Thursday, October 15, 2009

Yeah, this guy!, rip city, pagers, and huge top N lists!

Umair Haque sounds a rallying cry for idealism, collaboration, and more of the same things that I like a lot. And disses the entire older generation. (well, not all of them, just some.)

Portland is fun. Daniel and I went there last weekend. We hung out with Henry, and went to brunch, and went to a movie and drank beer, and went to a couple of parties, and went hiking, and I went to Powell's books. Far as I can tell, these are the quintessential Portland things, and I quite enjoy them.

Another note to my college self: if you go into software development in the web apps world, well, web apps have to be up 24/7. Someone has to carry a pager, and if the app goes down at 2 AM, someone is going to get paged. That someone might be you. It might not; your team might not have to deal with it. But you might. Just so's you know.

And in other news, Pitchfork released their "top 200 albums of the decade." AND the "top 500 tracks of the decade". Yeah, there's quibbling to be done*. But still, I look at the list as a whole and I am happy! This is my music! I can intelligently debate it, and I can look back and relive it. I can get shivers reading the top 50 songs. And I will be proud to tell some young whippersnappers in a half century about how they made good music back in my day.

* Blueberry Boat down at 140-something, In Case We Die not even on the list, Hey Ya not being #1, the weird half-assed hip-hop coverage that Pitchfork is known for, that weird ironic(?) coverage of mainstream pop like "since u been gone", and... Kid A? Really? Come on, giving Radiohead the best albums of two decades is critical laziness. Sheesh.

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