Last night while cleaning my living room I decided to dive back into my vinyl stores and see what might sound good. The funny thing about the vinyl LP collection is that it's not where I turn for my daily music listening needs. As is obvious to anyone who's used a record player and a CD player in the last 20 years, CDs are just simply more convenient and more consistent in sound quality (I am not touching the LP vs. CD quality debate with a ten foot stylus). On top of that, when I listen to vinyl, it's a bit of a ritual, which means that I clean the LPs and make sure that my manual turntable is still as well aligned and adjusted as the last time I used. That means that vinyl listening has to be a directed exercise -- I have to make an effort to listen to LPs.

I only dusted off two LPs last night, but they were great. The first was the first Fishbone album, containing the classics "Party at Ground Zero" and "Lyin' Ass Bitch." But I do have to make a small confession -- that LP's not mine, but actually my girlfriend's, but that doesn't mean it doesn't rock. After refiling the Fishbone platter I ran my eyes across the alphabetically ordered records into the Ds and noticed a black cover without a name on the spine. I pulled it out and was glad to find a record I'd completely forgotten about, "Live at the China Club," by Dramarama, one of New Jersey's most underrated exports during the 1980s. Playing this one brought back memories of my college radio days, where songs like "Last Cigarette" and "Anything, Anything," were minor hits. Although they never achieved much wide success or recognition, with their at times garagey and punky approach, Dramarama stood with the likes of the Smithereens (who, by the way, I saw in Chicago last month at a fun, raucous show at the Metro) to prove that NJ could produce more than Bon Jovi and Springsteen during the 1980s.

I enjoyed the flashback so much that I broke out a blank minidisc and recorded the four songs I highlighted for easier listening on my portable. A tentative title for the MD comp is "Attack of the 80s Vinyl." I'm not good with titles.

Webmonkey has this opinionated overview of Napster alternatives. Download away!

Can't... stop... playing.... 3-D Pong.

Looking at the Wired Rave Awards I noticed the Estonian Genome Foundation. I'd never heard of this, and it's of principal interest to me because I'm half-Estonian on my Dad's side, and you just don't hear too much about Estonia.

Can't the music industry just face the fact that CD sales go down when they jump on a formula and drum into the ground by releasing a constant barrage of copy-cat boyband, nu-metal, teen-pop dreck? Although Napster, the scourge of the music industry, has been all but shut down and useless for the last few months, music sales are still down for the first half of 2001. It's funny how industries will blame everyone but themselves for sales downturns, making the wholly arrogant assumption that a decline in sales can never be related to quality of product. Just like the American auto industry in the 1970s and 1980s which got its ass kicked by cheaper, better Japanese imports, the recording industry better start turning out a better product, both in terms of musical quality and in terms of being useful to people in their homes, computers, cars and portable players, if it expects folks to continue to anty up their hard earned cash for music.

I'm back from a short emergency vacation to Miami Beach FL, which was very relaxing. But the combo of too much saltwater down the back of my throat and a plane ride with horrible pressure have conspired to give me a cold, which is not what I expect from a trip to Miami. It was a last minute cheap flight & hotel deal from Orbitz, and the hotel turned out to be great. It's a little restored art deco place in the middle of Miami Beach, about a mile north of South Beach, called the Indian Creek Hotel. Located on the Indian Creek on one side and two blocks from the beach on the other, the hotel also had a beautiful courtyard with a nicely shaded pool and little lizards running all over the place. The staff of the hotel was great, and the food at their little restaurant was nice. One of the most interesting things to me was the fact that almost all the tourists were from Germany, Italy and Argentia. Which makes sense when you think about it, since it seems like almost all of Europe comes to stop during Aug. for vacation, and it's winter in South America. American tourists go to Florida when it's winter here. Guess I'm just a weirdo... a lot of the Cuban service staff thought we were Europeans.

