Boricua 4 Life!

So I've got a hangover. Not a terrible one, but just enough to annoy the hell out of me. Just enough that I can't be bothered by incompetence, especially my own. Unfortunately, I got out of the retarded side of bed this morning.

I subscribe to Yahoo's LAUNCHcast music thing. It's a form of internet radio. I have the upgraded, subscription service. It's worth it. You can fine tune it (sort of, see below) to play the types of music you want, and it actually has an amazing amount of variety. It has its share of bugs and glitches, but its a godsend at work.

My cubicle buddy and training partner is out of the office today, so I was lucky enough to be able to head straight to my desk, turn on LAUNCH, and pretend to get to work. Things were going fine for about forty five minutes. LAUNCH was playing good songs and no one was bothering me. I guess it was about 8:30 when things started going downhill.

One of the best things about LAUNCH is you can skip as many times as you want. The software continually 'recommends' songs you might like based on your preferences, and if you get a dud you can just skip it. I love this, as few stations let you do it. But excessive skipping tends to make the application act buggy, and sometimes crash altogether. Not the end of the world, as you can just fire it up again.

One of the worst things about LAUNCH is that it often 'recommends' complete fucking crap. When it actually recommends something good, it will show a message that reads "This song is popular with fans of (insert band or record)." These are things I can deal with. What I cannot stand is the messages that say "This song is popular on LAUNCHcast." You can only imagine the shit that passes for popular. So even though I've banned country, rap, pop, and god knows what else I still get the occasional tracks that make me weep for the future of music. If I've got bands like Fugazi and Minor Threat rated highly, can't LAUNCH pretty much assume I'm going to hate everything on the country, pop and urban charts? I mean, can that be that hard to figure out?

Sitting in my cubicle this morning, I'm happily wasting the first hour of work rocking out to my emo cryfest when some horrible Latino hip hop song comes on. I'm nearly deaf, so I've got the volume turned up very high and the change in music is startling (and disappointing, and frustrating). I understand that this new kind of hip hop is getting very popular, but it's probably safe to say thirty year old white emo guys are not the target audience. I fumble to bring up the correct window so I can ban the song and artist (of course the genre is already banned- thanks LAUNCH).

I skip the song and the goddamn thing glitches. I get a Windows error and the application closes, but the fucking song is still playing! I bring up the processes window and can't see the fucking thing running, yet it's still blaring in my headphones. I take them off, and I've got the volume up so loud I can still hear the song. I'm very professional at work, and I'm embarrassed that my nearby cubicle mates can hear what I'm listening to. I'm sure they can hear my punk stuff sometimes, but I can live with that. What I can't live with is the image of the old white guy pumping the hip hop. I loved this stuff when I was a kid, but that was damn near fifteen years ago. Like I said before, it doesn't quite speak to me like it does to my younger amigos.

So I mentioned I'm hungover, and it doesn't occur to me to turn down the system volume. Instead I get the bright idea to reach behind my laptop and unplug my headphones. I would like to stress that this was a very bad decision. By default the laptop switches to its external speaker, so now I'm broadcasting Spanish profanities at full volume to everyone in my department. Suddenly 8:30am in Reston becomes the Boogie Down Bronx. I panic, and reach behind my laptop to try to plug the headphones back in. I'm already shaky from last night's Budweisers, and the embarrassment doesn't help. Heads begin to appear over my cubicle walls. I finally plug the fucking things back in. I don't even bother to explain what happened, I'm too busy counting the seconds 'til five o'clock.