Music from my Life

Thought I'd actually post about music, seeing as how that's sort of the theme of my blog. I love music, with two or three exceptions. I don't like rap or heavy metal. Also, not too keen on organ music. Some years ago, probably when I was about 25, so half my life ago, LOL, a friend (Dana, you know who you are!) turned me onto movie soundtracks and electronic music. At that time the local jr. college was doing a Saturday nite show, featuring many cutting edge artists, such as Steve Roach, Vangelis and more. I would tape the program and I got a lot of great music for free that way. What amazes me is how powerful these influences actually were; I just tracked down the music to Western Spaces, an album by Steve Roach, Kevin Braheny and Richard Burmer, that I had listened to way back then. I still remembered the title of the first song on the album, The Breathing Stone. I found that the album had been reissued, but minus Burmer's work. I actually spent a long time online searching for his pieces, so I would have the complete album. The awesome thing about the internet, well, one of them, anyway, is that a lot of the old music is being made available again. I use Pandora.com sometimes and am even able to listen to praise music on their site. They did a lot of research and set up what they called The Music Genome Project and then made it available to everyone. Okay, I can't find Love Song, a group from the very beginning of the Jesus Movement, but hey, it found Karen Lafferty and Keith Green! In this case I actually bought the songs from Amazon.com, an album for $8.99 and then a couple of individual songs for .99 each. Then I downloaded them as MP3's and could listen to them immediately. Very nice! But I do have to get them backed up, or I'll have to buy them again.

The reason I'm worried about getting things backed up is that I just went through a computer crash. Wow, sure found it hard to deal with being without my laptop. But a couple of good things came out of it. I found out why my external drive wasn't working, for free. I also regained a function I'd lost, which allows me to copy pictures more easily. I'm wondering if I got it back because the reload of XP gave me what I think is IE6. If that is the case, Don says IE6 is hackable and I have to upgrade to at least IE7. No one here is upgrading to IE8, it sucks! And, although I had to sacrifice a few documents, I did get back into my Asus EeePC, which I had lost the password to, changing it while traveling caused me to forget what the password was. I also had to reset the connection to our WiFi, which helped me figure out how to connect to it on the Asus as well. The other thing is that Don built an awesome shelving unit and set up the new color printer and my laser printer; the latter is wireless, so I can now print from the living room! I had been emailing documents to Randy or myself, then going online at her computer, opening the darn thing and printing it.

I have a theory. I think cats are secretly IT and computer experts. It started when Tyler was a kitten. She walked over the keyboard and managed to type "TY." Then Skittle typed "puppy." Now here is where it gets really suspicious; one day I was online and had left my computer for a few minutes. I came back as Skittle jumped down and discovered she'd been Googling!

Her results included a number of mathematical equations and a foreign embassy! More recently, she also managed to shrink the browser characters to miniscule, even a magnifying glass wouldn't have helped. It's a plot I tell ya! That's her at Randy's computer, doing who knows what!