This one's for the closet neo-classical-prog-rock-metal guitar shredder in me: the Top 50 Worst Guitar Solos of the Millenium. A damn funny and opinionated list that made me want to go back to listen to some of these songs, since, for the life of me, I can't seem to remember any of these solos, 'cept "Free Bird." Of course, I can think of many that are left off. For instance, he misses almost all of late 80s cheese-metal (CC DeVille of Poison couldn't solo his way out of a paper bag. And while I'm considering Mr. DeVille, why is this retarded half-talent showing up perpetually on VH1? Why do we give two shits what this guy has to say about sex and rock, besides the fact that he had plenty of the former with clueless groupies in 1987?). And given his apparent distaste for 80s-style neo-classical guitar wanking, I'm suprised that Yngwie J. Malmsteen isn't anywhere to be found. While Yngwie probably hasn't written a bad solo, he's only written about 2 of them, that he's now repeated for almost 20 years. And what about Steve Vai? Perhaps more accurately, I think this list should be called "Top 50 Most Overrated Guitar Solos."

I mentioned BBSs in my old computer memories post the other day. Now I stumble upon this post on kur5hin announcing a documentary project on BBSs. This guy also apparently hosts an archive of 30,000 BBS-era text files at http://www.textfiles.com/--a pretty amazing feat, if you ask me. Somewhere in my parents' attic there has to be a big box of 5.25" Commodore 64 floppies filled with text files I downloaded in the mid-1980s. Oh, the memories.

"Malaysian pirates turn to home delivery"--it seems the gov't has been cracking down on street vendors selling VCDs, which tend to have a lot of pornography, which is illegal in Malaysia. Makes pirating sound more like high-end drug dealing or prostitution, doesn't it?

Old Computer Memories:
After now reading all the comments made to the previously blogged ZDNet story on people's first computers, I feel compelled to reminice about my first computers.

My first machine was a TI-99/4a which my Dad bought for the family in 1982. We hooked it up to a 13" color TV, since a monitor was around $500, and used a Panasonic cassette recorder for data storage. I quickly learned basic and spent hours upon hours programming my own games and other software. About a year later we got an expansion unit, which was this massive steel box which would fit the floppy drive and expansion cards. We added 32kb of memory, bringing the total system to 48kb, and a speech synthesizer, which I think we got free by buying 6 cartridges. Remember cartridges? All the home computers of the time, including the Commodores, TRS-80s and Ataris used cartridges for a lot of software.

Actually using floppies and not running out of memory made me feel like I was flying high. The expansion also allowed me to start screwing around with assembly language. For some strange reason, out of the box a user could only program in Basic. In fact, you couldn't even load software written in anything besides basic unless it was on a cartridge. The worst thing about this was that TI-Basic was sloooow. In its infinite wisdom, Texas Instruments, had decided that all software to be written for its computer would be in an interpreted language called GPL (Graphics Programming Language, I believe), that was closer to system level than Basic, but still interpreted. And then the Basic was written in GPL. So that meant that every Basic program was double-interpreted, all at a blazing 1.5 Mhz or so.

TI corrected this situation with their Extended Basic, which included machine language subroutines in addition to the ability to add your own, but I think the damage was done by then. All the other major home computers had relatively more open architectures and so software and game developers could more easily write software for them than for the TI. It was too bad, too, since the TI was a 16-bit machine, more like the IBM's 8088, rather than an 8-bit machine, like most home computers. Had the TI not been so hobbled by GPL and TI's wanting to keep software development proprietary it really could have given Atari and Commodore a run for their money.

I used the TI through to about mid-high school when I got a Commodore 64--I think I was 15 or 16, around 1986-7. Although in raw power the C-64 was a step backwards, more of my friends had the C-64, and so free pirated software was much more readily available, as I stacked up a collection of floppies full of games. I added a modem to the C-64 and got into BBSs, which for you youngins, were the precursor to the Internet. I also got a subscription to an online service called Quantum, which I think eventually turned into AOL. I'd been using a computer for schoolwork since the 6th grade, so I almost never handwrote anything. In 1988 I added GEOS to my C-64, which gave it a graphical environment--maybe even some rudimentary multitasking (I can't remember). Not bad for an 8-bit machine, running at 1 Mhz with 64 KB of RAM. I used my joystick like a mouse, and using the GEOS apps I printed reports and things like cassette liners that rivaled stuff a friend of mine made using his relatively new Mac (first generation, all-in-one unit with black&white monitor -- I used to give him a hard time b/c my C-64 had color).

