Did anyone notice I went another thirteen days without posting? I didn't mean for it to be like that, but my internet access has been somewhat curtailed of late. Longtime readers know that I've done a lot of my blogging at work. Last week, one of the front desk machines contracted a nasty trojan, something that embedded itself in the registry and prevented the computer from connecting to it's net-based security software. Corporate had to send us a restore disk and scrub the machine back to factory-spec. A couple of days later, my supervisor comes to me with, "We're not accusing you of anything, but the GM is convinced that whatever we got was downloaded while you were working." It happened while I was off, but somehow it's my fault? Anyway, as fallout from that, all front desk agents had to sign an agreement stating that they'd only use hotel internet access for guest-related activities. I will abide. As such, it's been a long couple of weeks.
I haven't done much since then except download music. Lots of music. I've added a few new artists to the mix, as well as favorites from assorted classics. As stated before, the joy of downloading music is that I no longer have to go broke buying entire albums. If I only like one song, I can pay for that one, and be done with it. Plus, if one knows where to look, there's tons of free stuff out there.
My latest acquisitions include:
AC/DC
Agent Ribbons (free)
Air
Al Di Meola
Alice in Chains
Anna Nalick
Band of Horses (free)
Beach House (free)
Bell X1 (free)
Black Label Society (free)
Blue Man Group feat. Dave Matthews
Boom Boom Satellites
Breaking Benjamin
Bush
Cassie
Chevelle
Civil Twilight
Creed
Crossfade
Cylab
Daft Punk
Deee-lite
DJ Earworm
Ellie Lawson
Feist
Fergie
Foo Fighters
Gnarls Barkley
Godsmack
Gotan Project
Guns N' Roses
Heather Alexander
High and Mighty Color
Jem
Jerry Goldsmith
La Roux
Lia Ices (free)
Lifehouse
Live
Living Colour
Magic Wands (free)
Marcy Playground
Mathew Leutwyler (free)
N2o (free)
The New Mastersounds (free)
Nikka Costa
Nirvana
Papa Roach (free)
Paul Oakenfold
Phil Collins
Philip Glass (free)
Pink
Puddle of Mudd
Regina Spektor
Revis
Rihanna
Robyn
The Roots (free)
Run DMC
Scala & Kolacny Brothers
Seether
Shinedown
Silversun Pickups
Sleigh Bells
Stone Temple Pilots
Sufjan Stevens (free)
Suzanne Vega (free)
Three Days Grace
Tim Minchin
The Ting Tings (free)
Tool
Tosca
Trapt (free)
Tricky (free)
The Who
Yael Naim
That's only the new artists. I've also added to my collections of several artists already existing in my library.
There's not a lot of rhyme or reason to my downloads, either. A lot of the free stuff was downloaded over the course of a couple of days. Amazon has thousands of tracks listed for free; it's just a matter of picking through for the real treasures. Some of the other free tracks came about because I Googled "free mp3" and found links various artists' pages, record company sites and assorted clearing houses. I was on a grunge kick for a couple of days, hence the Alice in Chains, Nirvana and STP. Then I found myself hankering for electronica, and I found myself downloading Moby and Paul Oakenfold.
Take care of that job, no point taking risks.
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of Mickey Mouse security have they got there?
Blog quality not quantity.
Caroline xxx
Trojans don't come from the dodgy sites of popular imagination, they can come from anywhere and everywhere.
ReplyDeleteThe best IT security policy is to accept that viruses are going to happen and put in the best protection measures available.
The worst is to have strict no-this, no-that policies and go on witchhunts for transgressors when a virus happens.
Why? In the former, outbreaks are dealt with as quickly as possible, in the latter if a virus happens on someone's watch the last thing they're going to do is say anything about it so it goes longer undetected and does more harm.
That's a crazy long list of music there. I must be getting old, I've only heard of about half of them.
Jenny,
ReplyDeleteDon't feel bad about not knowing the bands. A lot of the stuff I've downloaded over the summer are bands I learned about from the music system at work. Some of them are songs I heard in commercials, or movie trailers.
I think the virus was in the computers for days before anyone noticed, as I constantly saw prompts come up in the browser bar saying, "This website wants to install Adobe FlashPlayer version X.XX. Do you wish to install?", even though the websites in question never contained any Flash content. I never download anything to a work computer without express permission. I think someone less computer-saavy saw it and assumed it was okay. Then all hell broke loose.