My Life and Code

I have an older cousin who, when I was a teenager, gifted me her old turntable (which was outdated at the time, but has somehow made a comeback), complete with built-in 8-track player (a technology I am sure  is never coming back). Along with it were a handful of 8-track tapes, most of which I had no interest in, but one of them was Queen's The Game , which included a song I'd at least heard  of, "Another One Bites the Dust". So I listened to that one. It was my first exposure to Queen, and I remember really liking some of that album over the summer I listened to it. In particular, the songs "Need Your Loving Tonight" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" were favorites of mine. One of the songs got chopped off halfway through due to the 8-track format, ending on one track and resuming on the next. Very awkward. Despite liking some of this album, I didn't really become a fan of Queen until I saw Wayne's World . I'd heard "Bohemian R...

With the Christmas season upon us once again , I wanted to write about some of my favorite Christmas songs. As an adult, I've found it difficult to get into the holiday spirit each year because there's always a lot happening. As a kid, the world almost seems to stop as the holidays approach and arrive, but as an adult, things just keep on moving. One of the few things that has any affect on my mood during this time is the music, almost always because of some sort of nostalgia, and even then, there are times when it does nothing for me. But I digress. Here's a list, in no particular order, of my 10 favorite Christmas songs. Sleigh Ride - Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops This one's my all-time favorite. It's an instrumental version that's been around since long before I was born, that I first heard on an album my mother would play when I was a little kid. My earliest memory of it was from when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I think the track itself originates in ...

The first time I really listened to Led Zeppelin was in my junior year of high school, when my friend John gave me a copy of Led Zeppelin IV  for Christmas. It was one of those rare, consistent albums that I could listen to from start to finish without wanting to skip a track. Not too long after that I picked up Houses of the Holy  and was surprised to find that I liked that  album even more . Sometime after that , I picked up Led Zeppelin II , which I didn't like as much as the other two albums I already had. After high school, I picked up the boxed set . This was my first exposure to a lot of the tracks from the albums I didn't own. One of the things about the boxed set that I heard people say they didn't like was that the tracks were out of chronological order, and it can be kind of confusing as to which song came from which album. A few years later I picked up the second boxed set which included all of the remaining studio tracks not on the first boxed set (pretty coo...

One of my favorite bands is Queen . Probably more than any band, the music of Queen takes me back to certain moments of my life, as if part of the soundtrack to it. Along with Iron Maiden , they were a perennial during a period of my life. Just recently, I started listening to them again after many years without. I became a fan after their career with the original lineup had ended, and over the course of some time collected their albums. I didn't get them all in the order they were released (far from it), and could easily pick up an album from a different stage in their career which was much different in style from whatever my previous purchase was. Below is my ranking of their studio albums, from least favorite to favorite. This is just my opinion , and not an attempt to say "this album is better than that  one" -- it's only personal preference. 15. Flash Gordon Released 12/8/1980 This album is ranked last on my list simply because it's the one I listen to least....

(Disclaimer: Your mileage may -- and probably will  -- vary.) In 1975, psychiatrist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term  Flow , which Wikipedia describes as "a flow state , also known colloquially as being in the zone , the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time." We've probably all experienced being "in the zone" at one time or another in our lives, and most of us would probably agree that we do our best work when we're "in the zone". As a software developer, music can be a help or a hinderance. It can be a distraction, or, with the right music, it can become a background soundtrack which helps us attain flow. In my personal experience, I've found that even if I love a par...

From the "Who Really Thought This Was a Good Idea?" department comes The Ethel Merman Disco Album . I went spelunking for bad albums a week or so ago and found this, released back in 1979. I'd heard of it before but this is my first time listening to it and...gee, where to begin? According to  the Wikipedia article , each of the songs was recorded in just one take with Ms. Merman's usual vocal arrangement, with the disco instrumentation added later. Also, there were apparently 14 songs recorded for the album, of which only 7 made the cut (with an additional being included with a CD reissue). That means there are 6 unreleased songs from this. I'd love to hear them. The album is available on iTunes, but without the CD bonus track. The album is typical of the genre, if that genre is Celebrities Releasing Music Outside of Their Wheelhouse . In some cases music itself is outside of the celebrity's wheelhouse, but Ms. Merman was an established singer. Still,...

