Evil livejournal 'meme' or not, it's a chance to promote good music
Last week I made a pretty big mistake. While going through my www-style backlog I saw a joke (funny only to css fanatics - actually, let me dig it up:Make a require-properties: require; property (the irony :))- written by, credit where credit is due, Laurens Holst) and was groaning so hard that I just had to share it... So I asked
please tell me I'm the only one who finds this funnyin a small cozy IRC channel that I spend many of my waking hours idling in. Sam being absent at the time, I knew that no one but me would think so. What I hadn't counted on was Jochem copy/pasting on the message to another IRC channel he was in. One frequented by Faruk (once upon a time known as KuraFire to at least some of you) as well. Who nowadays is a webstandards geek. And sent word back to me to come visit a tiny channel on the mozilla IRC server that I also frequent. Already inhabiting 12 channels there, I relayed back that he should come hang out in one of the larger channels there instead. And he did. And hasn't left since, nor stopped throwing standards-related questions at me. (To be fair, I throw my fair share of the same back.)
And now he's throwing silly livejournal based memes at me as well.
If you read more than one or two weblogs by people generally active in the standards-based webdesign world, you'll have seen this already. More than once. The Musical Baton. If you want to know how it got started, you could trace the links back - but luckily Andrew Hayward did that already.
Basically it's what in the livejournal world of weblogging is considered a "meme," even if it's nothing more than a glorified chainletter spreading through weblogs: Copy/paste this list of questions and fill in your own answers, and then pass it on. This one happens to be about music, and actually interesting. That is, I've enjoyed reading about the musical tastes of pretty much everyone who's gotten the baton before. (As opposed to say, reading about which character from some obscure Anime that I've never heard of they resemble most.) And I hope you'll enjoy reading my answers too.
Total volume of music files on my computer:
16.1GB (3212 songs that would take 9 days, 2 hours, 1 minute and 27 seconds to play). More doesn't fit, as my current computer is a laptop that has its 40GB harddisk continuously being fought over by several GB of pictures (in dire need of editing, and instead I'm writing yet more non-travel related stuff here!), development environments for several languages, and a linux install. My Rio Karma currently holds roughly 18GB of music, and I have another few GB only stored on DVD.
An estimated 80% of this all is ripped from CDs I own, the rest evenly divided between free downloads from independent artists and music passed on to me by direct friends. (Which happily enough is legal in the Netherlands.)
Last CD I bought:
Deity by local Melbournite artist Wendy Rule, at a concert I attended late April this year.
Playing right now:
Moonbeam Friends - Happy Rhodes. Given that 253 of the 3212 songs on my playlist (nearly 8%) are by her, you could nearly have predicted this one. She's the goddess of ectophiles the world over. (
What's an ectophile?you ask? If you like more than two of the artists listed here, you're one.)
Five songs that mean a lot to me:
The Tower - Vienna Teng -- Downloaded for the first time from the predecessor of the very page the link goes to, this song made me an instant fan. (Becoming an instant fan of music is very rare for me. Usually I need to listen at least a dozen times before music connects. But Vienna did it, and I haven't grown bored of her voice yet.)
Dante's Prayer - Loreena McKennitt -- A song I can retreat into when I need some serious alone time. If you ever catch me with this on continuous repeat, leave me alone for the rest of the day and I'll be good as new.
Magnolia Street - Catie Curtis -- What can I say? Memories.
There Is a Light That Never Goes Out - Neil Finn & Friends -- Idem. (I am so tempted to go and list The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins as well now! (No, that's okay - you're not supposed to get that.)) :)
Madeline (live) - Terami Hirsch -- The song that made me a fan of this most awesome
introvert with a microphone. Major fidgetting going on for her new album which is due out Real Soon Now.
Five people to whom Im passing the baton:
Phil Ringnalda - He cost me my Saturday last week by somehow noticing my previous weblog post and then asking for a feed. (Oh hey, anyone here with a feedreader who hadn't noticed this yet - I have a basic Atom feed now! (If you don't know what that is, I'll explain in some future post.)) Phil, consider this revenge... :)
Guy - He's been very good with writing frequently lately - let's keep him at it. :)
Ian Hickson - I somehow doubt he will have time for this, given the absolutely staggering amount of things he does. (Hixie is webstandards god - without him, the foundation on which we develop websites would be a lot less stable - and it's pretty much sacrilege to distract him like this...) But these very things make me really interested in his musical tastes. What music does he listen to while singlehandedly tackling a SVG last call and ripping it apart? Or if music would distract him too much during this work, what does he listen to while relaxing afterward?
Gigi - Same as with Guy, really. Plus, hey, passing on a musical baton makes up for not letting anything hear from myself by email for far too long, right?
Jesse Ruderman - Jesse is an interesting guy who I know far too little about. That needs to change.
Now a problem that everyone before me in the chain has apparently somehow solved already. How the hell do I notify these people that I'm genuinely interested in their musical tastes and that although I too cringed at the thought of doing this, I do hope they too will give in. Manual trackbacks and pingbacks? (But what to?) Leave them a comment? Poke them on IRC? Email them? Hope they check their referers and notice all of you following those links?