Tron Legacy Soundtrack

I've been rocking out to this all day long, and it's probably never going to get old. December 17th can't get here soon enough. I'm not a cinemaphyle, but I'm almost positive I'll be one of those crazy people lining up for a midnight showing in 3D.

The Amazon exclusive MP3 version is only $3.99. Go. Now. Listen!

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.

Favorite tracks of 2009

In no particular order. Sometimes bizarre. Sometimes banal and mainstreamy. This is the stuff that was released recently that rocked my world.

Truth: More than half of the stuff in my top-10 listened-to tracks this year are pretty old. Yes, I'm a bit of a retro-grouch. You'll see it in the throwbackish nature of several "new" tracks as listed below, I'm sure.

Jerry Ropero - The Storm (Inpetto Remix)


Santogold - Lights Out


David May - Superstar
David builds on a sample of The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony. The PG-13 Video is probably NSFW. Just sayin'.


Chicane vs. Natasha Bedingfield - Bruised Water
It came out in 2008 but I didn't hear this mash-up until 2009. Saltwater is easily my favorite track by Chicane, although it's got to be a decade old by now.


Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike - Under The Water (6 A.M. Terrace Mix)
Another cover of a classic from days gone by. Prior to this, my favorite remix of Brother Brown - Under The Water was by Deep Dish (YouTube Link)


Ferry Corsten - Shelter Me
Another one that technically came out in late '08


The Airborne Toxic Event - Sometime Around Midnight


Depeche Mode - Perfect
The whole album was a solid win, full of vintage sound.


The Prodigy - Invaders Must Die
From another album where it's worth buying the whole damn thing, if you're into this kind of noise. I am.


Plumb - Hang on (Dave Aude remix)
Old song. New remix. Plumb is somewhat of an enigma for me. Originally the name of a Christian crossover rock band, frontwoman Tiffany Lee (at the time using her maiden name, Arbuckle) repurposed the name "Plumb" as her stage name when the band fell apart in 2003. She still leaves hints of crossover in her alternative- and electronic-inspired work, some of which has been wildly popular for remixing.

Alanis Morissette - Thank U

Duplex-bonded 128k ISDN.

A chintzy Compaq with an old-school Pentium OverDrive CPU -- the fastest thing my parents could afford to give me for Christmas after my laptop died. It ran RedHat Linux for a bit before one roommate hooked me on FreeBSD.

The Bachelor Pad.

EtherMonkeys adorning the place. Literally, Barrel Of Monkey pieces hanging from do-it-yourself crimped Category Five strung up and across the ceiling.

Bowls of ramen noodle soup.

The occasional Screwdriver or White Russian (even though I was only 19)

Late nights.

Early Mornings.

Really, really pampering my 1995 Ford Escort, which I'd barely had a year, if that, at this point in my life. Weekly wash and wax and detailing.

Crashing at my girlfriend (now wife)'s apartment on occasion after really, really late movies. Not that we'd do anything but talk until our mouths hung open and drooling as we succumbed to the sandman at 4 o'clock in the morning.

Gizmo, the evil death cat that would shit, piss and vomit on anything touching the floor.

Audiogalaxy Satellite, and racing MP3 downloads home from work to see which would get to my computer faster. Damn, I miss AG Satellite. What a mindfuck. Why hasn't anyone ever duplicated it on some kind of Pirate Bay level?

Hitting the data center to help -- or watch, really, as Kenny Root performs massive upgrades on "Orator of the borg"

I expect no one but myself to know what all of these are. But that's what this song brings back.

B-Movie - Nowhere Girl (Adam Freeland Mix)

The original track was nothing too exceptional, but this version, which made it into a Various Artists Compilation called Future Retro, really rocks. I love the driving drum beat.

This reminds me of my half-year spent working in the wonderful, tumultuous world of dot-com start-ups. I was responsible for building, maintaining, and enhancing our "Appliances" -- That is, little rack-mount servers that booted off a mere 32MB of storage. Appropriate, since I bought the album from iTunes while on the clock and working on the very stuff that this track reminds me of.

