I have always prided myself on finding something enjoyable about all forms of music. When I say I listen to all types of music I try to do exactly that.

What I have found while doing this is any form of music can be enjoyable. Music grows on you; you can learn to enjoy anything.

So when other people say “goddamn I hate rap” they just have not been exposed to it. People’s music tastes are set when they are developing, I would say around the teens. Then it starts to solidify. Once you hit the late teens/early twenties your music tastes are pretty much set. Whatever music you were enjoying then you will continue to enjoy for the rest of your life.

This can be changed but change is scary. Also to what end? To quote Ghost in the Shell “Over-specialise and you breed in weakness”. Following the one genre or a narrow field will lead to dismissing all other forms of music. Learning to expand your field of interest is not only a great boon as you can converse and connect to anyone about music but it also puts you into a different head space.

Music has such a profound effect on your emotions, a snatched piece of a song can instantly transport you 10 years and halfway across the world. So what happens if your only enjoyable music is death metal? If that is all you listen to then it is going to influence you towards an angrier, despondent disposition. Psy-Trance? You start to lose the ability to follow and appreciate lyrics and well sung harmonies. These are broad stroke generalizations but they have the ring of truth. Learning to enjoy more genres’ means you can cater your music to your mood, not the other way around.

The longer you leave it the harder it gets and, just as frustrating, it is something you constantly have to work at. The moment you stop exploring different forms of music you start to lose the ability to enjoy new music.

Well, I will leave it there, below are links to some of the best examples of each genre. There are too many genre’s for me to list but here is a start, feel free to add something I am missing.

Classical – Ave Maria

Rock – The Offspring – Gone Away

Opera – Pirates of Penzance – With Cat Like Tread

Punk – The Vibrators – Baby Baby

Metal – Tool – Lateralus

Death Metal – In Flames – Crawl Though Knives

Indie Rock  – Okkervil River – Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe

Folk Rock – Mumford and Sons – Little Lion Man

Folk – Redgum – I Was Only Nineteen

HipHop – Hilltop Hoods – The Nosebleed Section

Rap – Tech N9ne – Beast

PsyTrance – Infected Mushroom – Deeply Distrubed

Dance – 4 Strings – Diving

Alt Country – Michelle Branch – Everywhere

Pop – Lady Gaga – Bad Romance

Acapella – A Perfect Circle – Fiddle and the Drum

As I foreshadowed in my article Why Game? I got interested in this idea of the Social Surplus.

While I was looking through the numbers for how much time was spent playing games I was shocked to say the least. 10,000 hours is a hell of a lot of time and as Chris pointed out, 10,000 hours would be about right for the required amount of time to become an expert at something. That amount of time though was dwarfed by the amount of time spent watching TV.

I always knew people watched a tremendous amount of TV. When I found some statistics though I must admit I felt slightly ill. The Nielson group released the following figures. In the first quarter of this year the average for people aged 25-30 was 144 hours a month, which spins out to be a shade un 5 hours a day. 5 Hours a day!? Jesus Christ. In the five years between 25-30 we will average 8,500 hours.

As the age bracket creeps up it just gets worse. When we finally hit 65+ we are watching around 7 hours a day. That is such a disgustingly large amount of TV.

Where does my term of Social Surplus come from though? Well that’s exactly what this TV viewing is. I would argue that using that using this time to play games is more, if only slightly in some cases (Looking at MMO’s here), productive. Watching TV is basically a time sink, you get nothing out of it except the fleeting enjoyment that is gone the moment you stand up. It is lost time. Again as with games I understand people need to relax and unwind, but for 5 hours a day?

To put it into numbers that we are able to relate to lets have a look at Wikipedia. We all know it, we all use it, we have an understanding, if shaky, of just how massive an undertaking it was/is. Lets say using their page of what has been done and doing some dodgy numbers we come up with 150million hours of collective human effort. Everything, every article, every edit, every language, we would be talking in the ball park of 150million hours of effort.

Now let’s look at the amount of time that the age bracket of 25-30year olds in America spent watching TV in one year. Call it 22Million people (going on rough data here) at 4.8 hours a day we end up with:

38,544,000,000

That’s for one age group. Each year. Spent wasting time in front of the TV. That is the equivalent of over 250 Wikipedia’s every year. That’s a complete and whole new encyclopedia of all human knowledge every two days! Being pissed away watching American Idol.

Getting people to do any form of work is difficult. The only reason most people have a job is money, not enjoyment. The reason Wikipedia worked is that anyone could spend any amount of time on it they wanted and straight away get something back. It extended itself and said “Look, the tools are here, help yourself”. Anything that can do that will work; we only have to look at something as stupid as, say, lolcats. It extends the idea of “look, if you have a picture of a cat and large Helvetica Font you can participate”. And people did, in droves. It is a meme that has still not totally died.

People no longer expect or even accept media that does not extend itself to them. Whenever I read anything on the internet I now instinctively spin to the bottom and read the comments. The only reason I still read Slashdot is for the comment. Even here I changed over my blog to WordPress because it had easy to use comments.

