saturdays are musical number days

Recycling Tip from gmail: You can make a lovely hat out of previously-used aluminum foil.

Every time I try to imagine life without gmail, I kind of twitch; no where else on the net freebases me spam recipes, literally. I don't even like spam (the food or the email), but it's just comforting to know that someone, somewhere, really did think Spam Jello Salad was a good idea. It wasn't, but still. Human imagination. Terrifying.

The first week of testing didn't formally start working until much later in the week due to testing things that aren't working, environmental failures, etc; you may not know this about me, but when something starts cascading in its failures--literally, me and K started competitive filing of defects--I hit a state of mind not unlike giddy, where I wandered through the cubicles whistling Taps (I have been told my whistling could wake the dead with its piercing quality) and singing Billy Joel, because We Didn't Start the Fire is so appropriate at that moment (we didn't REM until early afternoon when we started getting server errors). A developer and I did a high-five in my boss's cubicle when we got the very mother of defects; we lost all our web services.

(For the record: I hate web services. Everyone uses them, and they are just evil. One code problem there takes everything down like a house of very unstable cards. I mean, they are cards made of jello, that's where this is going. It works badly even in the ideal.)

Music

Currently checking my top five and then my last twenty-five (nothing like iTunes for useless statistics to stare at blankly), I notice two key points; one, even if I was amnesiac abruptly, I would know I'm writing, because nothing says your creativity is awake like a mix of Pucifer, Switchfoot, Gregorian Chant, Dido, and the complete Linkin Park (don't ask). To be fair, thirty percent of my musical choices come from what vids I've been watching--that is how I ended up with a Dido album once upon a time, not to mention Britney Spears--but even that cannot excuse how Michael Bolton made my top fifty in a surprisingly shoot to the top of the charts. Fucking Jack Sparrow is screwing my stats.

Most recently, for various reasons, music purchases of the past month or two:

Scars and Stories, The Fray - to say I am beyond irritated is to understate the case. I like one song on here, and can listen to three without being overly annoyed, but Jesus, I was at eighty percent on their earlier albums and I bought their live tracks just to complement it. In general, I do not have those kinds of odds with any band, so I find it more than a little unsettling that this album isn't clicking. But I am grimly determined to learn to like it. The Fighter so far is my only repeater, and not that dramatically.

Trekka, Pucifer, V is for Vagina - they continue to be the band that I literally hate all of their music, then one day they come up and I listen and no matter how much I hate the song, I suddenly love it and need it like air. Yes, I do mean this is vidding's fault. Goddamn it. I did a twenty-five repeat and feel like I may or may not have had some kind of quasi-religious experience, but oh, so worth it. You know, when I stopped mourning the fact I will never have a universe beneath my heel while I gleefully conquer plants and blow up anything that doesn't bow to my will. It's that kind of a song.

The Unforgiven, Gregorian chant, Masters of the Chant V - not easy to find, but svmadelyn sent it to me so I wouldn't break into hysterics when I realized both iTunes and Amazon were failing me. Yes, vidder fandom, damn you all. Seven minutes and it's on one hundred repeats. The math is scary. The thing is, I like Metallica's original, but there's something just beyond unsettling about the translation into chant. This holds true with a lot of their famous covers, to be honest; I still feel deeply uncomfortable with the Bad Romance one. It should be funny; mostly, it feels vaguely dangerous, and makes me really wonder about monastic orders. Just saying.

Recommended: these two cut with Linkin Park. Very something. I'm not sure what.

Empty, Neverbetter, Still Feels Like You're Here - the best I can figure from my Genius six degrees, this is because of Theory of a Deadman and Absence of Concern (and 10 Years and 32 Leaves). Apparently, they're in the same family of semi-generic post-grunge return to no way is this classic Rock; it's more Rock that got its heart broken by emo and is using its guitar to express its pain in ways not necessarily compatible with the chords they're expressing, but. Unlike One Less Reason (Someday, let me show your lifeless body locked in my closet when you try to leave me because I love you too much), I'm not vaguely worried about anyone cutting their wrists with their guitar strings, so I can nod along and enjoy the not-emo. Also, I like this one.

Dare You to Move, Switchfoot, The Best Yet - this just makes me happy, mostly. Yes, vid fandom, this one I am happy to listen to like a lot, and not worried when I want to start breaking guitars with a whiskey glass because I don't have any eyeliner left to cry into smudges.

Jack Sparrow, The Lonely Island featuring Michael Bolton, Turtleneck and Chain - it is possible that this may be the greatest song in the history of vocal music. It has Jack Sparrow and Scarface. I mean, where do you go after that?

Any musical interludes to report? I need more now.

Comments

[weird_one]

Have you listened to any of the Scars & Stories itunes bonus tracks? I think like Maps and Ready Or Not more than most of the rest of the album. (I feel sort of obligated to like The Fray since they're a local band but this was not their best album.)

I've been quite pleased with the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album and Fun.'s new album Some Nights has been growing on me.

[concinnity]

Ngl, I've been stuck on a heavy rotation of Cold War Kids & fun. . Did you know you can get a 1,000-ish song download of sxsw songs via torrentfreak? All perfectly legally obtained. Just in case, you know, you needed another 5GB of music in your library. :)

[ravurian]

Last night I went to see Joan Baez play live at the Royal Festival Hall on the Southbank in London, and it was seriously amazing - not quite such an experience as seeing Leonard Cohen, but very very close. Today I have been listening to Diamonds & Rust a lot. An awful lot. Sometimes on loop. Beautiful.

The Chant sounds brilliant!

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Th chant is brilliant.

Ooh i need to listen to Joan Baez. I recognize the name.

[lucifelfalling.livejournal.com]

What do you classify as web services? (I work with B2B tech start ups so "shit doesn't work like it's supposed to/advertised to" always interests me because it means that someone, somewhere, could be making money by building something that *does* work.)

[seperis.livejournal.com]

In our case, web services are the--center point of everything. For the purpsoes of this discussion, we have three very, very large programs that have to communicate with each other as well as communicate with the world at large. All of it goes through web services, which is messenger between them, trigger for batch jobs and overnights, basically, the middle of the world.

Okay, diagram didn't work. But, also, it acts as communicator and correspondence trigger et al to the subprograms within each program. When it fails, literally nothign can pass between them, nor can third party programs communicate with us. And to say it fails a lot is to say water is known to be really wet; understatement.

Note: all programs are run in all HHSC offices off a server cluster or four; one of them directly interacts with the public as well as a few terrifying databases. To give you a scale idea.

[threnodyjones.livejournal.com]

*cries horribly sad cries of woe*

You don't like Puscifer??

*cradles every one of their albums lovingly and reassures them they still have a home with me*

[seperis.livejournal.com]

It's more I always assume I don't and then end up buying tracks from them. It's weird.

[aquila1nz.livejournal.com]

We found that Jack Sparrow video right around the time a friend was posting episodes of her webseries that happened to include both Michael Bolton and Jack Sparrow references. That video is is the greatest thing ever.