A few last shots of equipment from the past and current views of my equipment.

In the basement I still have the Surround Sound speakers that I at one time had connected to the stereo at theCentennial Parkwayduplex. They were good for certain kinds of sounds, but were hard to get adjusted. Some movies that I patched through a VCR to the stereo, bypassing the TV sound, were amazing. Sound seemed to come from behind you and made some creepy movies positively skin crawling. For music however, just give me a good old equalizer. I did try for a while, as this photo from some point in the early 2000’s shows. The tiny square speaker on top of the huge (old faithful) speaker is the surround sound left speaker. The mid speaker was on top of the entertainment center. That’s Max and for some reason the Little Tikes play gym is in the living room. Clearly The Wiggles is on TV. Joey must have been in the room.

Here is a photo of Joey trying to jam to my MP3 Discman. This was a breakthrough in sheer volume of music I could put on a CD. This played burned CD’s and so I filled CD’s with 10 – 12 albums in MP3 format. Hours of music on 1 CD. At the time, it was groundbreaking. After a few years the display stopped working so you had no idea what track or album you were selecting to play.

In 2001 I was straddling 3 different worlds. I had store bought CD’s, MP3 discs that I played on my MP3 Discman, and I had my work computer hard drive filled with MP3’s and used Winamp to play them over headphones. I was also still listening to tapes, as you can see by the sweet looking boombox on my desk. The large drawer you can see to the right of my chair was filled with tapes and CD’s. A bit of everything on hand for whatever mood struck me that day. Playing music on the PC went pretty well, only a few times I had problems. Once my PC got a virus, and I was convinced that it had come from my music downloads and that the Helpdesk police or the 3 man IT services crew were going to have me escorted out. It wasn’t me. A few other times my headphone cord pulled out and I was blasting music for the unwitting and unprepared engineering staff. Fortunately the few times that happened I wasn’t listening to anything scarring. This was my first cube job and I was on top of the world. Or at least the factory floor. Check out my sweet view of the assembly lines.

Fast-forward to today. What am I using now you ask?

My work rig:

 I have a Toshiba 500 GB external hard drive which has every album that I own on it, backed up of course, and with me in my work backpack every day. If I want to go with White Zombie to work on a form and drown out the rest of the office, I have it. If I need some soft and quiet Everything But The Girl to soothe me until 4:30 rolls around I have that too. If someone mentions they like Neil Young and I want to pass them some bootlegs to listen to I can. All my music is with me, portable and ready to instantly gratify me with whatever sounds I might want to listen to. The headphones I use now are a wireless set I got from Cindy after almost repeatedly choking myself out with a short cord set of headphones I had. These have great sound, fit well and allow me full mobility in my cube. No more neck craning trying to reach the printer. Bliss.

My Home Rig:

This is the stereo I had in the basement for the first 4 years I lived in this house. I had converted to I-Pod and portable speakers by the time we moved in. About a year ago on a whim, I brought the old rig up and plugged it all in. It has the basics: Equalizer, 50 CD changer, tape deck (broken unfortunately) and on the bottom of the stack my Sony receiver. There is a cord hanging unconnected that I can use to hook up my I-Pod. That is about the only use they get anymore since I now carry around my entire music collection on the external.

As is my way, there are a scattering of tapes and CD’s laying around to prove I was there.

Yes, that is a 3 CD box set of Howlin’ Wolf.

And yes, those are his and hers toy helicopters.

Man cannot live by music alone.