MUSIC! CODE! MONKEYS!

(I should be asleep.)

Firstly, 50FOOTWAVE have published "Free music" which is a 5-track EP of good hard stuff. Available in MP3, etc. and also FLAC. I'm so used to MP3 that the quality of FLAC is like a breath of fresh air.

Secondly, and on this subject: I was recently re-acquainted with just how beautiful a decent record player with nice can sound when given decent vinyl to groove on, esp. Dire Straits guitar solos and classic jazz. So given how I come across new music (friends give it to me, sometimes on a wholesale basis), an ideal music infrastructure begins to look as follows:

1. MP3 for general music consumption
2. CDs for archival & liner art
   
3. Vinyl for when the music is just so good.

Other random thoughts:

• Lisp, spreadsheets, and RagTime (from it's description) all seem to embody a spirit of computational fungibility that shows what computers should be like in future. The reason I can't take the aforementioned 3 programs/languages/environments and produce said Nirvana is because computers suck.
  
• Closures in JavaScript are nice. var f = function() {} and all that makes events much nicer to use.
• I've been forced to confront my instinctive fear of big, sophisticated IDEs from gigantic megacorporations. I'm worried that their code is so smart that my job will become no more challenging than that of the average Visual Basic droid. This would suck.
  
  
• This may simply be post-Microsoft-IDE trauma. I remember VB4... VBA... generated code that should never have seen the light of day... *shudder*
  
• Legitimate reasons for ignoring these things still exist, lock-in to their own evolutionary path being the biggest and baddest.
• This is why, if I have to move intelligence into code, I'd rather it was open-source code. That way, when I've trained Rhesus monkeys equipped with build scripts to construct web applications based on my legion of sequence diagrams, then I could hack on the code to make the computer do even more of the boring stuff computers are good at and which I detest. (repeat after me: a good programmer is a lazy programmer...)
  
  
• Speaking of Work:
  
  
• Time was, people would sleep through Winter 'cos there were no crops to harvest and no light to work by. Humanitys biorythms are adjusted to this pattern.
• Now, we work 8-hour days all year round, and waking up at 7:00 in the dark is a truly crushing way to start the day (not to mention Brussels public transport.)
• Therefore, why not work 10-hour days for half the year, and 6-hour days for the other half, when I'd rather be in bed? Eh?
  
  
• I'm currently reading a translation of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (who is a genius), and it truly is an absolutely incredible work.
  

Last but not least, I would like to re-emphasise how incredibly stupid it to ramble on in a public space when the brain is already half-asleep. Anyway. I can always edit it later.