70's

JUST ANOTHER MELLOW MONDAY

Happy Monday, everyone out there in the internets. This weekend, I was away from home for the first time in years. Usually, my business trips end on Fridays…this time, it’s a full two weeks. I’m not ashamed to say that it’s damn lonely. See, this past week was my daughters 13th birthday. There’s nothing harder for me than to be away from my family, but when I have to miss something as important as my baby becoming a teenager…well, lets just say it’s completely fucked I was away.

So after just hanging out in Boulder, sleeping and relaxing, and trying to get caught up on my work. And preparing for the week ahead. I still have a tremendous amount of work to get done. I think we’re gonna thread the needle and pull off a miracle for this customer, but it’s going to come at a price, that’s for sure. I’m happy with the progress we made last week. By far this is going to be one of the biggest success of my career.

So, enjoy. I’m having a mellow day, just trying to maintain until I can get back home.

I DON’T KNOW JACK ABOUT MUSIC…OR DO I?

One of the nice things about traveling for business is that I sometimes find some great music stations on the radio. It’s rare, but when I find one, I get pretty jazzed. Well, my friends (as John McCain is so fond of saying), this week, I have found one, though it has a little twist, as you’ll see. First of all there is a Denver Station that calls itself Jack FM, and I gotta admit, they play one hell of a variety of songs. Not every song is great, or even a song I like. But unlike most stations, I can listen to 3 or 4 songs I really enjoy for everyone I don’t. Normal stations are lucky to have the reverse ratio.

Now for the controversy. I guess that Jack FM is a new type of format, or so says Wikipedia (who we all know is NEVER wrong!). The playlist creation is centralized, and market research driven. Their catalog of songs are, I guess, twice as large as other stations, and they are no where near as specific to one genre of music. Honestly, I find none of those things disturbing, and in fact, it’s a nice change. The stations (and there are several across the US, Canada, and now even in the UK), have no local programming. No DJ. No local voice to add that local touch. I guess that upsets people. To be honest, though, there are very few DJ’s I honestly care to listen to. The last one passed away a few years back (I hope your jamming your ass off up there, John Peel!). It’s all about the music…the other stuff is just fluff.

That brings me to today’s list. All the songs on the list are from a 2 hour period. Of course, I choose the ones I liked the most, and left off the clunkers like Neil Diamond and Kool and the Gang (apologies to those that like those two artists…I have nothing again em. Hell, I even dig the hell out of Neil once in a while.). But the stuff listed here is pretty typical of the range of styles, both in genre and in decades, that they play around the clock. Like I said, it works for me, and makes that drive to and from work a little more bearable. Enjoy!

SONGS YOU MIGHT NOT EXPECT ME TO LIKE!

Alright, as the title suggests, this post is made of songs that, having read my blog and seen my tastes in music, you might be surprised to find I like. Crazy as it may seem, everything here, at one time or another, was a song I really liked a lot. Some because they remind me of special places, people and things in my life. Some, just because I like the songs. So, you can see what I listen to when I don’t listen to my normal playlists.

Now, as far as what I have been up to this week. As a profession, I’m an infrastructure architect, which means I design and build the environments that companies run their IT systems on. The infrastructure I build is a lot more complex that normal environments…in fact, this one I am here to build now is extremly complex. I have an older mainframe, a 3745 front end process, which I have to integrate with an HP Tandem, and several start of the art Power 6 AIX servers. Add on the storage systems, the tape systems for back up and recovery. Plus, I am building a pretty world class VMWare environment, complete with a separate VMotion infrastructure. Simply put, I have about 10 million dollars in cutting edge servers I am building and integrating. Well, i don’t do the work…I am the lead architect for the project.

So, this week, I’m here to make sure that everything gets put in the proper racks, all my cables get run like I designed it, as well as all mir fiber optics. Long story short, I am slowly going insane, managing things to a detail that kinda freaks me out a little bit. Complicating things even more is that I originally had 5 weeks to build and test everything…but the customer changed their minds, and decided that two works would be more than enough time, and the powers to be agreed. So here I sit, busting my ass for 2 weeks, working 16 - 18 hour days. And believe it or not, we are going to be very close to getting it all done! Go figure. So enjoy the tunes…and if I miss another post, please know that it’s because I am slowly going insane! Enjoy!

