Your rock station still sucks.
Posted on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I know what you’re thinking. Two blog posts in one day?! That’s crazy! Yes, yes it is. But it’s going to happen. Because I’m just awesome like that.
Today is Festivus, so in the spirit of airing grievances, I think I’ll finally get around to writing the post I’ve been working on in my head for a good long while. It’s a follow-up to another post I made nearly two years ago. Unfortunately, the situation hasn’t gotten any better. In fact, it seems to have gotten worse – though traffic has been significantly worse over the last month, so perhaps it just seems worse because I’m agitated already.
Anyway, as I have been driving home most days lately, it seems like the rock station here in Dallas (102.1, “The Edge”) has been playing more and more old music. Then, when I got home tonight, I looked up their last 10 played songs, and it was indeed worse than I thought. Of their last 10 songs, 4 of them were made more than 10 years ago. One of these was even a Nirvana song from 1991.
I’m sorry, but I have a question: what, precisely, are you purporting to be the “edge” of?! Right in the damn middle of rush hour, when you’re probably getting the most listeners, a full 40% of your music is from the 90’s. I’m not necessarily saying there’s anything wrong with that music… I’m not particularly fond of it, but I admit that its got its place. So, allow me to give you a suggestion: its place is probably not during the middle of rush hour, on a station that is supposed to be playing new rock. Its place is, much more likely, the other rock station (which is a new development since the previous post) that plays a bigger mix of stuff going all the way back to the 70’s. Because that’s its format! When your format is supposed to be new rock, you probably ought to stay away from songs from 17 years ago.
Also… Gnarls Barkley and The Gorillaz. Seriously, what the hell?! Did nobody tell you that these are rap/R&B groups? Why are you playing them on a rock station?
Finally, that God-awful new Death Cab for Cutie song about the obsessive stalker guy… it’s just really, truly an awful song, and you should never, ever subject anyone else to hearing it again. Please.
Ok, that will about do it for my grievances for the time being. But I reserve the right to make yet another post about this in the future, if the radio station continues to blow large amounts of ass. Because it’s really just not cool.
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Technology is kind of awesome.
Posted on at 12:05 am
I am the VP of Technology for the company I work for. So I may be biased. But it kind of struck me tonight how simply awesome technology is, and how far we’ve come since things like ENIAC, the Apple II, and even the Pentium. (Sidenote: the first computer my family ever owned had one of the original 60mhz Pentium CPUs that contained the FDIV bug. So that’s kind of cool.)
Anyway… I just got a new computer at work today. So I brought the new computer and the old computer home with me, to work on getting all of my stuff transferred over. Some rather annoying transfer problems notwithstanding, we’re doing alright so far. It’s late, it’s taking significantly longer than expected, but (so far) nothing has exploded or murdered anyone. It’s boring, but not horrible.
But as I am sitting here waiting for file copying to finish, I can’t help but notice something. I am basically within arms’ reach of 5 fully functional computers, and also enough spare parts to come damn close to building 2 more if I felt so inclined. I’ve got my own personal desktop and laptop, plus the old and new work computers, plus my home fileserver. In one single room, that’s a combined total of something like 11ghz of computing speed on 12 CPU cores, 2tb of storage space, and 10gb of memory. (God help me, I just thought about my electricity bill and nearly passed out.)
In this same room, I also have a hard drive from 1985 with a total storage capacity of 120mb that weighs probably 5 pounds. It’s sitting on a shelf, and it’s probably one of the coolest things in the entire room. (Thanks, Scott! I still show it off to everyone who visits my house!)
The absolute sum total cost of every computer I have in this house is orders of magnitude cheaper than those first computers cost to create, even in “pure” numbers, let alone if you accounted for inflation. And even the controller chip inside a single mouse is orders of magnitude faster than they were. And I’m just one guy who happens to be a techno buff. Imagine companies like Google or Microsoft… how much sheer processing power they control, how much storage capacity.
Ok, I suppose I probably ought to quit waxing poetic about all this stuff. But have you ever really stopped and thought about how good we’ve got it now? What would you do with your life if computers didn’t exist? I, for one, would be hard-pressed to support my family, if nothing else. I’m scrawny and uncoordinated… I wouldn’t last 15 minutes doing manual labor!
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El. Em. Ay. Oh.
Posted on Sunday, December 7, 2008 at 12:01 am
I’m not usually one to make posts that do nothing but link to someone else’s content. If I want to make a blog post, it usually has its own purpose. But this is just too good. This thread is a great example of why I started reading Fark in the first place. And if this had been a weekday, when I was at work, I probably wouldn’t have accomplished anything else for the rest of the day, because I would have been too busy hitting reload and hoping for more comments. It’s a damn good thing this is a Saturday night.
So yeah, here’s the thread that pretty much made me not stop laughing for an hour or so.
Read it. Laugh. Enjoy.
