Rain

I was going to post this one - butI felt I had to do my duty as a Canadian and promote Triumph.

I was a big fan of Winamp back in the days, and I often miss the simplicity. I am an album kind of guy, so for me, playlists were an exception and a spur of the moment thing rather than the norm, but when I did use them, I liked the simplicity and the flexibility Winamp afforded me. Unlike iTunes, you could just drag and drop MP3s in the playlist on the fly and Winamp would stream them from your HD. You could change the order, delete, add, drag and drop entire folders - all on the fly. It was a very intuitive process. They did a beta port to Mac but it was never as good. iTunes insists on importing the media before playing it, so if you want to audition a bunch of files, it's a rather cumbersome process. I took the habit of simply clicking the file to preview it directly in the OS finder. It will play the whole file just fine but you must do it one file at a time and thre's no volume control. I liked iTunes as a mean to curate my offline music collection (as long as it doesn't wipe all the album covers in an update). Instead of having a Music directory with folders for every album, you could browse your collection by album cover in iTunes. Which was nice. That being said, it's hard to believe that it's been plagued with the same issues for over a decade - albums getting split for no apparent reason was probably my main pet peeve. You'd see the same album cover twice in your collection and realize that one of them had all the songs but the 2nd and the 7th, which were separated and listed as a different album - by the same artist, with the same title and album cover. iTunes has now been replaced by music, but this type of behavior persists. And yeah, the duplicate/incorrect album covers... And this is not the worst - at least these are Iron Maiden albums. But how does THIS happen? Now that I have finally started streaming music, I do find it handy to have my music accessible and updated automatically on every device. And I have found this player called Elmedia Player which behaves quite like Winamp used to. But I was so used to Winamp that nothing can really replace it.

Triumph - Magic Power

Skinny Puppy - Hardset Head

Triumph - Hard Road

Judas Priest - One for the Road

My younger brother received one of these for Christmas in 84 or 85 IIRC. I remember entering pages and pages of code to get it to play 3 Blind Mice. Quite underwhelming. Might be part of the reason why I wasn't interested in computers afterwards. He also got this game with it, which I played with him every now and then. On the small black and white tv. Glorious! One of my cousins had the same computer but he also had a tape recorder with it to save data.

I guess I have been lucky as switching to Apple has made my life a whole lot simpler in general. Not that I don't have any grievances, mind you, but they are fewer and pale in comparison to those I have with, say, my bank and a number of other entities. And don't get me started about Google... I am using Apple products all day long every day - my computer, phone, the Apple TV, Apple's streaming service. Unless I am reading a book or in the dojo, there is an Apple device in use in this house. And in 12 years, I had to contact them maybe 4 or 5 times. Had an issue last month with a subscription which had been accidentally been activated and charged. Chatted with them - the chat session was a bit longer than I expected but everything was fixed and I was fully reimbursed within 48 hours. I am writing this on my 2014 iMac, running the most recent Apple OS. To be honest, this computer is on its last leg, but it has served me well for such a long time that I can't complain. I am still using my 2010 MacBook Pro. Through the years, with OS upgrades and all, it became sluggish, but a clean install of its original OS and it's running as swiftly as it did the day I ytook it out of the box. Of course, the sofwtare is obsolete. But it works perfectly fine. Logic 9 runs as flawlessly as ever, and remaines the most solid DAW/OS combination I have ever worked with. But yeah I do have grievences. For exemple, in October when I upgraded OS, my iTunes library was transferred to Apple Music. In the process, album covers got all messed up. So, for example, of the +40 Iron Maiden albums in my library, at least 30 were assigned the cover of Piece of Mind. I have been through that process of downloading and replacing albums covers in iTunes too often for one lifeltime already... And I dread the upgrade. I am not happy with the iMac options they have - 2 USB ports and a default 256 GB HD? Are you kidding me? My old iMac has a 1 TB HD and 4 USB ports! Still, overall, worth it for me.

Those "enlightened" people who are judging and condemning the past according through present orthodoxies are an exemplary product of their time. They are perfectly conditionned and executing the program to the letter, not missing one iota. They're here to free us - and yet no one follows the script more slavishly. Transplant them in a different day and age and they would be marching FOR segregation. In other words, they are exactly what they condemn -people of their time. The irony... Disclaimer - I actually do support a lot of the same causes they do. One more layer of irony.

Depeche Mode - Barrel of a Gun

Beastie Boys - Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun

I guess Iived in the transition period. During the years I was in highschool, I had typewritting classes, then Word for DOS (can't remember the version, but the screen was all blue) and then basic introduction to computer science. None of these were of any interest to me, of course... In college we had access to the computer lab but I always preferred my old typewriter. I could work at home late at night, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, listen to Cannonball Adderley and pretend I was Jack Kerouac or something instead of hanging out with the nerds. Those were usually the same people who would spend their weekends RPG'ing or LARP'ing and they rarely seemed to break character even when they were not playing, always calling each other by their game names - Turgarok the Troll and such... Not many girls either, and if there was one, no matter what she looked like, she was typically addressed as Milady and treated like a beauty queen. I have probably managed to insult a few friends here and for that I am sorry. That's just the way we felt back then.

Social media - a way for people to get a false sense of importance and an exagerrated sense of the legitimacy of their grievance and the impact that they are having. So no wonder they are bragging about how empty the arena was. Chaplin’s character in The Great Dictator said of modern means of communications that “the very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all.” Well maybe their nature cries out FOR that. But it speaks OF an entirely different kind of needs, the needs of an unspeakably abject nature.

Alice Cooper - I'm Always Chasing Rainbows

Ozzy Osbourne - Over the Mountain. That solo is what made me want to play electric guitar.

I remember listening to Van Halen's 1984 on my grandfather's console - something that looked a bit like this - and I remember the sound of it vividly. Not an audiophile experience to say the least, but that's all I had access to to play records for a while. I also seem to remember it being quite loud.

Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain

Wow - had not listened to these guys in years! Tks.

Strawberry Alarm Clock - Incense and Peppermint

Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose - Treat Her Like a Lady

Elmore James and the Broom Dusters - Quarter Past Nine

The Sisters of Mercy - Nine While Nine

Nine Inch Nails - Starf*ckers, Inc. (quote from Mrs. Simon's You're So Vain during the break)

Of course. The one bit that really knocked me off my feet when I first watched the footage.

Of course, in an ideal world, one can score something like this...