what the hell was in the water ten years ago?
Ya know, 1997. Ok, so we heard about Dolly, which was rather cool. There was also the coup attempt in Papua New Guinea, Soundgarden breaking up, the ascent of Tony Blair, Hong Kong handover, some random blonde got killed in a car crash, some random Aussie committed suicide. Ok, so a fair few events but no more and no less than any other year.
Except – the term weblog was coined ten years ago. If I cared more about blogs, I’d be excited about this. As it was, I didn’t hop on that particular bandwagon till a good few years later. So a blog was really turn of the century stuff for me. But more importantly from a geeky perspective, Slashdot is ten years old. And Winamp turned 10.
I don’t really remember when I started using Slashdot (or indeed, if I did use it in 1997). I definitely was using it in 1998, though. And considering that Winamp was the only player around for the new fangled mp3 format; well, yeah. I was using it from the pre 1.0 days. I definitely started using Winamp by about November or December 1997.
Ten years ago, all those things. I have now officially descended into the “You young whippersnappers don’t remember the Great War, do you?” old timer territory. Has it really been ten whole years? A decade? Good grief.
update: Pissu Perera points out that some religious figure died (and was later beatified) and TinyLittleFascist points out that the first Harry Potter book was published in 1997.
On 17-Oct-07 at 3:32 pm,
Psy wrote:
Winamp Class of 98, yo.
It really has been that long. Only back then, I was younger, and er, still am younger. Oh, snap. Pheel teh sting.
It seems to be a nostalgic time ‘cos someone was babbling on about LOGO as well
On 17-Oct-07 at 5:07 pm,
Anuradha wrote:
Oh so I was babbling on about LOGO? I’m shocked Psy, and deeply hurt. I will now retreat into the jungle and live amongst the turtles.
On 17-Oct-07 at 5:15 pm,
Tez wrote:
Jesus! It’s like a reunion.
On 17-Oct-07 at 5:37 pm,
Psy wrote:
You’ve been missing from the Interblogs so long that you very well could’ve retreated into the jungle, and been living amongst the turtles for the past month-ish.
Did those egotistic turtles make you blog about LOGO? Did they? Huh?
On 18-Oct-07 at 3:25 am,
pissu perera wrote:
you forgot mother theresa. she went up in 1997 too
On 18-Oct-07 at 2:05 pm,
Curious Yellow wrote:
I remember thinking is he saying “it really whips the llama’s ass”, or am I having some mild auditory hallucination? 10 years down the line it’s still my preferred player. Remember the Xing mp3 encoder?
On 18-Oct-07 at 5:15 pm,
drac wrote:
Heh. Yes. It used to ship with “It really whips the llama’s ass” on a loopback. I think they had that until 5.0 at least, perhaps even more recently.
I’ve tried unsuccessfully to move to other players (foobar, mediamonkey, 1by1) but I always seem to find myself missing some feature or the other. The windowshade mode and some plugins are things of beauty and irreplaceable.
Woo. Xing! I haven’t used that in … umm … 10 years.
On 19-Oct-07 at 12:02 am,
Curious Yellow wrote:
I remember desperately trying to warez the encoder because I didn’t want to fork out the $20 for it. I had a Spice Girls CD that was gagging to be encoded. Those filthy whores.
Amarok on Kubuntu was pretty cool but it doesn’t behave as expected with last.fm so I ditched it. I use foobar for the few flac albums I have but I keep returning to Winamp just like you! Are you on any skins these days?
Still, those were the heady years of compression I guess. I’d just been introduced to mp3s, high quality jpegs and even animated gifs. The world was my oyster. I look back on it now and wonder what went wrong
On 19-Oct-07 at 9:10 am,
tinylittlefascist wrote:
You mean… drumroll… Win Amp… It really whips the llama’s ass (llamas bray in the background)?
It is still the default on my edition.
On 19-Oct-07 at 9:35 am,
drac wrote:
Tiny Little Fascist: Props. Yeah, that’s what it says.
CY: I discovered LAME around ‘99ish and abandoned the filthy Xing. Since we’re sharing those filthy secrets, the first mp3 I remember listening to is this one. Not as earth shattering as your secret lust for Ginger and Scary Spice, but close.
Dude. The 5.5 default skin is very nice! I hated the modern/3.0 variety skins and stuck with an ancient OSX lookalike skin for YEARS. Bento (the new default 5.5 skin) is much cooler though. It has *gasp* changeable colours. Oh, the advances in technology.
Since I’ve been using Winamp and nothing but, it took until the 5.5 release to make me realize that people have been embedding album art and lyrics inside mp3s for years. And I never realized. *sigh* (Most of the mp3s I possess seem to include album art. WTF?)
On 19-Oct-07 at 1:59 pm,
Curious Yellow wrote:
I’ve been using LAME for about 3 years now and I can definitely say it is all about the variable bit rate baby. Don’t do much encoding on it these days because Fopp’s gone out of business and I can’t be bothered to buy any CDs off Amazon.
What is that mp3? I’m on a public terminal at the mo so no sound. And yes, I think the Spice Girls album was the 1st one I encoded but a 5ive album was the first one I came into possession of on CD (horrifying to admit but we have to face our demons someday).
I didn’t know about the embedded album art thing. Most of the LAME stuff that my mate gets off this uber stricr DC hub has the album art in a jpeg in the folder anyway so I thought Amarok was just picking it up from there. I’m going to have a look at 5.5 when I get home.
I too didn’t like the overly futuristic newer version.
But changeable colours? That’s just crazy.