In 1989 I went to college and decided I needed a real computer, so I used my graduation money to buy an IBM P/S2 Model 30-286 (8 Mhz). It came with Windows 1.0 preinstalled, a whole megabyte of memory, a 20 MB hard drive, and VGA graphics on a 14" color monitor. I think it cost somewhere around $2500 (compared to my C-64 which cost about $200 by the time I bought one). I found Windows 1.0 pretty useful for anything besides the Paint program, and mostly used MS Word 4.0 for DOS and other DOS apps. I did upgrade to Windows 3.0 when it came out in '91, but it was kind of a dog, given that I still only had 1 MB of memory. When I got the PS/2 I was the only person on my dorm floor with a computer, and I had one of the most powerful computers around altogether, since most other students were using PC clones with 8086s or even still using C-64s, though Commodore was getting into financial trouble by then--I think that's why I didn't bother with an Amiga.

I used the PS/2 throughout college and into my first couple of years of grad school. I even installed a 14.4 modem in 1993 so I could dial into the University and get my e-mail and surf Gopher at a decent speed. (My college didn't have Internet or dial-in until after I graduated).

The PS/2 was retired in 1995 when I upgraded to a homebrew PC running an AMD 486 clone at 100 Mhz. AFter that I've spent a lot of time using and upgrading my machines, but somehow they lack that fun and magic of my old machines (I think maybe the TI and C-64 are still at my parents' house). Oh, the (kinda) good ol' days...

I'm also enjoying this ZDNet series on the PC's 20th anniversary. I'm especially enjoying the articles on the pre-IBM PC's, like the TRS-80, which are closer to my heart. See, in 1981 I was 10 years old, and got my first computer a year later--a TI-99/4a. By that time I'd already played with Apple IIs and TRS-80s, but it would be years before I'd even touch an IBM PC, since it was a "business computer" and cost much more than these "home computers."

I'm addicted to filepile. Some of my favorite files of the moment: shrine to David Hasellhoff, choo choo charlie, safety tips from anubis.gif.

One of the purported rationales behind my main site-with-blog, mediageek, is to help faciliate do-it-yourself media. Unfortunately, the site tends to more blog than anything else, though I always intend to expand the DIY section. So, it should be clear that I'm down with the DIY ethic. I found and bookmarked this site called MisterRidiculous.com, but then didn't remember why I bookmarked it. I went back and found a cool DIY section with articles on everything from making guitar picks to making your own cheap jug wine (DIY-Boone's Farm). Though some of these things might seem silly, normally you still need to go to a store and buy guitar picks that some company had to build a factory to make--can't be that silly.

I'm sure you don't need me to point out that it's the ethic behind so much of the growth of the Internet and the Indymedia mov't (but somehow I'm pointing it out anyway). So, do it already.

Last night I saw a killer show at the Highdive: Drums and Tuba. Three guys, one set of drums, two guitars and one tuba. They played a one-hour late set for $3.00 and it was worth it. I had heard they're CDs while I was still doing a show at WEFT, so I knew a bit of what to expect--funky, heavy instrumental rock that calls into play the Minutemen, Parliament and Captain Beefheart. That's what I got, but to watch them actually execute it was a treat. The tuba player sits behind a rack of electronics which sounds like it contains a sampler and some midi stuff. On many songs he lays down a funky tuba bass line which he samples and loops live, and then plays over, sometimes layering on effects making the tuba into big fat synth. The guitarist sometimes plays two guitars--wearing one, one on a stand--using a pitch shifter to lay down another bass line. It's all held down by the drummer, who also frequently playing along with his own loops. It's a dense sound that never gets too busy, and is all about the groove. I talked to the drummer at the bar for a minute or two before the show, and they're on their way home from a 63 date tour. But according to their website they've got more dates coming up--I recommend catching them if you can.

This is the first posting to my personal weblog, which is a companion to my mediageek blog. That blog focuses on issues, news and ideas having to do with DIY, grassroots and indie media, whereas with this here blog I'll post things that interest me generally. And so this will be less focused, more eclectic, and, I guess, more blog-like... at least more like most other personal blogs. Whether I end up actually using it, who knows? If you want to know who "I" am, you can look at the about page for mediageek.