Author: jkonrath

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orange county

I think all of the FBI business calmed down by Friday or so, and I spent most of the weekend moping around, trying to make some progress on things, but mostly just passing the hours from when I got out of bed to when I got into bed, and then making sure that I was sufficiently passed out for the in-bed hours, which always seems to be a trick, except when I take a mid-day nap that demolishes my sleep cycle. I didn’t have any grand Memorial Day plans, other than to not do anything. That always seems to be the plan on most weekends, and it never really seems like it happens.

I don’t know. I watched the movie Orange County this weekend. It’s not that incredible or mind-blowing of a flick, although Jack Black’s character is pretty good in it. It’s mostly the sort of build-up-tension-with-fakeouts sort of plot that would make a Julia Roberts movie look sophisticated. But the one thing is that it’s got a main character, a kid who wants to become a writer, and becomes obsessed with writing almost constantly. It’s similar to one of the things I took from the movie Almost Famous, the Lester Bangs character that talked about how on some nights, he just sat at the typewriter and wrote and wrote for hours. And both of those made me wish I was spending all of my free time writing for hours, just scribbling in notebooks until every blank page turned filled, or chipping away at some mystic novel and before I turn back to look, I’ve got a quarter-million words behind me.

But I don’t do those things, and I almost never write anymore, and that depresses me. And part of it is the lack of projects on my horizon, the lack of any concrete thing that I should be filling with words. And part of it is this general apathy because so many things around me are eating away at me, each one taking a tiny part of my energy. When it comes down to it, I sometimes have the hours to write, but I simply don’t have the motivation to sit in the chair and put my hands on the keyboard and make the cursor spit out words as it coasts from left to right in my document buffer.

I spent part of the weekend trying to think about reorganizing media in my apartment, trying to find places to put new shelves, trying to find new ways to stack books or hide boxes of magazines under other furniture or whatever else. I’m not saying I DID any of these things, I just thought about it, and then I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond to look at shelves and other storage solutions meant to provide my life with more completeness. I didn’t find anything that worked that I wanted to buy that second, but I did see many things that I would buy at some point if I had money burning a hole in my pocket and wasn’t going on vacation in 19 days. Instead, I spent twenty bucks on a zen rock garden fountain for my desk, and rearranged the piles of bills and papers and other crap to get the thing assembled. It looks nice sitting next to the black-framed ViewSonic flatscreen LCD, since the bigger slate pieces are also black, and although the most frequent complaint about these things is the sound of the pump, it’s more quiet than the Athlon power supply under the desk, so no worries there.

Actually, I’ve always wondered about combining the two technologies: a water-cooled manifold on a CPU, with hoses that run out of a case and are connected to a display fountain up on the desk. The fountain would cool down the water, and it would cycle back into the case. Has anyone done this? It’s a thought.

Okay, awaiting food so I can eat so I can write…

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Fun and profit when one of your zine writers joins Al-Quaeda

Okay, things have been weird here lately. Let me explain, although this story doesn’t have much of an ending.

I got home from work on Wednesday and had a message on my machine, which was from a reporter at Knight-Ridder. He wanted to ask me how I felt about “having one of my writers be a member of a known terror group”. My initial reaction to this was “what the fuck is he talking about?” Then he mentioned the name Adam Gadahn, and I hit the computer, firing up google in one browser window, CNN in the other.

John Ashcroft and crew had released a new terror warning that afternoon, and that included a list of seven people wanted or wanted for questioning, along with a group of seven headshots that were immediately glued all over the usual news sites. I didn’t recognize any of them, but the newest addition to the list was a US citizen by the name of Adam Gadahn, and I knew where the reporter’s call came from, and why I was associated with the guy. I immediately checked to see how bad the damage would be and exactly where I might have mentioned his name.

Here’s the deal: I used to run a music fanzine called Xenocide. It was a photocopied pile of pages stapled together, filled with music reviews, interviews, and other news about underground heavy metal bands, particularly Death Metal bands, which were big at that time. In addition to trading and selling these zines through the mail, I also posted ASCII copies to various heavy metal newsgroups on the internet, in hopes of meeting new people, and mostly to get more free stuff from bands are record labels.

