my first mp3

we've come a long long way together...through the hard times, and the good. I have to  celebrate you baby...I have to praise you like I should!

okay, that wasn't it. but first, the story. and before that, thanks to @anishasharma10 for nudging me into this trip down memory lane :)

it was 1999. I was just out of school. I had never heard of mp3s before. and I had this cool, geeky friend joel who was ranting and raving about this awesome new thing called "napster". and consequently, music that was small enough to fit on my pc's (tiny) hard disk.

I'm not sure if the problem was that I couldn't believe him or that I couldn't understand him, but he took it upon himself to demonstrate what the hype was all about.

so one evening after our evening games of cricket (summer vacations were on), he brought his cpu over, and we sat down and figured out how to disconnect my pc's hard disk and connect it to his.

halfway through the adventure, there was a twist: my brother, who was fooling around with the electricals somewhere in the house (yesh, he was all of 12 years old, and messing with live wires. don't ask.) blew our mains fuse and plunged the entire house into darkness.

joel was kinda freaked out (he had taken his pc without permission, I'm sure :D), but my dad bypassed the fuse with some regular electrical wire, and we had light again.

so we then set about transferring stuff.

I remember, he was supposed to give me a c compiler and visual basic (I was interested in learning and vb), and finally my hard disk was almost completely full (I had a 500 mb hard disk back then!)

his parting gift was one mp3.

I didn't choose it.

I didn't even know which one it was till he left and I started browsing the stuff he gave me.

I know for sure that it didn't play the first time I tried loading it (my pic was below the minimum spec of most mp3 playing software).

but I do remember which one it was.

a live performance of eric clapton's "tears in heaven".

and that, ladies and gentlemen, was my first ever mp3.