(Wednesday, October 10)

The more things change the more they.. Yeah.

On a "Just-Finished-High School-Summer-Before-moving To-College" high I drove up from Snellville to the Bestbuy near Gwinnett Place Mall on the day OK Computer was released specifically to pick up the album before heading to work. I listened to the entire album in the car on the way to work after leaving Best Buy and also I spent most of my dinner break sitting in my accord in the back of the parking lot of Kroger reading the liner notes and listening to paranoid android and electioneering over and over and over. I had just read So Long and Thanks for All the Fish so I already had an Adams vibe going in my head before I even put the cd in and keyed in on what I assumed paranoid android was playing on Adam's Marvin. Paranoid Android had been out as a single for awhile on the radio, but now I had my own copy to play. I left work (I had worked the evening 4-11 shift) and went home logged onto M59 and left the album in the comp for game music while I played.


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I had been in the lab the entire weekend and most of the morning which was a rarity for CS peeps at UGA. Most of the upper lvl CS classes happened in the later morning or early afternoon, so most people stayed up either in the lab at 101 or logged on from home coding for big projects late into the evening and slept in on the mornings. I want to say that the prof had ended up giving us a 2 or 3 day extension (the app was due on Monday at midnight) and most of us just put it off till the last possible point that we needed to start. When there were mass coding session going on like this I always headed to campus at 10, coded till about 12 went to Little Italy for lunch, then would hit the record store then head back to the lab or too class. I remember going by School Kids (it wasn't called School kids back then, i forget the name) and picking up Kid A. The sun Sparcs we had in the lab all had earphone plugs, but it never failed that when you got up to go the piss (or in edgemoor's case go for a snickers) or just go look at another screen you ripped them out and your music blared for everyone. I probably would not have minded mine being pulled out, as I thought this album was superb the first day I listened to it.


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I was working at a fairly large company doing some C++ in the Wachovia building in downtown Atlanta. It really sucked ass. The traffic from our apartment to the marta station was 30 min on a good day, then marta took 40 mins, then I had to walk another 15 mins to work. So most of my weekday was eaten by travel rather than and actual coding, it was then that i started to take sanctuary in being handed a massive project by myself, so that I could "zone" in my code and just produce while having my headphone on and no one to bother me. I had heard that Radiohead was going to be releasing some "B-Sides" (said with irony) to Kid A with the title Amnesiac, so I got off Marta at the Perimeter mall stop and walked to that Best Buy and picked up Amnesiac. I gave it a few spins that night after Lindz had gone to bed (with a new Min Pin we had just got) while I played Shadows of Luclin.

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4 years ago, I was working with the company I currently work with now in downtown Alpharetta. Every week on Tuesday I would go to bestbuy at lunch and buy 2 cds for the collection. I wasn't totally against the new ipod/itunes thing, i just still wanted to have the physical CDs and I didn't mind spending a little more dough to have the generally good album covers that radiohead produced. I picked Hail To The Thief and the Best of Bowie, the Bowie greatest hits didn't get played for at least 3 or 4 weeks I think.


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This morning I received the email I had been hoping I would get last night after midnight. Waste, the site/company associated with tech side of Radiohead sent me my link to download In Rainbows. It actually went to my junk mail so I fished it out this morning on a hunch it might have landed there. It took about 8 mins to download on my works decently fat pipe, and I just finished my first listen of the album. I enjoyed the album, but I wouldn't say that I was overtly impressed by it. But I know for a fact that, minus OK computer, every Radiohead album starts out this way with me. The first 2 or 3 listens are good, then it starts to marinate and I find myself listening to it alot, in sequence and learning the smaller pieces of the songs and I start to decipher all the lyrics; not the meanings mind you, just the lyircs, my interpretation of the meanings won't come for another few weeks.

Today, 10+ years out from OK Computer and gaining on almost 15 years out from Pablo Honey, Radiohead still remains by far my favorite band of all time. Its dark, its dreary and still sometimes doesn't make sense sometimes even after 500+ listens of a single song (i'm serious, I didn't think it was that much either till I saw my ipod stats in itunes). There is something unexplainable about why I love their music so much. I don't get it, I don't bother trying to convince other people of it either, mainly because I can't explain what I like them so much, I just do and I guess that is what makes me treasure their album release days so much.

Oh and also I will probably listen to it while I play Everquest II tonight after Lindz, Ava, Midori and that min pin go to sleep.