Back in 1993, as I was preparing for the fifth issue of the zine, I started to get mail from this guy named Adam. I don’t remember much of the exchanges, and I don’t have copies of anything but two paper letters, but he did send me some record reviews for some of his favorite stuff, and I folded them into the rest of my other writing. He seemed like a cool enough guy, not overtly into the whole campy Satanism thing, not too weird, and he always sent me artwork, like little scribbled or doodled zombies or demons or whatnot.

We traded mails a few times, and I printed about six of his reviews in Xenocide 5. I also mentioned his name there, and used some of his artwork. The copy went out to usenet (but not the art), and I didn’t hear much more from him. I never did another issue of the zine, out of general lack of momentum, and two years later I graduated and moved to Seattle. I actually heard from Adam again in November of 1995 at my new job and new email address, except he was calling himself Yahiye then. (He’d always signed his artwork “yagadahn”, but I figured he had dumb hippy parents that named him “Yellowsun” or something, so he just went by Adam.) I exchanged a couple of emails with him then, mostly on the “hey, what’s been up” level, but they didn’t mention terror camps or Islam conversion.

And that’s it. He didn’t seem like a nutjob, he didn’t send me a giant diatribe on the teachings of Muhammed, and I never met him in person or talked to him. But, that issue of Xenocide lingered in Google, and when the story broke on Wednesday, I was the only search result in Google that wasn’t some Islam web resource.

So, in the last few days, I’ve heard from Time, Fox News, AP, and a couple of independent reporters. I also got a call from the FBI, following up on the whole thing. There’s not much to say about it though: we traded some mails, he wrote some reviews, but I could not vouch for his personality, explain his motives, or give any details on his whereabouts.

Normally, I’d be much more sarcastic about this, or try to twist the story a bit to get a laugh or two, but it’s hard to be anything but serious when you come home from work and you have a message from the FBI on your answering machine. Do I think Adam is a terrorist? I don’t know. Do I think that the evils of heavy metal caused him to pick up an AK-47 and praise Allah? Probably not. Most people who fall out of heavy metal when they end their teen rebellion years usually cut their hair and go back to a Christian lifestyle, so it’s weird to hear of someone who turned to Islam, especially since most headbangers are white and conservative and would probably just call Muslims towelheads or worse.

If anything, I am relieved that the FBI did call. That means at least they are checking leads and doing work and not just sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, which is what most people think they do. It shows that federal law enforcement is trying to do something to find out more about these seven, and stop them if they are involved in criminal activities.

Okay, I am at work and get out of here early today, and I will hopefull get in a weekend of no distractions, other than the DVD-related ones I create for myself…

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busch gardens

I just tried to clean off my desk in some fit of productivity, and threw out a metric assload of paper. It’s amazing that one of the big sells of the whole online billpay thing is a lack of paper, but all of my billers still send me a paper duplicate, and of course for every paper of important information, there are about five pages of crap about credit card insurance, discount travel offers that are more expensive than just going to the airline and buying the ticket, and offers for free magazine subscriptions (postage and handling not included, $20 per issue.) I have some paranoia for keeping old statements, so I went through and excised them from all of the other paperwork and threw that shit out. Yeah, it’s been an exciting Saturday.

I’m still working on short stories for this next Bloomington book, and I posted the rough start of one in my livejournal (look below and to the left for the link.) I don’t usually post to livejournal, but I know that absolutely nobody reads this journal, so whatever. Anyway, the stories are going okay, but it’s the kind of thing where I am pretty much sure nobody will ever read them, and I am simply writing them for the sake of writing them, and I hope that the work will eventually get me in the right mood to do something else.

I’m still excited about going on vacation next month, and slowly picking at google to figure out what to do when I have the time, which is almost never. I am vaguely thinking about taking another glider lesson when I’m down there, because there’s a gliderport around Orlando and they have reasonable prices, but it all depends on time and money. The last time I was there for two weeks and with more money in my pocket, I vowed to drive to the Space Coast or at least to Orlando to check everything out over there, but every day I slept in or decided to do something else. Maybe some other time I might go out there exclusively, although I wonder how morose all of the tours of the space facilities are since the Columbia accident.