I believe the next big thing; the next great advancement will somehow involve harnessing this massive amount of social surplus and funneling it into something else. It will require a rethinking of the almost all forms of media. Any form of news story that I cannot comment on? Not interested.

As I said finding a way of channeling this surplus is key. A project like Wikipedia was a great idea but there are hundreds more. How about a relationship mapping chart? You would start from you and input all the family links that you know of. If it got large enough you could travel down those links to see who else you are connected to. As long as it had a simple interface and an inviting look it could work. Or a hyper local news site where you could jump in to your local area and read what is going on or post what you have seen, specials down at the local café, road works on this side street.

The possibilities when you start thinking in these numbers are amazing. What else could be achieved?

My partner is currently studying for her Masters in Classical Music Composition. To that end she has been getting into the local classical music scene and I have been going along.

I love classical music, there is nothing better on a rainy night to bring the lights down and turn up a Bach Fugue, or maybe listen to the Requiem Mass or even bring out some Debussy.

However nothing gets me more angry than modern classical. I used to dismiss it out of hand as pretentiousness or simply an a-tonal mess. The last performance Cath and I went too started off well but rapidly went downhill. The worst offender was a well-known composer who has had her pieces played around the world. In this piece there were three performers, one on Soprano Sax, one Alto Sax and the other on percussion. They were all facing a projection screen. A movie was projected on the screen of failing pieces of cut out coloured paper and each performer was assigned a colour. They would randomly play notes while their colour was on screen.

Say it with me now: This is not music. It was a hideous mess of random sound, I just felt horribly embarrassed for the performers and the audience. They finished and…everyone applauded.

We had an intermission and Cath was kind enough to let me beg off so I went to the pub and watched the cricket.

While I was sitting there though I got thinking. Is it really their fault? Let’s have a look at some of the music genres around today. Rap was first really performed in the early 1900’s, Rock music? Went mainstream around the 1960’s, was really started though around the 1930-1940’s. Hiphop? Started in the 1970’s! Classical music? That started in 1100. That is over 900 years of music.

In that time we have had some of the greatest artists ever encountered. With that kind of pedigree it would be daunting if not impossible to live up to those standards. When Cath first started writing for her masters and she asked for my advice I was blunt and said I did not enjoy the music she was writing and I asked why she did not write more in the Classical or Romantic era style and the answer was no one writes in that style because it has already been done better than anyone possible could.

So I think that is why we are left with these people writing for random videos or playing the piano with a teddy bear or using a prepared piano.

This is not the road it should be going down. People should be proud of what has been achieved and use it for inspiration for their pieces not simple look at it and conclude you could never be that good. It really smacks of my previous post The Great Leveler.

I could be wrong but I get the feeling that classical music is dying by being its own worst enemy.

Go me, two more exams to do…

I am currently studying to finish up my MCSE Exams (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer). I started attacking this the normal way I used to study, get the giant textbooks and work my way slowly from the front to the back taking notes as I go. I was around a quarter ways through the Windows XP book when I gave up the ghost (as it was covering everything I already knew) and decided to try my hand at a practice exam.

What the hell? It’s a polite way of saying that the exams bear little to no relation to real life. If you are administering to a Windows XP box or group you need to understand the basics, fine. But the incredibly obscure questions are so patently bizarre. The problem being these exams are multiple choice as they are all graded by a computer. Fine. However the questions do not judge how good you are at problem solving, if you can tackle problems from multiple angles, the ability to use related knowledge to figure out your problem. No, the exams are mostly questions of such an obscure nature that you never know the answer and you would never NEED to know the answer. Here are a few examples from the 70-291 exam that I am studying for right now:

You need to check the logs for the Routing and Remote Access machine. Where would you find these log files?

Followed by four different path names. Should I know this off the top of my head? Maybe, does this in anyway demonstrate my ability to work effectively administrator to a Server 2003 domain? Of course not.

The amount of these problems which are simple rote memorization is staggering. In real life if you were faced with needing to check log files or which snap in to use, if you don’t recall straight away then grabbing your handy guide book or hitting up google will solve your problem. If you deploy a new DHCP Server onto a separate subnet separated by a router and you do not have a DHCP Relay in place, can you google that? No. These are the sorts of things that should be tested, showing that someone is not only capable of understanding the network but thinking their way around problems.

Add in the fact I am half way through my MSCE and I learnt more on the job in two weeks than I will learning to pass 6 exams.

I wondered how other people handle this having to learn really precise, mostly useless information. So I started digging through the wonders of the internet and found what are called brain dumps. Basically they are collections of the current exam questions with answers. A glossy way of saying cheating. These message board are filled with people vouching for the authenticity of these exams by saying:

Used these collections, passed my exam today, all the questions were on it!

I know cheating has always been a (small) part of exams but this seems to make is it incredibly easy and add in the way these brain dumps are done up they almost seem legitimate.

Ultimately I will get my piece of paper but I don’t feel good about it. Can you tell I have an exam today…? /rant