What? Another Blog?

Having blogged pretty regularly for the past 4 years, the shape of my main blog has turned very personal and creative, and I'm grateful to have that forum. But there are some far more geeky things I need to tell you about - real stories about working in IT in the 1990s when everything changed. Stories about working with music technology. Stories about strange interactions with real people.

And I want to share these stories with more people, but I don't imagine those people want or need to know everything about my summer vacations or my kids' cute stories. This new blog will be where I host the truly nerdy stories about 3 1/2" floppy disks, 5 1/4" floppy disks, and even 8" floppy disks. Visitors will get all geek, nothing heartwarming.

So I need to re-introduce myself here: I'm Jimmy B - Raised in Minneapolis. Bought my first synthesizer (a Yamaha DX9) in 1984 and my first Mac (a used 256k Mac) in 1986. Liberal arts educated, record store clerk, coffee roaster, barista, and almost accidentally, computer programmer. Through it all, I also have had an active music life, performing live, arranging music for film and choreography, a brief stint in advertising, and even writing backing tracks for lounge singers.

So I'll be telling these stories here... and to help you place these events, I'll preface each story with an approximate date. The blog is Tales from the Nineties, but I'm not ashamed to say there'll be some stories from the late 1980s in there, and a few from the early 2000s. We'll stop there, because I want to use as many real names as possible, and once you gel close to that 7 year window, people get touchy.

Why the 1990s? It was a period of huge upheaval - the dotcom bubble started, the traditional view of what Information Technology was capable of was dying, the internet was growing, and music was moving from the studio to the bedroom. I was in the middle of this, and saw some interesting things. For some, the 1990s is still a little too "close" - we're only really getting comfortable with 1980s nostalgia these days. In some ways, there's a lot of the 1990s that people still consider "current" - think about how many Seinfeld quotes or Simpsons season 2-12 episodes you still hold dear... we're still not OUT of the 1990s in many ways.

But it's time to start looking back at the stories of this time... I hope you enjoy this blog. I'll leave comments open if you want to join in the discussion. All stories will be true to the best of my recollection. I promise.