My desk was often cluttered with 3 or 4 of these servers, a pile of Bootable USB flash drives. The smell of burnt electronics is faintly lingering in the air because we were building these appliances on the cheap and they often failed or overheated.

Robert Miles - Children

Ah, the days of my foolish youth, and my first speeding ticket.

It's kind of an interesting story. I had just gotten back from a visit to the optometrist for an eye check-up. As usual, my vision was better than perfect (20/13 if it's any of your business), and as one who works in the IT Field among a sea of four-eyed peers (no offense meant) I've always been proud of my eagle eyes. Interesting fact, eagles probably have something more like 20/5 or 20/2 vision, but that's neither here nor there.

For some reason or another, part of the vision testing stressed me out quite a bit (dilation and the air-burst glaucoma ordeal) and I had a grand-mal seizure right there on the spot. It took me a while to recover, and the drive home had me feeling much like a zombie.

I was cranking this song at full blast in my 1981 Honda Accord, not paying much attention to my speed. I was going 70 MPH in 55 MPH zone that was under construction but without workers present. The resulting ticket was nearly $300. Ugh.

Good Times!

Real McCoy - Another Night

Oh jeez. I ran across this song in my playlist today. Memories of my BBS days flooded back. Not just hanging out on BBSes, but all the real-world social atmosphere that came with it.

Playing Tradewars. Going to Ren Fest or Tippins (rest in Peace) to meet with people. Late nights in 16-color text-only teleconference. Driving out to Independence to hang out with my favorite Sysop. Arguing on the forums with Frogman, who's now one of my best friends. Turning Poet's little Geo Metro sideways between Kestra's basketball goal and the front porch, stranding him. Giant Pixie Sticks. Bowling. You don't even understand. You'd would have needed to be there. This is part of my mid-teenage past that permanently changed the course of my life. It may also explain my terribly eclectic and slightly disturbing social flair.

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 - Walk Now...

This track reminds me of the kinds of mobile mischief I used to partake in in 1996. I saved up a good chunk of cash from working at CompUSA and bought myself a brand new laptop at the time, an NEC Versa 550D. And boy, was it stylin' back then.

Modems, sound cards, and whatnot weren't very common on laptops. I bought a PCMCIA laptop modem and an acoustic coupler to go with it. When I got home to play with my new goods, the Orbital II album was playing, hence the flood of memories. Even while a senior in high school, I was quite the road warrior. This carried on into college. With this setup, I could get on Bulletin Boards, the Internet, and into the college's campus from virtually anywhere there was a phone, even if it was a payphone... especially if it was a payphone! And the wonderful thing about payphones is that you can't really trace a payphone down to a specific person unless you have video cameras rolling or can get there before the person leaves. This shield of anonymity often provided me with the brazen resolve to do a lot of things that I probably shouldn't have been doing.

Of course, now, we have EDGE and EV-DO wireless broadband, 1xRTT tethering, satellite, and almost ubiquitous IEEE 802.11 "WiFi" at our disposal.

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.

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?!"

Ian Van Dahl - Castles In The Sky

For some reason, I can't escape thinking about spending a few hours per Saturday for over a month straight wrenching on my old '95 Ford Escort when this song plays. I'd recently put a new engine in it, and shortly thereafter, the clutch started acting up, thanks in part to some abuse by someone I'd lent my car out to. The person who was driving it knew how to drive a 5-speed manual car. That wasn't the problem.

Anyhow, 5 weekends, gallons of sweat, quarts of transmission fluid, hundreds of dollars, and many piles of under-car grime later, my car was working fine again with a brand new clutch that I can gladly say I had replaced all by myself.

I chose to listen to this song today as I recalled this past weekend, when I found myself under that same car again, going through the same motions, and replacing that clutch that I installed myself one final time for the friend who I sold the car to.