I recently finished Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg. It covers the development of Chandler, an open source, cross-platform personal information manager (PIM).

A project of the Open Source Applications Foundation and led by Mitch Kapor, Chandler was meant to revolutionize desktop PIM software by eliminating the ’silos’ that separate email messages, contacts, calendar events and to-do tasks and enable peer-to-peer sharing of such information (as opposed to being proprietary and locked-in to a central server, ala MS Outlook and Exchange).

Along the way, Rosenberg delves into the bigger picture of software development by reviewing its history and thought leaders, differing ideas on organization and project management, methods of information sharing and collaboration tools, the open-source and free software movements, contemporary programming languages, modular and object oriented programming concepts, user interface design challenges, coding and quality control issues, and much more.

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Upon re-reading my previous post, I realized that each ‘chapter’ could have a (tongue-in-cheek) title and bit of explanation:

1. The ‘American Top 40′ years: Most of my exposure to new music was either from listening to popular radio, my older sister or a classmate or the occasional middle school dance.
2. The ‘Radical Romper Room’ years: Most of my exposure was from a late-night, local radio show which showcased ‘alternative rock’ and ‘modern music.’ I used to stay up long enough to start recording it on Sundays, then listen to the tape the whole week and note what I liked.
3. The ‘120 Minutes’ years: Same as above, but leads were garnered from videotaping the late-night show on MTV and tracking down what I liked.
4. The ‘long haired’ years: I bought (and sold) a lot of CDs at local record stores, taking a chance on whether I would like it or not.
5. The ‘underground (aka rave/chill-out room)’ years: I acquired music as inspiration for my work — music as the soundtrack to my life.
6. The ‘post-cool/hip’ years: A lot discovered on Much Music, MTV2 and the internet — music as personal identity.
7. The ‘digital/eclectic’ years: Largely discovered on Amazon, iTunes and Usenet — music as supplement rather than center.

/musings.

Every so often I find some time to dig through my digital music library. A while back, I deleted my iTunes library (alas, bloated and slow; come on Apple!) — but not the music source files — and have been sorting through (e.g. must-listen, save-for-someday, mashups, one-hit-wonders, exotic/strange/novelty, vintage), weeding out (no tags = delete!) and adding back to iTunes some favorite and forgotten files from my two 500GB hard drives.

A moment of listening to various songs can evoke vivid memories and take me back to former ‘chapters’ in my life. I’ve noticed that certain music delineates into distinct segments:

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