The 1998 Series (Part Two).

Sorry for missing for so long. Have been quite busy lately with work and sometimes I don’t even have time during lunch to pen my entries. And as usual, once I’m at home, writing on my journal isn’t too high on my daily to-do list. But tonight I somehow managed to gather some momentum, so I decided to continue on my 1998 series.

When I was in JC, one of my friends introduced me to J-Pop. He was a big fan of MAX, who earned their fame under Namie Amuro. Being ever so interested in learning something new, I decided to try listening to J-Pop and I must say that I was kinda hooked from the word go. During that period, I started out listening to MAX and Speed. But after a while, when I bought a compilation album from Nanase Aikawa, I changed my taste from J-Pop to J-Rock. It wasn’t difficult to make that switch, the poppy songs were kinda getting boring after a while (strange that I’m enjoying K-Pop so much now though)

ID by Aikawa Nanase – The album that changed my life!

After Aikawa Nanase, I got introduced to acts like Luna Sea, Glay, Mr. Children and B’z by my other friends and for a good while, I made sure that my Discman was always playing some J-Rock music. I think most of the time I was listening to Luna Sea and Glay though. Until now, I still think songs like “I for You” by Luna Sea, “However” by Glay and “今夜月の見える丘に” by B’z were real classics. And nowadays I would switch on my Winamp to play a few of those classics every once in a while.

Talking about Winamp – I was first introduced to this little application back in 1998. I think one of my classmates came over to my house and saw that I didn’t have that on my PC. He was saying how amazing that program was and how it was able to play near-CD quality songs. Even though I was studying computer science, I had no idea then because I used the Internet primarily for my football needs (I started my online days back in 1996 using a 33.6 modem). So he volunteered to install it for me, and also helped me download a few MP3’s for me to try. That changed my life. After that, I was always busy decoding and encoding my CDs into MP3’s, and using Winamp, I was able to listen to the songs easily on my PC. That was really fun – I still remembered I was always on the lookout of pretty Winamp skins to decorate the player. But after a while, I thought that the classic skin was probably the most effective one. Haha!

1998 was also the year when I laid my hands on “broadband” Internet – I managed to persuade my mum to fork out S$60 per month to subscribe to Singtel Magix – essentially an ADSL service. When I first started playing on Singtel Magix, I was really enjoying the fast speed that the 33.6K modem couldn’t give me. But the problem was, I only had 30 hours of access time per month (back in those days unlimited Internet access was something that we could only dream about), so I had to be really watchful of my access. But no matter how careful I was, I was always over the cap, which meant that I (or in reality, my mum) had to pay additional surcharges. Singtel Magix was my main access to the Internet until about a year and a half into my army life, and I must say that it served me well. After that, Singapore Cable Vision came up with this cable modem which was even faster. And I think that was when I cut my subscription of Magix and switched to the cable modem. When I looked back, ADSL at 128k was considered high speed, and now if I were to be given a connection at 128k, I would probably scream at a few people.

Singtel Magix – when 128k was considered “broadband”…

Studying in a JC meant that it was back to a co-ed school for me after 4 miserable years in a boys’ school. While I had my twice-weekly German lessons to so-call soothe the misery and get to be in the same class as girls, it just was different. Of course, being at that age, and being in an environment where you’ll see the opposite gender everyday, it was natural for me to develop crushes on people. I guess I’ll come to that in a later part. I mean, you know I would be writing that anyway, right?