This, here, is the last of Leonard Nimoy's five albums.  Five  albums. Some of my favorite bands haven't had five albums, yet somehow Leonard Nimoy did. It's also the only one of Nimoy's albums not to be available on iTunes. It may have something to do with one or more of the cover tunes featured on it. Where to begin...okay, so, Leonard's not exactly the best singer. And when I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was listening to this, he asked "Why do you hate your ears so much?" Included here are covers of  Proud Mary  by Credence Clearwater Revival, and  Everybody's Talkin'  by Harry Nilsson, either one of which could be the reason why this isn't available on iTunes. I just noticed that Leonard's headshot is different in each of the squares on the album cover...that very sparse, minimalistic album cover. Apparently, that new world of Leonard Nimoy's has some wide margins and a lot of purple. I have to admit that I find so...

I’ve already written about ‘70s novelty albums based on  Lenny and Squiggy  and  The Odd Couple , but this one is the piece de resistance of albums based on Garry Marshall shows: the way too optimistically titled Laverne and Shirley Sing.  Personally, I think a much more accurate title would have been Can  Laverne and Shirley Sing? While the album is long out of print, it was re-released on CD a number of years back, but that too is now out of print. But, shockingly, it's currently available on iTunes. Being a lover of obscure/weird/bad music, I paid the $7.99 plus tax to get it. And...wow...just...just wow. In all fairness, Penny Marshall (Laverne) and Cindy Williams (Shirley) are both talented individuals. It’s just that singing really isn’t one of their talents. But is it really that bad? To be honest, they're not horrible , it's just that the album sounds like two people singing karaoke. As for the songs themselves, they're mostly covers of 195...

This is the second of three posts I'm doing concerning odd albums from the 1970s. It seems like if you were a television celebrity in the '70s you were sure to get one of two things: a variety show special or an ill-conceived album. Here, we have the latter. The Odd Couple Sings . Do they? Do they???  Well, sort of. Tony Randall (aka Felix)  sings. Jack Klugman (aka Oscar) not so much, and he even admitted as much. And it's evident from the very first track, entitled Johnny One Note , which seems to tell you right from the beginning "Look: Jack can't sing. I know it. Jack knows it. Now you  know it." How bad is it? Well, in the aforementioned opening track, Jack sings one note through the entire song. I'm not sure exactly which note that is , but it sounds like when you go to the doctor, and the doctor brings out a tongue depressor and tells you to say "Ah", and you say "Ahhhhhhh" with your tongue sticking out. Now imagine that fo...

The 1970s were a weird, weird time. It’s one of the reasons I have such a fascination with that decade. This is the first of three posts I’m going to do on novelty albums from the ‘70s, all three based on TV shows from producer Garry Marshall. And this first one is, IMHO, the most palatable of the three. Lenny and Squiggy Present Lenny and the Squigtones  is played for laughs. Recorded in front of a live audience and released in 1979, the album features Michael McKean and David Lander in character as Lenny and Squiggy from Laverne and Shirley . Several times on that series they performed as Lenny and the Squigtones , and this time they’re joined by a drummer and by future Spinal Tap guitarist Christopher Guest. Included here is the track Night After Night  which had been performed by the duo on the show during a Shotz Brewery talent show. But it’s not just music. The album also contains comedy bits that are interactions between Lenny and Squiggy. I gotta admit: this one ...

I didn’t have a very happy childhood, but some of my fondest memories from when I was young, memories which I cherish, are of baking Christmas cookies with my mother. I was in my early school days, starting around kindergarten or maybe before. I remember rolling out the dough on a round table in our kitchen and using cutouts to make the cookies we would then decorate. Thinking about it now, these are probably my happiest childhood memories. While we’d be making the cookies, my mother would play Christmas music from some old records. They were compilation albums from the 1960s featuring artists of the day performing traditional Christmas songs. To this day it remains my favorite kind of Christmas music. In the years since then, I remembered two album covers specifically: one was a white cover featuring round Christmas tree ornaments with pictures of contemporary stars like Jim Nabors and Johnny Mathis, who appeared on the album, inside the ornaments; the other, which I was sure was ...

I've been meaning to write this review for awhile, but life has been keeping me pretty busy lately. In fact, while I'd like to have spent more time playing this game, I haven't had much opportunity -- or energy -- of late. Rocksmith allows you to plug a real guitar into your PS3 or (in my case) Xbox 360 and play along to real songs (using a special cable included with the game -- plug one end into the guitar, the other into your gaming console). It adjusts the difficulty up or down depending on your skill (or lack thereof!) and no matter how badly you do, you can't fail out of a song as in games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero. When I first heard about this game, I was intrigued. But when I happened to come across it the day it came out, I was hesitant to purchase it. What if it didn't work well? What if the mechanics were off? I decided to hold off until reading some reviews. By the end of the day, a steady influx of glowing reviews had piled up on Amazon (the...