I was picking the subjects for my second year in university (studying Computer Science) today, and it really prompted me to think about my future.

I realised that I should be utilising my university time as best as possible by studying subjects that would best help me in securing and performing in a career I would most enjoy. This is obvious: the dream of doing what you love for a living. I know that I really enjoy using computers, especially the problem solving aspects of computers – which has historically consisted of fixing the damn things and getting them to work properly.

I could definitely see myself working in some big software company happily coding away, or designing the new database data structure, or the new standard in wireless networking. But no matter how many computing professions I think of, something nags at me and pulls me away from them.

Music.

There is a great PASSION that I feel for music that seldom is matched by my enthusiasm for computers.

In my spare time I like to waste time on the net, watch downloaded TV shows, and occasionally read novels. But most of the time you would find me listening to music, and/or singing and/or playing along with a crappy guitar. I’m not a great singer, but the act of expressing the feelings I get from listening to music by singing along with it is just amazing… I wish my voice would never get tired and I could reach any note I wanted, and that I could keep singing forever – in these moments everything else in life simultaneously doesn’t matter and also matters an order of magnitude more.

Have you ever listened to music that you enjoyed so much, that you could actually feel the endorphins coursing around you body? Music can be so powerful that it carries you away from reality, somewhere where your ears and your brain and your consciousness resonates with the sound. You get carried away, you rise and fall as the music reaches its highs and lows. You can sense the climax of the song approaching, and when you get there you can even experience a kind of audio induced”orgasm”.

One of the other awesome affects of music is to transport you to another time and another place which you associate with that particular band or song. Sometimes memories you didn’t even realise you had will come to the surface just from hearing a certain song again. As it is with memories, you not only remember it like a visual image in a photograph, but you remember the state of YOU in that moment – you might remember what smelled, or heard in the moment. You will probably recall your mental state in that time – what you were concerned about, your loves and hates and your mood. Even if it was decades ago, memories triggered by music can make you feel again the emotions you felt in the memory. That can be confusing: having the consciousness and emotions of your past self re-appear in the present. This is nostalgia. We can realise in these moments just how much time has passed, how little or how much we have changed, and all these thoughts are mixed up in a big mess with that seemingly unimportant one-hit-wonder that just came on the radio

The most  powerful aspect of music is how it conveys emotion. The intricacies of the English language allow beautiful poetry to be created which can tell a story or make you laugh but can also attempt to make you feel what the writer is feeling, or at least give you a sense of it.

But even without being able to understand the language the lyrics are written in, or listening to one which has no lyrics – emotion is still conveyed. This is because music has a language of its own. Most people would describe the same song accordingly, whether it me lighthearted and bouncy, or sensual and powerful, or intimate and painful, or furious and erratic etc. Through the language of music – tempo, texture, voices, melody, harmony and keys – we can convey emotions to people who take the time to listen. They will have some sense of what the writer felt when he/she wrote the piece. Through the use of lyrics, music can also give us context, meaning, explanation and lessons to go with the emotions.

These are some of the reasons why music is great. These are some of the reasons why it is worth it to dedicate to and fill your life with music. Sometimes, I am so inspired by music that I write things like this instead of studying for Foundations of Computer Systems or Integral Calculus and Modelling. But music draws me in and causes me to dream more than anything else, and I wonder how I should proceed to make it a bigger part of my life?

My enthusiasm for music often peaks late at night, when I spend time really listening to music and giving it my undivided attention. However, I was stimulated enough to write about music just now at a time when I can’t even find my headphones.

This is primarily because of 2 factors:

1. Max Bemis almost talked to me on Twitter
2. The Big Day Out 2010 line-up was announced

Say Anything is in my top 3 favourite bands, and when I helped Max Bemis and supplied him with a YouTube link on Twitter, I thought he was going to reply to me and make my day! Alas, he did not @reply. But I can take solace in the fact that I saw him and Say Anything live in Sydney, and was so fucking close to the front I touched his hair when he leaned in to sing with the crowd! (I’m getting so worked up already)

Muse (first of all, how epic is The Resistance, right? Exogenesis ftw) playing at the Big Day Out is a big deal for me, because I’m planning to see as much of them live as I can while they are here in Australia, and just their sideline show will surely not be enough to satisfy me.

Plus, I just got this great feeling that is kind of tied into the Big Day Out and Soundwave etc, which is that summer is coming. I don’t associate hot weather with the beach anymore, I just think of Big Day Out 2009 and how awesome it was, and how music festivals – nay, music itself is just fucking awesome.

