It all started in the winter term of 2002, directly after my 2B school term. I was returning as an intern to a meidcal imaging company known as Cedara Software Corp. in Mississauga, Ontario. The company was having a Christmas Concert in late december, which was just planned as an afternoon where the employees could gather together for some grub and christmas caroling. However, one of the interns had the brilliant idea of forming a band and performing at the Concert. As luck would have it, of the seven interns we had at Cedara ( all from Waterloo of course! ), we just so happened to have 2 singers, several acoustic guitars, a bass guitar and a drummer!

With time and good fortune on our side, our band of 6 was formed. The only intern left out actually had piano experience, but was a bit too reserved for actually performing. Luckily enough, he was also the only one with a digital camcorder, and made his contribution by recording and distributing our performance in mpeg form. =)

Of course, any band needs a name, and we spent several lunch hours contemplating one. In the end, the most compelling one emerged through the following digression: "the COOPS? naw, too lame! we want something that portrays us like the slackers we are, hrmm, how bout The Slackers? ....might be a bit too obvious a name to give in front of all our bosses, we want subtlety here - I've got it - we'll call ourselves the 'Alt-Tabbers'!"

So after spending the better part of two weeks finalizing the desired song list, we decided to eschew any potential christmas candidate and to go for some good old school rock music! We figured everyone would be sick of carolling and christmasy stuff after several hours of the choir going through it's paces. So after almost two weeks of practice with subsets of the group ( we actually only had our full group together for about one practice session! ) we were set for the big day!

All in all, this was my first experience with music, and my first experience singing, let alone performing in a band, in front of an audience approaching 80-100 people! But I have to say that the whole experience was definitely a thrill and a pleasure for me, performing music and entertaining people is definitely an awesome past-time that I'd love to try my hand at again. =)

I wish I could share the 700 meg video we have of our full performance, but it is a bit ridiculous to host and/or download on a small personal page like this, and even selected songs from that would still be a bit too large for the average surfer, so I've just made an mp3 of one of the songs that I sung, check it out below!

I should probably also mention to everyone that the performance was a great success! Everyone loved it, and the CEO even gave us a bottle of champagne to reward our effort. =) Perhaps one of the more gratifying compliments we got was the candid questions of people wondering if we had been hired by Cedara to perform at the Concert!! Haha, good times for sure!

Lastly, I should mention that all this success was not easy by any means, and we did practice fairly hard to get ourselves into decent shape for the performance. At least, some of us had to, with two people just trying to remember how to play guitar, and myself learning how to sing solo, which is significantly harder than just singing along to your favorite song, which is something I commonly do. The songs that I sung lead for were ( see the list below ) the two ones by Oasis and another by Tonic.