RICHARD WRIGHT: SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND!

I’m pretty sure that everyone knows by now that Richard Wright of Pink Floyd passed away this past week. Pink Floyd is not a band I normally list up here, mainly because while I liked their stuff, I was never really a fanatical Pink Floyd fan. But even I can appreciate the monumental influence Floyd had on the music industry. So today’s list is dedicated to Richard Wright.

I can say that there was a couple points in my life that I did listen to a lot of Floyd. Like any other teenager in 1979, my and my friends instantly fell in love with The Wall. We listened to that album incessantly, mostly while intoxicated on certain smokable items, if you catch my drift. We would sit in my basement bedroom (affectionately named The Swamp after Hawkeye’s tent in MASH…I was a HUGE fan of the original book.), smoke endlessly, and listen to the record on a cheap record player I had found and fixed. It was heaven. It even inspired us to grab a tape recorder, and record a few songs of our own. Considering I couldn’t play the drums, and my best friend couldn’t play the guitar, and neither of us could sing, we managed to come up with something that, if out stoned little minds, sounded amazing. Go figure.

The other was in the Navy. My best friend was a HUGE Floyd fan, and loved Dark Side Of The Moon. I spent a lot of time at his house (he was one of the few married guys I knew, and his kids were great kids. It felt like a little “normalcy” when we hung out there), playing cards, drinking, and just listening to music with him and his wife. Over the course of the weekend, I would invariably hear that record play. Hearing it now brings back some great memories.

So, here’s to you Richard Wright. That great big rock band in the sky just got a hell of a lot more talented.

SOME SATURDAY JAMS FOR YOU ALL!

Welcome to the weekend. I’m getting ready to head back to Boulder, CO, tomorrow, so this is a brief little post. Still some great tunes, just a small little update.

I went out and played some more gold yesterday. Since I first went a few weeks ago, I’ve been two other times, nine holes each, and been to the driving range a few other times. So yesterday I played 18, and shaved 25 strokes off my game. It was a beautiful day, and even through I started roughly, I finished pretty strong. I joined up with two other guys. One was a former Marine, and the other was an older guy who retired from the Navy. Lets just say that both of them we a hell of a lot better than I was. But they were pretty patient, and gave me some great tips, and that may have been the reason I finished so strongly.

Enjoy the Saturday, and enjoy the music!

A DAY OF PEEL SESSIONS

First, for everyone who commented about Mr. Sicks, a huge thanks. It really did make my wife feel a lot better reading them all, and for that, I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. There are a lot of really great people in the world, and I’m lucky enough to have quite a few of them reading this blog.

Someone left a comment the other day about this blog having the influence of the great John Peel running through it. I take that as a high compliment, indeed. John Peel had the finest taste in music, and sadly, most people over here have no clue who he was, or what his influence on modern music is. Never let it be said that I am guilty of either of those. I’ve done numerous posts featuring the Peel sessions, but it’s been awhile, so I thought I would gather up some great tunes from Peel sessions, and pass them on to you all.

The thing I love best about the Peel session is that the songs all have a rough edge to it, yet not as rough as a live recording. I’m not a fan of live recordings…usually, I just don’t find the music as good. But the Peel session gives some of that live quality, while still keeping a bit of the studio polish. It’s just good stuff. Enjoy!

A MUSICAL TRIBUTE TO MR. SOCKS

I mentioned a few days ago that a stray cat had come to live on our back deck. We informally named him Mr. Socks. That him there in the picture. The rains of the past few days, along with the coming of fall, and eventually winter, spurred us on to take him to the vet this morning, to get him checked up, immunized and try to get him ready for winter.

