Hilarous NTU lecturer.

Courtesy of Joelle, who posted the link in Cowboy bar.

It's the music delivery, not the music genre.

Friends who knows me, knows that I am a jazz fan, and most of my hang out places are jazz bars like Jazz @ Southbridge, or Harry's at Boat Quay.

Growing up, most of my music exposure was musicals (think Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, etc.), classical and the occassional top 40s. Rock songs do not appeal to me.

And yet, I try to go down to Wala's for my monthly fix of music from the Unexpected, which plays rock.

Today, as I watched Shirlyn and gang perform at Walas, it suddenly struck me why I began to listen to these rock songs.

It's not about the music genre.

It's about the delivery of the music. The powerful vocal chords, the running notes of the electric guitar solo, the crisp and fast staccato drum beats, and the synergy between the band members. That was what that made listening to this band so enjoyable.

Even IT techies makes such mistakes too.

In the middle of a concert on a Saturday night, I received an urgent message from my engineer.

"After the office power shutdown and start up, one server crashed", he SMSed.

"Which server?"

"The database server"

"Which component failed?"

"I am not too sure. The server could not boot up, but if I switched the hard disks to another server, it works. The monitor screen is blank"

"At least the data is still intact. It should be a hardware controller failure. Call DELL and get the hardware replaced. I will be in office at 9am to sort this out".

And so here I was in office, on a Sunday morning at 9am, troubleshooting the server with the DELL engineer. And we discovered that the reason why the monitor screen was blank, was because the cable attached to the monitor was disconnected. All those worrying and the sleepless night, because of a disconnected cable.

I need a beer