Amber - Anyway (Steve Porter Remix)

Sometime in the middle of 2005, I was working until 11:00PM at the local college. My wife started work a few miles away at 10:00 PM, and worked until 6:00 AM. As you can imagine, this played hell with our sleep schedule.

There was this awesome little place just up the road from the college, though, called Santa Fe Junction. It was basically a trailer home on top of a tall foundation, which had been converted to a smallish coffee shop and diner. It was open 24/7. The food was okay and affordable. The brewed coffee was great, and most of the baristas knew how to craft decent espresso drinks. Toss in comfortable chairs, couches, fun music on the speakers, and free WiFi, and you've got the perfect place to hang out on weeknights when you're working an oddball schedule like I was.

I'd go in a few nights per week armed with a $10 bill and my laptop. That would buy me supper, keep me hacking and caffeinated until the sun came up, and cover a reasonable tip.

It closed down in a matter of months, but it was worth it while it lasted. It opened a year or so later and became simply "Bar" with more traditional bar hours, no caffeine, and crappy bar food. Bar closed down a few months ago and it recently re-opened as "Woody's." I don't know that I'll even bother venturing by, even though I live a mile away from the place these days. I pass it on my bicycle a few times per week.

Orbital - Out There (Intro)

I was a naughty, naughty boy in the late 90's. I'd just purchased this album, and was in the middle of tinkering with an old AIX UNIX server at school that we used for student e-mail and homework storage. In order to get an e-mail account, you had to verify your identity, then you could choose a user name. Well, I accidentally crash the database while tinkering. When it crashed, it exported all of the data it had to the hard drive. For a brief, fleeting moment I had access to every student's first name, last name, SSN and Date of birth. On top of that, I had all of the student e-mail usernames, passwords, and what SSN (and therefore, person's real name) that the account belonged to. Never fear, I did not use the information for evil deeds, but it was kind of fun to watch it unfold.

I was friends (and eventually room mates) with the sysadmin of the server. I notified him of the problem and he cleaned up the files before anyone found them. He would later fix the glitch that allowed the crash to happen, too.

Underworld - Cowgirl

This is the first track I ever listened to on my NEC Versa 4050C. It was a used laptop that was new to me. It replaced my HP 300LX as my main classroom note-taking, BBS/UNIX Dialup terminal and Internet workstation. Yes, my 300LX was my main machine for a few months. But that's not what we're talking about.

I had just picked it up from a local used computer place (Oh, Computer Garage, how I miss thee...) and was sitting in my car, waiting for my wife to come out from her office on her lunch break. Except she was my girlfriend at the time. The NEC still works well to this day, but at a mere 90 MHz, it's pretty sluggish. It has great runtime on the battery, and it often gets used for Wardriving.

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.