mike parr's pages

top ten

Music

In no particular order...

• 'Juke' - Little Walter. The king of the amplified blues harp. Great sense of swing
• 'See See Rider' - leadbelly. This is unusual. Here, he plays slide guitar. Much more bluesy than his other 'songster' stuff.
• 'Foggy Mountain breakdown' - Earl Scruggs. Earl wrote the book on Bluegrass banjo in the late forties, and this track became popular from the movie @Bonnie and Clyde'
• 'Green Onions'. Booker T and the MGs. Great groove. The guitar playing is not flashy, but no-one else was playing like this at the time. Some of the MGs appeared in 'The Blues Brothers'
• 'Itchycoo park' - The Small Faces. Check out the final 'Haa' near the end!
• 'Talking 'bout you' - Ray Charles. Here because more people are listening to him (movie 'Ray'). This song was covered by the Animals on the B-side of House of the Rising Sun.
• 'All along the Watchtower' - Jimi. Not much to say about this.
• 'Shame shame shame' - the Merseybeats. Released on an EP, this is a proto-punk version of Jimmy Reed's R&B classic. They had a great singer (Tony Crane) but here, the bass player (Aaron Williams ? ) sings, in an exceptionally primitive manner.
• 'Casbah' - Bert Jansch. From his first album. Apparently, the titles of the instrumentals got mixed up - I'm talking about the slow 3/4 time one.

Computing

• Anders Hejlsberg - once wrote a full Pascal compiler and IDE for CP/M, which worked in 64K. Then went on to create Borland Delphi, and the C# for Microsoft.
• Delphi - Pascal with classes, plus a great IDE. A VB-style GUI, and a joy to use. produces amazingly small code in exe files.
• The Amstrad NC200 notebook. An early laptop. This grew out of Amstrad's PCW computer - a pre-PC machine, excellent at what is was designed for. The NC200 uses torch batteries, has instant-on, and a nice keyboard. Has a floppy drive to allow transfer of files to PC. Alan Sugar wrote the first few pages of the manual.
• Python language. I'm new to this. Seems very clean, does what you expect.
• Unix.