Malfunctioning site is functioning
If you're reading this then you're now seeing the recently-migrated-to-OpenHost version of this site - with the old site scheduled to come down at the beginning of February. I'm pretty sure the worlds' DNS' would have updated by then and ensure that all traffic points to here instead of the old place. (I wonder what would happen though if you still try to go to the old site location when it's not there anymore... your browser shooting packets of data into the ether...)
So like I said in a previous post, if this site starts to mess-up on me, at least now I'll have the ability to properly diagnose and correct any problems.
Oh, and first post of 2011 :D
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A few weeks ago, still thinking about the year that was, I watched a mashup of songs that made Billboard Magazine's Top 25 for 2010. Not as good as the 2009 one I reckoned, but it got me wondering: what were my favourite songs of 2010?
So I fired-up my music player and created a playlist with some very simple criteria*:
- all songs released in 2010
- sort by play count from most to least
(It's not a very fair test, I know: songs from earlier in the year would have an advantage over later ones, but I don't know how the hell I'm going to create that kind of criteria filter.)
Excluding the top result (which had a ridiculously high play count because it was a song I was learning to play on guitar - repeated stops and starts and all that), it was a 3-way tie:
1. Barenaked Ladies - You Run Away
I was very surprised to see this song amongst the results. Sure it's a nice song, but not one that would come to mind if you asked me to name my favourites from 2010. This is the only Barenaked Ladies song in my entire music collection - I don't even have their ever popular 'chickity China the Chinese chicken' song, One Week, which was released all the way back in 1998 and is the only other song I know of by these guys.
2. Ke$ha - Tik Tok
Oh now this is just shameful. I'll admit to enjoying the occasional pop tune, but how the hell this got into my collection AND make my 'top 3', I'll never know. I can't even blame magical faeries or something like that for having commandeered my computer and over-playing this song, although I did have lots of ants in my apartment once; caught them chowing-down on some banana choc chip muffins I made and left out on the kitchen counter. It's not totally impossible for them to find my computer and put Kesha on infinite loop... right?
Meh, I'm not even going to bother embedding the video. Just go an enjoy this collegehumor.com parody instead: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1935457
3. Brooke Fraser - Who Are We Fooling?
Finally, a result I can approve of.
I only became a Brooke Fraser fan towards the end of 2010. Sure, she's a local artist and has been around for several years, so everybody in the country has heard of her and heard her songs - even my friend's walking-down-the-isle wedding song was a Brooke Fraser song - but I wasn't a fan. Then one boring day I was just following YouTube suggestions, letting the links take me where they may, and after hearing someone's rendition of one of her songs that I hadn't heard before, thought, "Wow, that sounded really nice." So I went to find the original, listened to that, liked it even more, then remembered that she had been on the news just a few days before for an interview about her recently-released album.
"Isn't she touring the country for the album release?" I wondered, so I hit her site, looked at the tour dates and immediately saw the one that effectively said: playing in Wellington TOMORROW NIGHT YOU IDIOT!
I made a gamble that moment: I quickly texted a few friends who might have liked going to her concert with me (1 didn't want to come, 1 said "Brooke who?"), then tried to buy tickets the following day.
My friend Claire got back to me, said she would like to come on the proviso that it was a sit-down concert (she was on crutches at the time), which it was, and that I could get tickets at ridiculously short notice, which I managed. Everything was falling into place so easily, like - taking a spiritual sort of tack here - the universe was making the path to the Brooke Fraser concert as smooth as possible as if to tell me, "Hey man, you'll enjoy this concert."
Which I did.