We Shouldn't Do It Just Because We Can
Other than finishing my APAzine, nothing happened yesterday; hence, no entry.
For our next development-and-release cycle, I'm trying to get our team to focus a little more on what needs to be done, rather than doing things just because we can. It's all-too-easy to barrel along and add little bits of chrome to our software because it "looks cool and is just a little extra work". First of all, this makes our software more cluttered in its presentation, and second, it tends towards adding features that we don't fully understand, adding supposed flexibility that doesn't necessarily make sense, and even if it does, it may not be right. If we're going to spend time on little fringe details, they should at least be ones we understand and can pin down as having a specific, practical use to our customers.
(I'm not a team leader at Epic, but my voice carries some weight by virtue of longevity. Not a bad deal.)
In "the olden days", this tendency was called "creeping featurism" (as documented in The Jargon File), or occasionally "feeping creaturism". Hackish jargon seems to be falling out of use among modern programmers, which I think is a shame; I think it's one of the things that makes programming culture fun. (I wasn't even around in "the olden days", and I know more about hackish culture than 8 out of 10 programmers I meet!)
Right now I'm listening to Brian Eno & John Cale's Wrong Way Up. For me, Brian Eno is to progressive rock what Bob Dylan is to folk-rock, and what The Rolling Stones are to hard rock, that is, fairly-legendary artists in whom I have virtually no interest. My exposure to Eno has admittedly been somewhat limited; I've heard his work with early Roxy Music, his late-70s work with David Bowie (Bowie is another artist with whom I am underwhelmed), and some of his work with Robert Fripp, namely Evening Star (which is truly one of the five worst albums I've ever owned). John Cale I have never heard before (no, I've never had the urge to listen to more than a smattering of The Velvet Underground).
Anyway, I bought Wrong Way Up because I heard "Lay My Love" on the local prog/alt-rock radio station and liked it, so I figured what the heck. It is a good song, although the whole album has a tinny quality to the sound. One might expect that this is because it's mostly synthesized, but looking at the liner notes there are an awful lot of acoustic instruments in the album (violins, guitar, drums), and yet it doesn't seem quite real. It reminds me of The Rolling Stone Album Guide's comment about Elton John's album Madman Across The Water that somehow arranger Paul Buckminster had somehow managed to get a real violin section to sound like a mellotron. Wrong Way Up has a bizarre, Depeche Mode-like quality to its sound, which is not necessarily bad, but it seems like less than it could have been.
At any rate, "Lay My Love" is a solid track - it sounds a lot like a folk song, really, which I'm sure is what attracted me about it. I wonder what a group like Fairport Convention could do with it?
(And by the way, on the album's cover John Cale seems to look like Bryan Ferry on a caffeine jag.)
For a long time I've wanted to get a copy of Peter Gabriel's song "Shaking The Tree", which is one of his best, but whose studio version is only available (as far as I know) on his "hits" collection of the same name, and I was loathe to shell out bucks for an album with just two new songs on it. (This is why I don't know Jethro Tull's two '70s "hits" albums, even though I own almost everything else they've released...) At the same time, I've been shying away from his Secret World Live album because I felt that his Us album was far and away the weakest in his oeuvre (even weaker than the surprisingly wan So). Well, after hearing his live version of "Solsbury Hill" on the radio, I finally knuckled under and picked up Secret World Live.
It's a pretty good album, overall, although I'm still lamenting the fact that Gabriel has gradually replaced drummer Jerry Marotta with the more pedestrian Manu Katche. (I was pretty excited when rumors were flying that Marotta might become the drummer for King Crimson; too bad the '90s incarnation of KC - featuring the ever-deteriorating skills of Bill Bruford on drums - has been nothing to write home about.)
Third, a few weeks ago some folks at work were talking about Animaniacs, and someone mentioned their two songs in which they strung together either the names of Earth's nations, and the names of US state capitals, and put each group to music. I've heard these before, but this time my brain clicked and I said, "Gee, sounds like Tom Lehrer's song 'The Elements'."
The choral reaction to this observation was, "Who's Tom Lehrer?"
Tom Lehrer, for those who don't know, was a very silly songwriter/pianist from Harvard University in the 40s, 50s and 60s who wrote quite a few very amusing songs, such as "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park" and "The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz". I don't think he's performed much in several decades, but he was quite the favorite of many people I knew growing up around the Boston area. So I picked up Songs & More Songs by Tom Lehrer to introduce the philistines at work to the glory that is Tom Lehrer.
I'm not short on opinions when it comes to music, no, sir! More this weekend, maybe... I'll try to be more upbeat and less critical, if so.
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