Ben Folds Five - Brick

This song embodies the "college photography class" era, specifically memories of working in the digital photography computer lab. Year: 1998. Cutting-edge consumer-grade digital photography consisted of things like the Apple QuickTake 200. This song brings back memories of putzing around, digitizing my 35mm black-and-white negatives in that lab while getting paid to babysit the computers and their humanoid users. Playing around with PhotoShop 3. No, not Adobe CS3. Photoshop 3.

I really liked this time in my life. There were a lot of fresh things unfolding. My relationship with my wife, my career, my fascination with tinkering really blossomed in full force.

Exposé - As Long As I Can Dream

You'll laugh at this one. I had plastic surgery on my ears. Yes, my ears. They stuck out, and I'm talking about Dumbo here. In fact, Dumbo was one of my many nicknames, and not by my own choice.

Anyways, my uncle John was (and still is, to a certain extent) a plastic surgeon out in Boise, ID. He performed the surgery to mold my ears into some semblance of normal. I spent the better part of a week at his ranch house outside of Boise while my parents went snow skiing on Bogus Basin. I spent a LOT of time listening to tunes. At this point in my life I didn't have the means to buy any music, so I shamelessly recorded stuff off the air (or from friends' tapes or CDs) onto audio cassettes. The RIAA is going to have my ass for admitting this, I'm sure.

This was one of the songs that I had on tape out there in Boise. I heard this song a lot of times, as I only brought two tapes with me. Two 90-minute cassetes. Three hours of music, if that. That's all I had. I won't even mention how many AA batteries my Walkman ate during the trip.

Nine Inch Nails - Dead Souls

A Midi of this song looped in the background when you'd visit Silicon Toad's site, The Infinity Void. He had an impressive archive of underground "hacking" information, back when there really was an underground scene. This later went on to become integrated into hackers.com, which has probably by now been passed around Al Gore's Interwebs like a nickel whore. I probably won't bother heading back there to see who owns it now.

14 years later, Trent's masterful re-work of a Joy Division classic still sounds awesome. The so-called "hacking scene", however, is made of fail.

Cascade - Escape

I'm heads down, writing some goofy applications for a new operating system, V2_OS. Sometime around the turn of the century, I threw a lot of energy into this project to help kickstart it. It's pretty much dead now, and whatever trace remains of my assistance with the project is long gone. I pretty much gave up after it was evident that much more talented coders were interested in helping. I maintained the source code repository for a while until they got their own CVS server up and running. Then I pretty much forgot about V2_OS, Joost, and all my buddies on the project.

V2_OS is part of why I left FishNet. It's a very long and complicated story. If you run into me some time, ask me and I'll share it.

A compilation with this track on it was in heavy rotation on my MP3 player while all of this was unfolding.