My First Post

I suppose I should start off the first entry of this blog by explaining the title of the blog. It's not meant as some kind of reverse psychology to get people to visit, but it's really a reflection of the way I see this blog. Every once in a while, I've thought about starting a blog. I've enjoyed other people's blogs a great deal and it would inspire me to start one. There would be the random piece of music that I wanted to share or some odd thought I'd like to put out there, but then I would imagine the kind of blog it would be and it would stop me.

I knew if I did start one, it would probably be the kind of blog that, as a reader, I wouldn't want to visit very often myself. I would probably enjoy it a little bit, but I'd put it far back on the list of bookmarks, if it got on at all. I don't say that out of false modesty, but out of knowing that it would probably have all of the following qualities:

1) I'm only online sporadically, so it probably wouldn't be updated very often.
2) It would take a long time to choose & prepare material to be shared, so the sharity would probably be pretty scarce.
3) I probably wouldn't maintain the blog very often, except initially, so at some point there might not be a new entry for months on end.
4) It would probably be the kind of blog that seemed dead or inert to the point where you wondered what happened to the person that started it.
5) It would probably have more text than audio content.
6) It wouldn't have a lot of great insight or background information, thorough research on the music, authoritative critiques that you couldn't get anywhere else, cool scans and pictures, etc.
7) It wouldn't have a cohesive theme or overriding mission statement; it would be pretty random.

In essense, it would be one of those orphaned blogs that make you wonder why the person started it in the first place. Of course, having said all that, the temptation to start one was too powerful. And knowing all this up front, the people visiting this blog should know what to expect. So, I decided I might as well start one anyway. Hence, the title..........

By the way, I still enjoy blogs that have all of the above qualities (though they're not my favorite kind), but I'm perverse that way. I enjoy going back to 'dead' blogs every once in a while in the vain hope that somebody will update them. It almost never happens, but there's some allure to hoping something good doesn't go away completely. I also enjoy smaller blogs that share just a few things, but of course I think I'm like everybody else who prefers blogs that put out a lot of constant content. I don't know how they do it, but I have a lot of admiration for the people who are able to put out a ton of stuff or have researched the material they put out. If I figure out how the linking works, I hope to put links to my favorite sites, so that at least if the rest of the blog is boring, people can use the links as a resource.

I also enjoy blogs that have a lot of information or text, but like everybody else who visits a fair amount of sites, I know that reaction of 'lots of text, but where's the music?' I'd rather put out a lot of music and very little text, but I realize it's probably going to be the other way around, because writing is a lot easier than ripping, compiling, tagging, zipping, uploading, etc. files. I enjoy reading background on the music or the thoughts of the blogger on some random topic, but being a slow reader and visiting a lot of sites myself, I know only too well the thought, 'Oh, no, who has the time or energy to read all this?' Again, hence the title...........

So, if you think of this blog as more of a dumping ground for things I want to put out there, and less of a reliable resource for great material, you probably won't be disappointed.

Now, having gotten all that out of the way, I wasn't sure what to post first, so I thought I'd put up a compilation I made for myself. It was strictly for my own personal listening pleasure and was never meant for public sharity, but I enjoy it a lot, so I figure there must be others out there who would too. Back in the day, I used to make up a ton of tape compilations or theme tapes, as I like to think of them, although I guess other people like to call them mixes or some other terms I can't quite remember. I wasn't overly concerned with sound quality when I made those up, but I just had a lot of themes I wanted to collect on the same tape.

Ironically, when I had the capability of making digital compilations, I ended up making very few. It could've been the normalization issue (and my original CD burner had some issues too), but for whatever reason, I hardly make them up anymore, though I want to. I've overcome those various issues, but I think the reason it seems harder to make up the digital comps is that I could record directly from a CD or cassette to another cassette pretty easily, but it turns into a real production to rip from a CD, let alone a cassette (or LP) to a digital file (along with all the concomitant organization, etc.). It's much easier to alter something I don't like (like the ordering or sound) digitally than it was when I was putting it on tape, obviously, but between the disk space issue & sound quality issue, I think that's why I end up doing it less. The poorer sound quality isn't as obvious on a cassette, but I find I'm more reluctant to put things I had on tape next to some CD quality sound in an mp3 compilation, for instance. And in the past, if I was waiting to find the right songs to put on a tape, it would just sit there until I was ready to finish it. Now, with digital comps, it's sitting on my hard drive taking up a few gigabytes while I wait. Oh, well, nobody really cares but me about such things, but I thought I'd share the thought process anyway.