Another vague thought of mine was whether or not to go to Busch Gardens. I went as a kid, but I wonder if now it’s tiny and busted compared to my memories of it. I know there are a few rollercoasters, and I’m always a big fan of those, but I’m wondering if $50 and the drive to Tampa is worth it or not.

Food’s here. I haven’t ordered delivery for a while, but I was bored so I called up the Thai place. Now I need to find a movie to watch and eat.

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bored of rants

I haven’t written just to write in a while. Getting bored of writing rants, but I’ve also been too busy working on other stuff. I am still working on a book of short stories about my time in Bloomington. It’s at a good length now, but still needs a lot of work. It’s a good waste of time, anyway. I still feel like I should be writing something else, something new, but nothing’s come to me yet.

I decided to take a vacation next month, and I’ll be heading back to Treasure Island, Florida. I went there in 2001 for two weeks and had a good time, so I’ll be going back and staying at the same place. A one-bedroom apartment with a full kitchen right across the street from the white sand beach of the Gulf only costs $240 a WEEK. You gotta love the off-season. It’ll be hotter than hell, but the room has real AC, unlike my apartment, and so will the car. And I get to drive, which I miss. Plus the pool’s right there, and the place is almost abandoned during June. John Sheppard lives down there now, so I’ll drop in on him, and I’m making my list of things I missed last time I was there. It should be fun.

Weather’s finally decent here in New York, although it has been a bit weird. The temps drop then rise then look beautiful then get a bit crummy, and it’s always a coin toss on whether or not to bring a jacket. I went for a long walk tonight to maybe see about taking photos of Rikers Island as the sun set, but I missed that golden bit of time and ended up circling around the northernmost tip of Astoria, before it falls into the water. There’s a huge ConEd power plant that takes up some serious real estate. It’s got all of these fences and guards and whatnot, but it’s also surrounded by acres and acres of green grass, which always looks out of place in the middle of New York. It looks like some kind of sanitarium, like what you’d find on Wards Island, but no triple tiers of razor wire like the psych center out there has. Anyway, the walk took me through a lot of little areas I’d never seen before, and even though I didn’t find any new stores or places that would be useful later, I do like to see something other than the same usual shit, even if it is different brick buildings and fire escapes than the usual ones.

I got a power antenna for the TV for $30, which was a waste of money. I can barely get in 5 channels, very fuzzy. Now I can watch ER, at least. I watched all of the Must See lineup on Thursday, and after however many weeks of no TV, it all looked alien to me. Nothing was funny, and I couldn’t even understand the point of any of the sitcoms. Everything in ER was extremely predictable, and I spent most of that hour playing solitaire on my PocketPC, occasionally looking up to watch snippets of the show. I don’t see TV coming back to my life full-strength, at least like it was before.

I replaced the battery in my iPod, which was pretty untraumatic and simple. I bought a new one on eBay for about $40, and it’s been sitting on my desk for a few weeks. Opening the case was a bit of a trick, and I had to use two screwdrivers to carefully pry it apart. Aside from that, everything was a snap: unplug the old, plug the new, close the case, put it on a charger. It was very anticlimactic and so easy, I wanted to write a shitty letter to that whiner that created the anti-Apple site bitching about how his battery went out.

I can’t believe it’s past two already. I should think about sleep.

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Florida again

I have been in a weird state lately, in which I can’t really find anything I want to read, I can’t figure out what music to listen to, and most importantly, I have no fucking idea what to write. I think I’ve been doing this for about a week, but in the bigger sense, I have been avoiding a new book – a real one, not a collection of shit – for about two years now. I think part of it is weather and part is diet, and there’s also the fact that I haven’t taken any time off since January, so I’m getting pretty burned out. So maybe I need a vacation. Maybe I need to find a way to pay for a vacation.

I went to JetBlue today and found that it would be fairly cheap to get down to Florida again. I had a lot of fun down there in 2001, on Treasure Island, driving to random places and taking lots of photos. I’m afraid though that if I go now, I will get deathly depressed. That area is a good place to go if you want to see a lot of nobody, because it’s a ghost town during the summer. I occasionally saw some teenager locals, kids that probably worked shitty jobs and smoked a lot of bad pot when they weren’t flipping burgers or mowing lawns. I related to them about as bad as I did the older folk that bumped around down there. I’m not saying I fit in with everyone here in New York, but at least I see people here when I’m walking around. I’m afraid I will start thinking about 2001 all over again and get into some heavy depression and piss away 3 or 4 of the 7 days of the vacation. And also, it would probably be like a hundred degrees when I’m there, and that might be bad.

