Here, kick your day up a notch. Watching this certainly brightened up my day. It’s easily one of the best television theme songs of all time.
Geek
Betamax.
Back in the early and mid 1980s I used to trade music videos on videotape with my friend Scott. I’d record them off of “Friday Night Videos” while he recorded them off of MTV (the cable TV didn’t come up the road until 1988, Scott lived closer to town). The big chore was the actual trading; my father had bought us a VHS recorder when they first came out, Scott had a Betamax machine. Of course the two tapes would never mingle so you had to jimmy up wiring to record between the two. We’d have an occasional discussion about VHS vs Betamax. VHS eventually won. It’s still winning up in my Dad’s neck of the woods.
In this round of another Betamax versus VHS fight, Sony won out today with their Blu-ray format of high definition DVDs. So Earl and I are on the Betamax side of the line this time with the HD-DVD player sitting in our living room. Anyone want to buy an HD-DVD drive for cheap? Hell, you can buy the whole tricked out Xbox 360, just drop me a line for details. We want a Wii.
Weekend Merriment.
Earl and I have installed ourselves in the local Panera for some brunch. Even though it’s not officially lunch time yet (it’s before noon), I’ve already enjoyed a cup of tomato soup and half of a tuna salad sandwich. I’m not much of a tuna fish fan but this was rather tasty. It was a pleasant surprise.
Our weekend has been rather uneventful thus far. I worked at the bar Friday night. It was an odd night; there were a lot of young folks there (as observed by Grandpa J.P. in the DJ booth) and these young whippersnappers can not hold their alcohol at all. I worked at this bar almost every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night from 1992 to 2001 before starting up again a couple of weeks ago. I’ve never had the pleasure of: 1. not being able to use the men’s room because there were people getting sick all over the place and 2. not being able to use the backup plan, the ladies’ room, because there were two lesbians going to town over the single toilet in there. You think they could have locked the door or something.
Frightening.
I ended up holding it until the bouncers got the bathrooms under control. And the beat of the music went faster and faster until my chance to hit the head came.
I was then asked by a patron when I was going to start playing dance music. That does not amuse me.
Nevertheless, I shut the door on the DJ booth, switched over to beer and enjoyed the evening.
Yesterday Earl and I went for a little road trip. We ended up at EastView Mall in Rochester. I wanted to go to the Apple store since we have tax returns in our possession and we haven’t seriously upgraded our computers in three years or so. Earl and I looked over all that the world of Mac has to offer and have decided on what we are going to buy. We are going to sit on the decision for a week before making the purchases, but I’m going to be adding a 24-inch iMac to the stable (for audio and video editing), which will allow me to move my day to day computing to the Intel Mac-Mini currently in the studio, which in turns allows me to retire my PowerBook to mobile and DJ computing only. Earl will be moving to an iMac as well, which will allow us to move his Mac Mini into our “recreation room” in the basement, which allows us to move the Dell out of the house and probably into my mother’s arms. Earl will continue to get mobile on his iBook, which now lives in one of our spare bedrooms (we call it the boy room for the rotating houseboys we have).
Whew, it’s tough keeping track of all these things geeky.
After our window shopping at EastView, we made our way to the Cheesecake Factory and after a 70 minute wait we had a delicious meal and some cheesecake before heading home. I had my first Cosmo last night and it knocked me on my ass; Earl drove us halfway home while I snoozed and then I finished the drive.
Today is a maintenance day; on the agenda we have homework, laundry and grocery shopping, as well as video and audio editing and whatnot. So much for a day of rest.
One Thin Wire.
Back when I was a kid if some neighborhood geek blew up the local telephone party-line as a result of messing around with the telephone (I wonder who did that?), the Continental Telephone Company was out making the necessary repairs within a couple of hours of said experimentation. It didn’t matter what was involved, they did what they had to do to have dial tone to their customers before the end of the day. In no time Beulah was back chatting with Maude about what the latest “Gabbing with Gen” column in the local paper was about.
It was a given that the telephone would work when you picked up the receiver.
Fast forward to today. More reliant than ever on that thin piece of copper, many count on their telephone or cable connection to keep tabs on the rest of the world. They chat with friends, they watch life-changing videos (read pr0n) and their telephone service goes over this vast network of tubes we call the Internet.
Why does it take nearly 24 hours for the repair to come to the door?
Our internet connection has been sporadically flaky for the past several weeks. It would disappear for hours at a time and then magically return on it’s own. Having worked in the industry for several years, this type of behavior pointed to human error; someone had cross-connected the wrong wire, someone had powered down the wrong piece of equipment, or someone was setting up a field cross-box for potential overtime. We’d ride it out for a couple of hours and I’d bitch about the incident via Twitter over my iPhone connection.
And then all was right with the world.
Yesterday morning the internet connection just died. It didn’t fade away like it usually does, it just went buh-bye. After listening to a message announcing that the cable television/high speed internet service number had been disconnected (and the new one is unlisted!), I finally bluffed my way through a number in California that transferred me to the right department. The friendly technician named Brian told me there was a wide spread outage.
Turns out it was so widespread that it was two states away. Uh, no. After calling back to find out the ETR (estimated time of repair – it throws them off when I use industry lingo, Chuck), I was informed that I was misinformed and that they would have to send out a technician. “Tomorrow”. “We can squeeze you in between 8 and noon”.
