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| What you're about to read is a collection of pointers to some of the music I've discovered on the iTunes Music Store, music I like enough that I want to share it. If you're an iPod owner and an iTunes fan (and if you aren't, what are you doing here?), maybe you'll find something new. Click on any of the CD covers to bounce over to the store and sample a few tracks. And then maybe stop by my other blog for a few well chosen words (and maybe a random snark or two). | 
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| Have some music to recommend? I can always use a few pointers. Use the comments link at the bottom of the page. | ||||||
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Fri, 15 Dec 2006 |
| Foiled Again / Blue October | |
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Back in the mists of time around the beginning of my computing career,
I was working in London for Data General, a minicomputer company that
is no longer with us. And one day one of my even younger colleagues
came over to ask how much Latin I knew. Not much, I admitted. A few
useful phrases like Caveat emptor and
illegitimi
non corborundum, which I know isn't even real Latin. But why
did he ask?
Turns out he'd been playing a ancient chess program on our office mini. And when he'd beaten it, it had terminated with the Latin-sounding message, OFLIDEA AGNI. Hence the question. I remembered vaguely something about how early DG minis had been little endian (keeping the bits and bytes in right-to-left order in words in memory, rather than left-to-right as God intended). And I had the inspired thought that maybe something had been messed up during the program's translation to more modern (at the time) hardware. Sure enough, reverse every two characters in OFLIDEA AGNI and you get a more appropriate message for a program that had just been defeated. Which is also the name of this album. And which is irrelevant to that album. But I like the story and just had to share. |
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Take me home: 
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