life as a dog…

As of right now, I have five browsers on my computer: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.  There are others, but I either will not or can not put them on my PC.  Camino is Mac only.  Konquerer…is Linux only, as far as I know.  Maxthon…I just don’t understand what the point is.  It’s basically IE with a few things added.  There’s one called Flock, but as far as I know, that’s really geared toward social websites.  I have no desire for that.

• Firefox. Firefox has been my standard browser for a long time.  But it’s starting to get very frustrating.  It has a serious memory leak problem.  At one point, I had to shut it down because it was up to 1.6GB of memory used.  That’s ridiculous.  I only had about 5 tabs open and none of them had any kind of rich media present.  Version 3.0.10 also has a habit of crashing.  A lot.  The one benefit of Firefox over the others is the ability to easily block advertising content.  As I write this, 3.5 has just been released.  I supposed I should update to 3.5, but a lot of the add-ons I have do not function with 3.5.  Decisions…decisions.
• Internet Explorer. For most people, either you use Firefox or Internet Explorer.  I have not upgraded to 8.0 yet.  Of course, the biggest drawback of Internet Explorer is security.
• Safari. I don’t use Safari much at all.   If I had a Mac, that would be a different story.  Then again, if I had a Mac, I’d probably be using Camino.  Apple just released Safari 4.  Maybe I’ll play around with it, but I have the feeling it won’t make that big of an impact on me.
• Opera. Because Firefox has become so frustrating, I’ve started using Opera again.  But there are some downsides to Opera.  There are some rich media items that it simply doesn’t like.  In addition to that, if it were as easy to block advertising as Firefox, I would switch to Opera completely.
• Chrome. I know a lot of people like Chrome.  I don’t.  There are too many things that it simply can’t do yet.  I also don’t like the layout.  But recently, with the constant crashing of Firefox getting on my nerves, I have switched mostly to Chrome.  I’m getting used to it, but there are things I miss about Firefox – plugins and extensions and such.  One thing I don’t like about Chrome is how it splits itself into multiple processes.  It’s mostly just a preference of mine, I guess.  That being said, I have found Chrome to simply freeze quite often.  If I go to a tab that has been open a while but I haven’t been on, it seems like it comes up a blank screen and takes a while for the page to pop back up.  I do like how Chrome lets you drag tabs off to create a new window.  I just wish Chrome would have something to block ads as easy as AdBlock does for Firefox.

Everyone thinks the music from their formative years was the best music.   I’d say that mostly falls between what…the ages of about 10 and 20?  For me, that would be 1977 to 1987.  But I’m not going to say that the music from then was the best music.  I know it wasn’t.  You really can’t compare different eras of music, can you?  How can something from Mozart be compared to something by Leadbelly?  And how can Leadbelly be compared to Glen Miller?  What about Elvis?  The Beatles?  The Bee Gees?

And let’s face it…you really can’t compare genres, either.  How could anyone compare classical to jazz to rock to rap?  Anyone who tries to is just being stupid.  One of the things that really amused me (when I paid attention to it – I’m not sure if they even do it anymore) is Rolling Stone magazine’s year end lists.  They always had top tens from artists included.  I always viewed anyone who stuck with all music in their own genre as being not very knowledgeable about music.  Or maybe, it’s more appropriate to say that I was more impressed with someone who picked things completely out of the blue.  They were more willing to listen to things outside their “box” as it were.  If a rock artist were to pick something from Blues or Jazz or R&B or Rap…that impressed me.

But I’m going off the subject I was going to talk about…when did the music die?  I’m not talking about something specific, but just in generalities.  I think it died sometime in the early 90s.  Let me explain why…

Before I do, do I need to state the obvious?  This is purely subjective.  Sure, there is still some music coming out that doesn’t suck.

The biggest problem I see is that it seems like there are very few artists with truly new material.  What I mean by that is that everything that you hear on the radio seems to have sampled something from 10, 20, 30 years ago.  They did sampling in the 80s and 90s, but aside from a couple obvious examples (Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” for instance), it wasn’t entire songs.  Today, there are songs that about the only new thing is lyrics.  The music is just rehashed from another song.  Rihanna’s “SOS” for example.  All they did is loop Soft Cell and let her sing over it.  How about Jessica Simpson using Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane?”

Yes, some of the music in the 80s was beyond cheesy (“Mickey” anyone?), but at least it was original.  And just like the Bee Gees in the 70s… you may make fun of the music, but when it boils down to it, a lot of it was very good POP music.  Duran Duran wasn’t trying to be some trailblazing innovative group (at least I don’t think they were).  POP music.

Can’t anyone write music anymore?