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Rockville

No excuses, oh my brothers, I've just been real slack with the updates. Hopefully I can pound out a few this week for those out there in the dark who will still listen.

This weekend the lads and I were talking about the changes and evolution of the Internet and of music on the Internet in particular. How we all started up trying to pull crappy porno from irc rooms and ftp servers half the world away over 14.4 USRs and now we download movies weeks before they are released in the theaters (Did I say that? I'm just kidding).

As a known Mac user, I was asked about the Apple music store. I went through the whole .99/song $10/album song and dance. At least one of the lads seemed to think this was a good idea, surprizing perhaps for a heavy Kaza user (if you are a lawyer, I'm just kidding). His reasoning was that $15-$20 for a music CD was nuts, considering the amount of content in a similarly priced DVD.

Anyway, thinking back to the early days of the Internet, I remembered one of the first Internet radio stations I stumbled across, back in the days when music over the Internet was a novelty. I can't remember the name of the station, or what software I used (some early version of Real I imagine) but I remember what they played -- R.E.M.'s Rockville.

Yes ... just that one song in a loop, for as long as you would listen.

So here I am years later in the twenty-first century, having bought the single off the music store as an electronic files and setting the song to loop in iTunes for as long as I sit and write this.

So, what does it all mean? Anyone with a moral or a message? Maybe it isn't the same -- not hearing the song wind its way through quiet and trackless routers to arrive with the strange distortion that was Real's answer to static -- but it is still a great song to tap away at the keyboard to.

Good night folks.