Author: chris

Music

I’ve always been interested in music.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve sung along to tunes (much to everyone’s disgust) and I must be one of the few people who is happy to get up and do Karaoke without a drink.  The earliest song I remember singing was Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of the Road (which you can find here on YouTube), which must have been when I was about 4 or 5 years old.

At the turn of the millennium I was co-founder of a music-based startup called Razorcuts.  We sold custom CDs and did digital downloads way before Apple was selling iPods.  Unfortunately the business didn’t make it, because we couldn’t get access to decent content.  Perhaps a discussion for another day.

I’m also a reasonable collector of music, although not as obsessional as some people.  I tend to stick to well known stuff and the more mainstream, although I don’t have a particular genre that I like.  This tends to mean I have lots of CDs and playlists from which I choose stuff at various times, depending on mood.  My MIL doesn’t think I listen to the hundreds of CDs littered around the house, which is true as I have them all digitised and indexed then available through iTunes.  It’s probably one of the only things I’m OCD about, other than perhaps filing and organising photographs.  I keep promising to systematically go through my CDs and play them, although that tends to fall by the wayside as I prefer to work without music these days.  So in the spirit of going back and getting best use, I’m going to start a series of posts with a weekly (or bi-weekly if I can manage it), review of a CD I’ve been listening to.

Now, you may ask why don’t I use Spotify?  Well, I’ve collected CDs (and before albums) for a long time and I like the feel of physical media.  I also don’t like the idea of investing every month into something I will ultimately never own.  Yes, it’s outdated thinking, but it’s what I do.

Look out for posts in the coming weeks!

Finally – A Personal Blog

I’ve been thinking about the idea of starting a personal blog for some time.  For over 10 years I’ve written a technical blog of sorts that started out as “Storage Eye”, evolved into “The Storage Architect” and currently exists as https://blog.architecting.it, however those are technical sites discussing work issues even though they have a personal focus.

A number of things made me consider this is the right time to start blogging personally.  First, the social media revolution has made personal writing acceptable (people I worked with laughed at me in 2002 when I started writing the technical blog), but I don’t agree with the principles of organisations like FaceBook to the degree that I no longer have an active FaceBook account.  That means I need a different outlet.  Second is the opportunity to talk about things outside of a work environment, that covers hobbies, interests and opinions while retaining control about how that content is dispersed.  Third, I need a home for my resume, CV or whatever you choose to call it, that isn’t directly reflected again only from a work perspective.

So here we are and here’s the first post.  I have no idea how often I’ll write, what the subjects will be, or whether things will be long or short form in nature.  I’m sure they will simply evolve!