I know everyone had the typical migratory path for winter vacations, of heading to Florida or some island or Mexico or whatever, so they can cheat mother nature and catch a few rays. But does anyone ever do the opposite? I mean, I don’t really hear of people going to Alaska for the summer, or Iceland or something. I’ve always wondered what vacation spots would work for this. It doesn’t seem like there’s as much air travel infrastructure going north as there is going south. Sure, Montreal is well-connected, but I don’t see many planes leaving for Yellowknife at JFK.

The other issue is I want to do something that basically involves a 200-some dollar ticket, a hotel that won’t bust my balls price-wise, and maybe a rental car. I don’t have thousands of bucks to fly to central america or rent out a fucking cabin in the mountains plus all of the gear I’ll need to pack out to cook my meals. One of my reasons I like Vegas so much is I can always find a cheap fare and a cheap room and slap it all together with minimal Visacard damage in about two minutes flat. Unfortunately, I am bored of Sin City right now, and the bug to go back won’t hit me for a few more months. I’m actually thinking of going in August, when the room rates will be like $50 a night and the AC will be blowing full-blast everywhere (which it won’t be in my apartment.)

I think I’m going to read some Hunter S. Thompson now.

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Dream Theater bootlegs

I bought some CDs today and got a few more in the mail, and that brings the total in my collection up to 900. I think the goal is to get to 1000, but I don’t know if that’s doable by the end of the year or not. I’m buying CDs at a much more rapid rate these days, but I’m sure things will slow down as I get toward the end of the year. There’s also the issue that I am out of room for the damn things.

Five of the CDs that arrived in the mail today were from a company making these offical bootlegs of Dream Theater stuff. I guess a couple of the guys in the band got together with some small record company or something and somehow got permission from the record company to do small runs of each of the titles. I do not entirely know who is really responsible on the business end, and I felt a little scared sending a credit card to this unknown business, but they came through, and the products are pretty incredible, with real CDs and color booklets and lots of liner notes and everything. They have six titles, and I bought three of them. One is a collection of old demo tapes before the band was Dream Theater; one is a 2-CD live show from ’98 (when I saw them in Seattle); and one is the making of the album of Scenes From a Memory.

I listened to the demos, and they really brought back some strange memories for me. I never heard these tracks before – they came from when the drummer, bassist, and guitarrist first got together at Berklee school of music and started laying down stuff into their portastudio. And that reminds me a lot of when I used to hang out with Derik and Jamie and they got a portastudio and started recording all of this crazy shit, prog-rock stuff that they put together after listening to the first Dream Theater album a thousand times, plus way too much Rush, Marillion, Yes, Steve Vai, and so on. In fact, these demos include a version of the Rush instrumental “YYZ”, which reminds me of the thousands of times I sat next to Derik’s drum kit as he tore through the song. I have many fond memories of listening to Derik, Jamie, and both of them together work through all sorts of songs and arrangements, some written by other artists and some brand new, but all getting better and better with each jam and each mix. Unfortunately, I don’t have the pleasure of sitting down to a finished product by these two, as they eventually went their own ways without ever making a CD or tape.

The other CD I am listening to now is the making of SFAM, and it’s a very strange one. I first heard this album the weekend it came out (I think), which was when I drove to Cincinnati for my uncle John’s funeral. The whole trip out, my stay at a strange little hotel near some college campus (and, coincidentally, a stone’s throw from where me and Ray drove in 1993 to see Unleashed and Cannibal Corpse) is another long story I may have told elsewhere. And then I spent a few hours in Bloomington on Halloween. Then on the 13-hour trip back to New York, I was going nuts from boredom, and stopped in some little Pennsylvania town where they had a strip mall. The place was absolutely vacant, and reminded me of the days when me and Karena used to go to the mall in her hometown of Longview, Washington; there were about a dozen stores and a Target and Red Lobster all congealed together, maybe with a two-screen movie theater, and the inside of the place pretty much housed like three or four old people waiting to die, and nothing else. So I went into this mall and went to a Sam Goody or Musicland or whatever they are (I think they are all owned by the same company) and found a Jerky Boys tape that I knew would entertain me for about 20 minutes of the remaining 8 hours, and then I saw A NEW DREAM THEATER ALBUM! I got it and rushed the car to listen to it and see if it was as cool as the last one.

