Do Not Insert Disc Upside Down

Sometimes I just have to marvel at technology. In the "olden days" when I first started learning about these computer things, my first class was on a data general terminal of doom. Next class was on Apple IIs with a shared Corvus disc. Then I moved up to an IBM 370 running VPS (home made operating system at BU) where I had to wait in line for a terminal that could do full screen editing. It spoke only EBCDIC so I would have to run my programs through another program to make curly braces to run C. My first 128K Mac in 1984 was..... uh..... really cool at the time.

So today I was thinking just how great some of the music was on Charmed. They picked out some seriously good stuff and it wasn't always easy to find out the names of songs and artists. A quick google search netted http://charmed.kraftysworld.co.uk/music/ giving quite a bit of information, making it possible to search iTunes (yeah, I like iTunes although it would be much better without the DRM) buy the songs I want, and burn them to CD.

The kids think, "well of COURSE it's that easy." I think of telnet over 300 baud modems. And I was lucky to have it. Uphill both ways. In snow 4 feet deep. In April.

Anyway, I think it's really nifty and I burned a new CD for my long car trips (long car trip to me is anything over 15 minutes). Hooray for technology!

Procrastination update :-)

So for my latest attempt to keep myself from doing work, I picked up my old guitar. I got my first guitar at age 9 and began taking lessons with a somewhat crazy guy who could play that thing like it was a part of him. Before long I was playing classical on a folk guitar (hated the necks of the classicals since they were too damn wide, and those strings... nylon... *eugh*). My poor ancient Yamaha had been through so many trials and tribulations that I'm now afraid to restring it because the neck may give way. I bought an acoustic electric Guild maybe 15 years ago and really haven't played it much at all, having forgotten just about everything I knew except how to read notes, chord charts, etc.

So I picked up my old friend, dusted him off (all my guitars are male), tuned him up and thought... great. Now what do I play? I don't remember anything from the old days. I never learned to play by ear, only with music, and I have no idea where I put all those old songbooks of 1970s and 80s ickyness. So I went off to the web to look for songs. That's when I found "tabs."

What the heck are TABS? They sort of draw out this guitar neck and have little numbers near where your fingers are supposed to be. That seems like all the rage for playing guitar these days. What about actual NOTES? What about those old chord diagrams above the words and stuff? I am SO confused! TABS? Is that kinda like "new math" or something?

Ok, so I finally dug around and found some actual chord progressions. So I tried to play them... When one hasn't played for like oh, far too long it actually HURTS those little fingers. Ouchie ouchie. Can't play very long, but what was totally surprising to me is that I can actually still play some of the old classical stuff I used to, with something resembling coordination of fingers on the left hand playing the appropriate notes while fingers of the right hand pluck the correct strings. Wow. A little more practice and maybe I can play 1/2 a song :-)