“But I need to leave at 11:30.”
“We can not alter the time frame. We have 8 to noon or 1 to 5”
“Is that a commandment?”
Unfazed, the response was “No sir, what time are you available?” I mumbled 8 to noon and then got very antsy for the remainder of the day and night.
My Twitter messages via iPhone were becoming more desperate:
“No Internet connection again. No afternoon porn break.”
“The tech support number for Time Warner has been disconnected. Welcome to American customer service.”
“The Internet outage here didn’t really exist. They’ve scheduled an spot for tomorrow a.m. Roadrunner sucks skanky balls.”
“Its official. RoadRunner blows chunks.”
“My God I’m watching American Idol due to no Internet. At least Chase the bear was cute.”
The merriment continued today:
“Waking up to still no Internet is hard to do”
Impressively, Rob the cable guy came to the house at 9:20. His first proclamation was, “I remember you! It’s down again?” He made his equipment beep and told me that a line crew would be out to the house within the next 48 hours.
I didn’t kill Rob, for he did something that made our internet connection at least trickle.
Surprisingly, the cable crew was out here within an hour and they spent several hours replacing everything except the cable that runs under the driveway. As the tech told me, “whoever buried the cable under the driveway knew what they were doing, it’s four times bigger than it needs to be and it’s a dry as the Sahara.” I guess that’s good.
So today we are once again live on the internet. Let’s hope there isn’t a geek somewhere in the neighborhood experimenting with the wires.
Financially Responsible.
So I just got back from running errands: delivering Earl his lunch (he calls it a lunch kettle, I call it a lunch pail) of a sandwich, chips and other goodies and whatnot and then dashing off to the AT&T store to pick up a charger for his latest cell phone from work. (He didn’t know why he had all these extra chargers in his desk, so he chucked them. Turns out he chucked one too many). While I was out and about I stopped at Best Buy and couldn’t help but take a walk through the computer department. I enjoy drinking in the scent of geek.
I haven’t been paying much attention to PCs for quite a while. I’ve been quite content with my PowerBook and the other Macs strewn throughout the house. However, the PowerBook is starting to show it’s age and Earl’s Mac Mini setup is pushed to the limits nightly so I’m thinking we might need to do some computer upgrades soon. I’ve had my eye on an iMac for Earl and that clocks in around $1400 after all is said and done.
Looking through Best Buy I spotted an impressive Dell desktop computer. While not as sleek looking as a Mac, I have to admit that Dell is showing signs of “getting it”. With this particular computer we get triple the RAM, double the hard drive space, double the hard drive speed and double the video card RAM for $599. Throw in a 19-inch widescreen flat panel monitor and we are talking $894. The only drawback? It runs Windows Vista.
Now, while I’m primarily a Mac guy these days and I often preach about the beauty of all things Apple, I do have a soft spot for Windows as well. Most Mac fanboys are anti-Microsoft but I really don’t subscribe to that (unless I’m swearing at Windows for it’s latest WTF moment). Back when I was a baby geek I “grew up” with Windows having first run the software back with Windows/286 in 1988. I have Vista running on the lone PC in the house and it does what I need it to do very well. I support Windows on many of the computers throughout my family. It might be clunky at times but it’s functional and it’s comfortable.
I would absolutely love me some Mac but I find it hard to justify the price (especially as a struggling college student) when I can get three times the computer for half the price.
Earl and I will probably end up sticking it out with our current computing setup. However, if the winds blow the right way and money falls from the tree in the back yard, I can say that it would be much easier to justify buying this Dell computer over an iMac when I made my pitch to the big guy.
Updates.
So today is *the* day that Mac geeks all over the world look forward to. Today was Steve Jobs’ yearly keynote speech at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.
Oh my goodness. Within ten minutes of the end of Steve’s presentation, my iPhone was updating its software (with a little help from me). iTunes and Quicktime quickly followed suit on the various computers around the house. The only update left is the AppleTV and that is coming out in a couple of weeks.
Earl is out of town on business tonight so I have plenty of time to play with the computers and do the geek thing all night long. I’m sure there’ll be a video to share soon as well.
Bid On This.
What has happened to ebay? Browsing through the famous auction site used to be like walking through someone’s garage sale; you’d take your time to browse and perhaps find a treasure that someone else thought was just junk. You’d offer some money for the item, niceties would be exchanged and they’d get the money for their junk while you’d add another item to your collection of stuff.
It used to be so simple.
These days it’s like being forced to go through your local Wal*Mart (Always White Trash, Always) while sober. Lights flash, ads play, snipers bid at the very last possible second, squashing any chance of you winning an item because you can’t press ENTER fast enough, people are downright nasty in their e-mails and nearly illiterate people type questions and answers in all capital letters while mangling the English language in an astounding number of ways.
I sold my HP laptop on ebay. I will admit that I neglected to include the remote control that came with the computer when I shipped it so I am making good by shipping it out. On the other hand, I threw in a carrying case and a large amount of Windows based software that I have no use for. I didn’t charge for the software, I threw it in for free.
And the winner is still bitching about it, mainly because he can’t figure out how to work the computer and install the software I included with the auction. He also claims that the power connector was broken in which it wasn’t when it left here.
So here we are, 08 January 2008 and I am declaring it to the world in my typical “one extreme or another” fashion.
I’m done with ebay. Fin. Finito. It’s a wrap.