It turned out it was much cooler. Someone in Metal Curse (and I forget who, but it wasn’t Ray. King Foley? Jack Botus? Not sure.) said there are only two concept albums out there, Rush’s 2112 and Queensryche’s Operation:Mindcrime, and everything else sucks shit. He is partially correct, but wrong on two counts: first, 2112 wasn’t a concept album, it had a full-side song that was conceptual, but the B-side contained 5 regular-sized songs; second, this then-new Dream Theater album was a concept album better than either of those put together! I could not believe the total perfection, power, precision, and depth this 80-some minutes of music could lay down. The story, which is complicated to tell, is about the 1928 murder of a woman that haunts a modern-day man’s dreams. He goes to a hypnotherapist who helps him peel back the layers of the onion and find out about the conspiracy behind the woman’s death. Instead of being one song, there are a dozen tracks, some of them clocking in at over ten minutes each, some of them serving more as short introductions and bits for the story. Prior to this album, DT spent a couple of discs stripping back their sound, playing pieces that might get the occasional spin on an AOR station or that could make a good video, with the guys in stupid leather costumes probably, that might get played on some European metal show. It’s almost as if they said “fuck this!” to all of that and decided to completely Zappa out and pour as much black ink onto the music staff as possible to build these incredibly fast and complex rhythms. But it’s not all just a shredfest either; they make it all emotional and build strong songs where it’s needed for the story.

Anyway, I listened to the tape a half-dozen times straight through, then bought the CD, bounced it to an MD, and listened to the whole concept album at least once a day for probably six months straight. I still pop it in every once in a while and I’ve got every note memorized. It’s on a DVD and a live album of theirs, so I hear it there too. And now, it’s truly strange to hear this CD of them writing the songs in the studio, changing around riffs, fucking up and then swapping things around. Jordan Rudess replaced their previous keyboard player on the album; the old guy, Derek Sherinian, was more of a hard rock guy, and wanted to be some big rock star, so they fired him. Rudess is more of a classically trained guy, and you can tell the other guys feed off of his ability in the studio to put down good lines and structure. These guys worked together in the side project Liquid Tension Experiment, which is an equally project that involves the guitar, drums, and keys of Dream Theater with the bass and Chapman stick of Peter Gabriel and King Crimson’s Tony Levin.

Anyway, it is hilarious to listen to this studio work – sometimes they slow down a line, go back over it, then speed it up until it works again. I have every microsecond of this album so memorized, when I hear it performed differently, it’s very noticeable. Some of the stuff is interesting, though. There are occasional guitar licks and even some saxophone lines that were recorded but dropped from the final mix. And then there are just strange placeholders, like when vocalist James LaBrie doesn’t hold a long note in a scratch track and and does an almost yodeling song, or when the writing track for “The Dance of Eternity” breaks into an impromptu (but very kick-ass) version of “Foxy Lady” by Hendrix. It’s all very good stuff.

I thought my eBay auction was over, but it’s on PST, so I still have almost three hours. It’s up to $61, but I hope someone snipes out the thing and pushes it up to a hundred or something. Okay, time to go play the Simpsons game.

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back

Okay, I’m back. I’m a bit bored of the current project, and I don’t know if I will keep with it or jump off onto another tangent. I hate that I’ve basically been doing this for two years, but as long as I keep putting words on the page, I will be doing SOMETHING. And I was going back through old entries on here as I tried to complete a list of every DVD I own and I did like some of the things I wrote. So, here I am. Sorry if you hoped I wouldn’t write for a while, and glad if you didn’t.

