I recently got a copy of the Abba Gold DVD. It’s the equivalent of musical cotton candy — lots of very bouncy, catching tunes, with lots of rich, albeit simple harmonies. It was a certain sense of horror thatI found out how much I enjoyed listening to 45 minutes of nothing but 70’s pop music. After listening to the whole DVD a couple of times (I was using it as background music while working), I noticed something interesting about the topics of many of the songs on their Gold album.

The Wall Street Journal recently had an article about various forms of exercise “boot camps”. They rated one of them, which use “kettlebells”, cast-iron weights used by the training regimen used by the Soviet military, as being “surprisingly intense” because the revewier’s t-shirt was drenched after 40 minutes of exercise. Heh. You call that intense? I can get my t-shirt drenched after 30 minutes of Dance Dance Revolution, and if I go on for a full hour, I’m literally dripping onto the dance pad….

The last time I visited my friend Leonard Zubkoff, he gave me a batch of CD’s back from when he was doing professional recording of filk groups. Being all-too-busy, I never had a chance to listen to them all, which was a shame, since I never had a chance to tell him how good they all. I recently started listening to “Masquerading as Human”, by a three women acapella Filk group called “The Duras Sisters”.

Hmm, I haven’t updated my LJ in a while, mainly because I’ve been insanely busy. I pulled my first all-nighter on Monday in quite a while, working on a paper for the Usenix conference in June. Then Tuesday I was up until Midnight finishing up final version of the paper, and getting my taxes done and filed. (Thank goodness New Englanders get an extra day this year to file taxes due to Patriot’s day!

In yesterday’s New York Times, I found an article entitled “A Boxed Set in One File? Online Music Finds a Way”, on the front page of the Arts section. It described a new kind of technology that was promising to threaten the livelihood of record companies. Evil on-line music traders were using this technology to exchange not just singleton songs, but entire albums, complete with cover art. What was this new threat to world order?