars. I found a great many bookmarks, none of which I have ever used more than once. I found plastic knickknacks and puzzles that I'd forgotten and discarded. I found a tape recorder missing several crucial pieces. I also found a couple cassette tapes that were immediately obvious as to their contents.

You see, my parents had given all of us kids tape recorders (and some inherited creativity and imagination) and the desire to use them at an early age. There are probably ten or fifteen cassette tapes floating around bearing our youthful voices in pseudo-comedic sketches and fake commercials.

Well, this particular tape was mostly me solo, and as I listened to it in the car I was not impressed. The twenty odd minutes I heard along the way to the used games and movies place were downright horrible, replete with horrible timing, transparent voice imitations and 130-in-1 Electronics Kit sound effects. Did I mention that most of the "funny" stuff was cribbed from elsewhere, including, if I recall, a number of bad joke books.

Hence the joke at the beginning of this; it's the only thing in the entire forty-odd minutes that made me laugh.

Forty-odd minutes is a long time to be just listening to a cassette tape, and I was in fact also driving at the time. You see, earlier today Jessica and I were out on a mission to get some shelving (and groceries) and maybe even a broom handle (mission accomplished!) whereupon we also went a bit out of the way to drop in on a used cd/dvd/video game place. I had a coupon for getting a free whatever if I bought another whatever of equal or greater value, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Passing up a nice set of EPs by Belle & Sebastian (because I could find nothing else near it in price to get for free) I finally settled on The Simpsons: Road Rage and Gauntlet: Dark Legends (yes, yes, I know, Scott) for the PS2 for well under the price most places would charge, so I bought them.

It wasn't until I got home that I opened the cases and realized the discs were still at the store. Color me embarrassed.

I'd also not brought along the two Blockbuster rainchecks we had for The day after tomorrow and Man on fire (neither of which I'd be likely to watch if not for the fact that they're free).

So I ate some food and headed back over there to pick up my games. I'd grabbed the cassettes as an afterthought, realizing it'd be easier to listen to them than surf the radio through the north side of Columbus.

So I already feel like an idiot for not checking the games. I always check stuff like that. Always, always. I even look in the ones I check out at the library. Evidently I'd neglected to do so this time. Anyway I was feeling like an idiot and listening to the high-pitched voice of young Mike, whom I could just picture huddled over my little boombox with the box of miscellaneous pieces (which would provide the sound of breaking glass or an automobile crash) and Electronics Kit at hand. Too bad I hadn't prepared any funny material, because this stuff was painfully unfunny. There have been atrocious Saturday Night Live sketches that caused people to gouge out their eyes to stuff in their ears that were better than this.

Let's just say that my self esteem was not at an all time high.

The store clerks remembered me and found the discs, sending me on my way with a bonus five dollar coupon for my troubles.

I was so touched by their kindness, or annoyed by my lack of comedy, that I forgot again to stop by Blockbuster. Monday's not even until tomorrow.

I have a minidisc recorder, but it's not as convenient or practical as I once thought it would be. That said, it's several notches up on many of my other gadgets, as I do occasionally take it out and use it. I'm not very diligent with making new discs, though, so I rarely have anything new to which to listen. I've got this one mix disc that stands up pretty well, though, particularly for lawn mowing.

Among the songs (alas, no tracklist exists and I'm not willing to listen to it right now to figure it out) are such gems as:

• "Pistolero" by Juno reactor
• "Insane in the membrane" by Cypress hill
• "Fly me to the moon" by Frank Sinatra
• "I'm not your stepping stone" by the Monkees
• "The shape of things to come" by Max Frost and the Troopers
• "FNT" by Semisonic
• "Damn it feels good to be a gangsta" by the Geto boys

That last one pops up in a lot of places, not the least the Office space soundtrack, and also the movie itself. I noticed, though, that in the film the lyrics are altered from "pussy" to something like "Gucci" in the line "pussy-eating pranksters". I can but wonder what prompted this change.

All of my CDs are packed up in boxes still. I plan to build some shelves soon so that I can have all five or seven hundred of them out (I no longer know how many I have) and accessible, but I'm in no real rush. At work I've been using Last.fm, playing bits and pieces of my music collection as well as the occasional recommendation, and I'm pretty happy with it. I created a bogus profile specifically for my playlist. I haven't listened to music logged in under it yet, so it's untainted by other people's tracks. It's all mine.

You see, Last.fm does this interesting thing whereby they stream you the music liked by the people who like what you like. If that sounds too confusing, you can just donate a small sum of money to them and be able to listen to specific people's music, including your own. So I made /codger and threw in the four-hundred songs that sounded appropriate, mostly whole albums at a time. I've had some minor difficulties adding to it while listening under my real account, but that's probably the price I pay for trying to subvert the system. If you wish to do the same, or just to listen to my everyday music mix, give it a spin.

Anyway, two of the artists in my playlist are Cake and Prodigy (or I suppose I should say "The Prodigy"). Years ago, I'd have picked Cake to be my favorite band and Prodigy to be a rather promising artist. In the intervening time Cake's released some two or three albums, and burned out two or three band members, whereas the Prodigy folks did, well, not much at all. I bought Liam's Dirtchamber sessions album, but that was at a time I was particularly susceptible to mix albums.

Oddly enough, by some odd coincidence both groups are soon to be releasing another album. I don't know if I should be excited or not. If I pre-order the new Cake disc I apparently can get a super secret bonus extreme limited edition three track disc, but to do so I need to throw some money at Sony. Thirteen bucks plus shipping, in fact, and it's been a long time since I paid thirteen bucks for a CD.

For that matter, it's been probably since I bought Dirtchamber, and then I think I'd ordered it to get the super secret special digipack edition or something like that. Whatever reason it was, I should've waited since I've seen it many times since used for less than half of what I'd paid, but such is life when one wants to live on the cutting edge of washed-up electronica.

Then again, I do have a birthday approaching. Maybe I could leverage that.

I don't like to fail.

I mean, nobody does, but still it bugs me, a lot.

Today's failure was in trying to install a screen door. The one we have now sticks and doesn't close very smoothly. Moreover the plastic clips that hold the glass or screen in break easily.

So when our neighbor offered us a brand new screen door, we mulled it over and took it.

Oh, the humanity! Of course I measured it first, and it seemed like it would fit.

Well, the door's about 3/8" smaller than the existing one. That in itself probably isn't a problem, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The side "Z-bars" are too tall for my opening, so I needed a hacksaw to trim them down. Scott said he had one, and he happened to be dropping by today to pick up a pair of two-person passes to a screening of Princess diaries II: Electric boogaloo that Jessica and I managed to score at a recent neighborhood picnic.

I expect a full report, Scott. And sorry, Carina for borrowing Andrew Bird for so long.

Andrew Bird, for the uninitiated, is a really cool D-I-Y musician who does it all himself. The album was well-put-together but I guess I missed out on the whole bit of his live show.

Enter the newly-expanded Internet Archive, with its audio stuff. Check out IA's collection of his shows. It's worth checking out.

Myself, I'm digging the M. Doughty stuff.

But back to the door stuff. I cut the frame to fit, with a Meijer hacksaw, and still just couldn't get things working. I spent another half hour reinstalling the old door, and then vegged out for the rest of the evening playing Burnout on the PS2. The game's pretty fun, especially for five bucks.

It sure beats reinstalling a stupid door.