My wife took him into the vets office this morning. An hour later, I got a call from her, and on the other end, I heard only sobbing. The vet had done a feline HIV test on the little guy, and the test came back positive. Further more, the vet said he was already pretty sick, and could not survive a winter. Unfortunately, it was time to make a very rough decision. Mr. Socks has been living on the back deck for two months now, and we honestly have grown extremly fond of the little guy. But this morning, we made the decision to put him at rest. It was hard, and it sucks, and it’s left a little bit of a hole in our home, but we just could not stand to watch the poor guy suffer, and gradually pass away. So it’s with more than a little sadness that today, we said goodbye to our little friend, Mr. Socks.

SONGS ABOUT CARS FOR A THOUSAND, PLEASE…

You can tell I’m going a little stir crazy. After three days of non-stop rain, this is the best title I can come up with. For some reason, I was sitting here playing some xBox, watching football, and generally trying to not be bored out of my skull, when somehow, the thought came into my head to try to come up with 10 songs that mention cars in their title. You know what? It wasn’t even close to being as hard as I thought it would be! Plus, I think I actually put a great list together to boot!

There’s something for everyone here…some old stuff from the 70’s (Adam and the Ants), to newer stuff (Arcade Fire), and everything in between. There goodies from the 80 and 90’s. If you can’t find a song you like in this list…then you must not like songs about cars. What the hell ever that means! Like I said, it’s been raining here for 3 straight days, and will be for another 3 it looks like.

Enjoy the car tunes!

A CELEBRATION OF NEW YORK PUNK

There is nothing like good old fashioned New York punk to get the juices flowing on a lazy, rainy, sleepy Sunday morning. It’s funny…in 1977, most of the music here was considered pretty radical, even to the point of some people calling it noise. Yet 31 years later, it still sounds as fresh and relevant…more so than most of the crap that was “mainstream” back in the mid 70’s. Compared to what punk eventually splintered off into, especially some of the more hard core streams, it’s was also pretty damn tame.

As I’m writing this, I’m waiting to watch the USC - Ohio State football game. For those not aware, I am true blue Ohio State Buckeye fan, and have been my whole life. Having grown up in northeast Ohio, Buckeye games, whether on the radio or on TV have been a fall tradition since I can remember. In fact, I still have the Akron Beacon Journal from 1978 when Woody Hayes was fired. So, I have this sense of dread right now, because I hate to see my Buckeyes loose. We’ll see what happens.

Enjoy the music!

SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE: Ok…the Buckeyes were not just beaten, they were destroyed. I honestly don’t find fault with loosing to a team that is better, provided you did everything you could, you left every part of yourself on the field. Sometimes, even when you play your absolute best, you will loose, because the other team is better. There is no dishonor in that. But there’s not a chance in hell the Buckeyes can say they left their best on the field last night. Not even close. They took a serious beat down from a better team, and looked like scared, panicked little girls the whole game. I’m sorry, but I can’t respect half efforts. Half efforts are the product of hubris, of thinking your better than someone else, when in fact your not. Half efforts are for losers. Congratulations USC. It was a well deserved victory, as much as it pains me to say that.

HAVE A GREAT DAVID BOWIE DAY!

First, anyone that has family or friends in the Houston/Galveston Texas areas, I hope you all have been able to get a hold of them and everyone is safe. After having lived through numerous tropical storms and hurricanes when I lived in Florida, I can tell you first hand they are big, bad and can be extremly destructive. I have a feeling that there is going be a lot of clean up after Ike…let’s hope that the government continues to handle this stuff better than New Orleans.

Here, it’s a rainy, mellow Saturday. Somewhere along the line, we adapted a little outdoor cat. He’s very tame and socialized, so I thing it’s a cat that was just left behind when someone moved. How someone could do that is beyond me, but there he is. He’s been living on out back deck for about a month now. So last night, I build him a nice little house to live in, including a shingled roof with some old roofing shingles I had sitting around. I used scrape wood from other projects, so it really cost me zero dollars to build, and the little guy now has a warm, dry place to live.

Anyway, while I was building it, I listened to David Bowies “Singles” album from about 8 years ago. If you want a really good collection of his greatest stuff, it’s a very nice primer. The problem with that is that Bowie is one of those album oriented artists, and to truly appreciate his greatest singles, you really need to listen to the entire albums. Since I can’t do that, at least enjoy some of my favorites of his. Enjoy!

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