Notorious B.I.G. - Mo' Money Mo' Problems

This track was a serious chart-topper back in the summer of '97. As such, it was the song that was playing when I first hopped into my 1995 Escort when I turned the stereo on during the test drive before buying it. While I'm certainly not a huge fan of Hip-Hop, Rap, R&B or urban music in general, there are a few tracks in the genre that I genuinely enjoy because they're just fun to listen to. This is one of them, and it reminds me of all the good times I had with that car. It went to a good home back in May of 2007 when I sold it to a friend of mine, about 10 years after I bought it.

Green Day - Basket Case

In high school, my friend Mike and I would sit around before school in the cafeteria. Only a masochist or a nerd would show up EARLY to school, right? I'll leave it to you to figure out which one of those categories I fell into. I often rode my bike to school - about a 7 mile ride each way. If I hammered it, I could get there pretty quick. When I'd drive, I'd get there early just for the parking.

It was our time. That's the real reason. We'd brainstorm, play games, talk, whatever. We got on this kick of selling the service of installing programs onto Texas Instruments and Casio graphing calculators. These could be anything from programs to look like you erased your calculator's memory (so that you could convince the teacher that you didn't have any cheat notes typed in) to algebra solvers, to silly games for your calculator. One of the programs we found would allow you to store and play music via your calculator. Basket Case. That's what we copied, in uber-low-one-bit quality to his calculator. It was awesome.

So yes, this reminds me of geeking out with graphing calculators before school. Pretty sad, isn't it?

Orbital - Otono

Sitting at a CTF table at DefCon 9 with my old NEC Versa 4050. Hacking away, and listening to Orbital's Middle Of Nowhere album at the same time. That laptop still works well, but the CD-ROM drive died many years ago. It obviously still worked fine back in 2000 if I was playing music through it.

Deep Blue Something - Breakfast at Tiffany's

This track hit the airwaves in 1996 or so. It reminds me of working at CompUSA as a lowly cashier (my first job), of trying to come out of my shell of shyness, and of my attempt to socialize in real life with so many other BBS addicts that were much like myself, trying to find some real life friends. A lot of other stuff happened in 1996, but that's probably tied to another song, somewhere...

Binary Finary - 1999

This was one of my favorite tracks right toward the end of the 20th century. During this time, probably my greatest hobby was that of making unsavory and rather hackish modifications to cars. Most of these were performance enhancements, like using various hoses and ducts to provide ram air intake and increased brake cooling at high speeds. Namely, this was my 1995 Escort and my friend/co-worker James' Probe and Firebird. Although, there were quite a few electronics/lighting and other aesthetic modifications done during this time period.

Some of my ideas failed miserably. Others worked out very, very well. I look back now, and ask "What was the point again?!"