The roads I take...

I just sat down to play a bit of guitar, and while I'm a quite mediocre player (probably due to lack of practice to a good part), I've written an number of songs - all in all I should have reached about 280, though some of those are only a few lines that never grew to a full song, and some are just new lyrics to existing songs. I taught myself to play guitar roughly 20 years ago, just from a chord table, mainly to be able to accompany my own songs, actually, and this is still one of the major reasons I play.

When I felt like it and took out some of my older songs to play through, I realized how ago long it really was, roughly 20 years ago, in 1992, when I wrote the first lyrics and full songs. Hard to believe even for myself, who lived through all of it! Man, it's been "ages" since I started to contribute to Mozilla in 1999, but this goes back even much further - and some of those songs still aren't too bad (granted, some of the lyrics I wrote as a 14-year-old sound naive today, but it's interesting how little of it, though that could just be me looking at myself).

Earlier today, I quoted some Country Music lyrics in a Mozilla IRC channel, and apparently it surprised people who know me pretty well Mozilla-wise that I'm a huge country fan, or there were even any outside the rural Southern US.
In fact, my dad played the drums in a country band in the 1990s (which inspired me a lot music-wise) and we have a pretty vivid country scene here in Austria - not mainstream, but good enough for common people to go to events and to have a thousand people or so at some of them. My dad stopped playing because being the CEO of a small company and having a family was ultimately more important to him, but the love of this kind of music stuck with him as well as my mum and myself. I continued writing songs, playing the guitar when I have time, listening to a lot of Country Music - and when I started singing Karaoke regularly, I took that music with me and I'm known in my regular Karaoke bar as the one who sings country stuff all the time.

Mentioning my dad being the CEO of a small company reminds me of him telling me sometimes how interesting it is that a lot of successful managers seems to be playing an instrument or sing in a band - possibly because both require a lot of harmonizing with those around you. And that reminds me of a brown bag session I attended via video earlier today on how to be a good manager (I'm technically in program management now but I don't manage any people, still I'm interested in those topics). I wonder how many Mozilla managers have music as one of their hobbies...