I’m just full of basic complimentary adjectives like ‘awesome’ and ‘great’ tonight… Later, I’ll write something more specific on my passion for music. Preferably some time between now and at least 50 hours of sleep

I was very excited to try the beta release of the next version of Windows. The install went smoothly and I was soon greeted by the pretty new taskbar of Windows 7

I was very impressed with all the little UI touches that Microsoft has made to the operating system, like the ability to snap windows out of maximized mode by dragging them, and simple keystrokes for minimizing windows, for example.

But the reason I am beginning to feel a severe panic attack coming on right now – is that MEDIA PLAYER HAS BEEN MUTILATING MY MUSIC COLLECTION!

There is a warning on the Windows 7 Beta download site, recommending to backup all vital files before installing the operating system on your PC. I wasn’t too worried by this, as all my music was backed up on my linux server in the wardrobe. A free Microsoft product called SyncToy syncs all my music over the network every night at 3am.

I was pleased that iTunes was running smoothly on the beta OS – at first.

I wished to watch one of my movies on the Xbox360, and to stream it over the network I had to add my media library to Windows Media Player. This was my downfall it seems, as there was a bug in this new version of Media Player, which would cause some audio files to have the first few seconds cut off from them – permanently!

After a couple of days, I began to notice some songs would skip the intro, or start abruptly, and just thought it was a problem with iTunes. However, after playing the files in Windows Media Player and Winamp, the problem remained. Thank God I had all my music backed up, I thought – on the linux server, and my iPod. But – damn! Of course all this time iTunes had been syncing the broken mp3s to my iPod, so they were now broken too.

By this time, Microsoft had released a patch in Windows Update which fixed the bug, but not after several of my digital albums had been circumcised ( I still don’t know how many, I am trying to find the SyncToy log files)

Deciding to find all my broken music and replace it with the backups in the morning, I went to bed – just as my younger brother decides to boot back into Windows XP and start playing Battlefield 2. Now back in XP, the scheduled SyncToy task  was just waiting to kick in at 3am. In the morning, all broken mp3s in my music collection were also broken on my backup, as SyncToy did what it was supposed to.

Now thoroughly angry at Microsoft and myself, I decide this would make a painfully comical blog post, but it has only made me feel worse.

Ahh, YouTube… I can spend hours upon hours on this thing. I really enjoy going from one video to another – perhaps starting out on something featured on the front page, or something new from one of my subscriptions. Then after watching a video and posting a comment if I have some kind of compliment to the author or to let someone know if they posted something idiotic, I then proceed to watch related video after related video – and watch in amazement as they gradually dwindle in relevance from the video I started at.

Anyway, I was looking at peoples’ cover performances of one of my favourite bands Say Anything and found one by a user called Jaaaaaaa.

This girl is absolutely bloody amazing! Julia Nunes is a very talented singer/songwriter from New York that skilfully plays the ukulele, guitar and melodica. She is of course, extremely talented at what she does. But it is proven through her talking channel that she is very fun to watch even when she’s not performing. She has this immense enthusiasm, silliness and joy that comes through in her videos, which had me grinning ear-to-ear at 2am last week when I discovered her. She is really just amazing to watch, and she has given me immense musical inspiration.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a superb specimen of computer gaming goodness. This game is un-freaking-believable! Whether it’s on the Xbox360 or PC this is one of those rare games which people will usually find nothing wrong and nothing to criticize about. Apart from the insane graphics, gameplay and class customization, it continually gives me a very pleasant feeling when the map loads so fast.

Finally, the Call of Duty line of games has broken the time lock of the 1940’s in which it’s developers had it eternally trapped. This brings the obvious upgrades in weaponry which have accompanied decades of Research and Development into human beings killing each other, in real life. But apart from the assortment of weapons available to you in campaign and multiplayer, there’s also sections of the game where you view the story from another soldier’s perspective, with very different weaponry. There’s a part where you shoot enemies with huge rounds from an airplane, and also a sniper backstory which ends in assassinating a political leader with a 50 caliber sniper rifle from a mile away.

The multiplay gameplay is very well impemented, with around 15 different game modes. There is also an addictive rank/level system with lots of challenges and goals to complete.

In short, if you like first person shooters, buy this game. You won’t be disappointed. It is well worth the $50. It is even worth the $110 it’s likely to cost in Australia. (This is why I only have 4 360 games)