The book I’ve been working on is a lot like Summer Rain in its style, and the fact that it roughly takes place during a pivotal summer in transition of the main character, but this time it happens between high school and college, and is a lot more centered around the underground heavy metal culture (or lack thereof) in Northern Indiana in 1989. It has been interesting to hack out, and I have many 20,000 words of pieces of essays and experiences, but there’s not enough central “stuff” to really keep the stories going. I had the same problem with Summer Rain in the early drafts – there were these stories, these things happening, but there are no great revalations or points where the reader goes “yeah! exactly!” and it’s hard to just throw those in without really planning out the whole thing. I mean, you can write a bunch of riffs that sound cool, but you need a SONG to put them in to make it all work. (Unless you’re a stoner metal band – then you can just repeat the riffs over and over and over, and put a pot leaf on your CD.)

I’m happy to say my bitching about groceries is over, as FreshDirect.com now delivers to Astoria! I have been waiting for this for years – when Amazon.com started selling books in the mail and I got my first package in the mail, I said “god damn it, they need to do this with food.” And they have! I logged in, signed up, and started pointing and clicking at all of the food, with nice examples and nutritional information and cooking tips and everything else. I put in the Visa number, selected a delivery time, and that was it – just like ordering books or DVDs or whatever else. Tonight, two guys showed up and unloaded three boxes and a bag of food at my doorstep. I spent just over $100 and got $20 of it free for my first order. I can’t complain about the food, either. The produce all looks fresh and in great shape, properly wrapped and unbruised. They have their own brands of frozen stuff like pizzas and seafood and whatnot, and that all looks great. The usual staples are at decent prices, and there’s a good brand variety. I got my 2-liters of Coke for 99 cents and didn’t have to lug them back from the Key Food, or pay $1.89 at the bodega across the street. So it worked great, and I’m going to keep doing this and cooking my own dinners. You can’t buy stuff on-the-spot or anything, but if you plan ahead a day, it’s great. And you can figure out your menu or list online and then drill it into the browser without going to the store and seeing what size of tomato paste they carry or whatever the hell. It’s all very awesome.

I got the new Joe Satriani album today, which was a surprise, because it isn’t out until the 13th. I ordered it (Is There Love In Space?) direct from Sony a week or two ago, and they sent it early, along with an extra booklet that was signed in silver marker by Satriani! The album’s interesting – he has largely ignored his electronica interest that was on his last couple of albums (which is good, because I hated it) and focused more on exploring what he can push the six-string into doing and saying. The guitar work is a step above everything else he’s done, and the songs are for the most part memorable and deep, similar to what he did on Crystal Planet. But there are a couple of real stinkers on there too, similar to what he did on Flying in a Blue Dream, with him singing and this white man’s boogie blues thing going on, and that doesn’t work at all for me. It’s probably one of those things where I’ll leave two or three songs out when I move the thing to the iPod, and then listen to everything else 20,000 times.

It’s been a deluge of media lately. I got Geoff Tate’s solo album, which doesn’t sound much like Queensryche at all, but works rather well with his voice and range. I also got a Queensryche CD-single for “Jet City Woman” that was signed by Chris DeGarmo, which is slightly humorous in that he left the band. I also found the UK import of Peter Gabriel’s “Burn You Up/Burn You Down” song, which is a relief because I thought it would only be available in the new Myst game, and the song sounded cool, but not cool enough for me to buy the game and try to capture the sound or whatever. I also finally got Carnivore – Retaliation, which I haven’t heard in almost ten years. We were listening to it at work and cracking up at some of the classic lines in it, like “I shit my pants and wait for the reaper” in “Ground Zero, Brooklyn”, and “every hole in my body drips blood”, from “Inner Torment”. Very cool, but it set me back $17.99, and nobody cut me a deal on it.

Man, these grape tomatoes are incredible. I didn’t even pay for the vine-ripened ones, and I could sit and eat these all day like candy…

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Dell Axim

My newest toy showed up on Friday, a few days ahead of schedule. I got a Dell Axim X3 pocket PC. I know I’ve railed on Windows CE devices in the past, especially as a former Palm OS user. I’ve always thought they were underpowered, with an anemic version of Windows trying to run full-sized apps in a downsized way. But as the Palm becomes more and more lacking and the hardware behind mobile Windows becomes more powerful, I’ve become more interested in these machines. And I haven’t been entirely happy with the Danger Sidekick, either. It’s a good machine for a few things, like mail and instant chat, but it’s entirely worthless as a game machine, and I don’t like the fact that you can’t add or modify any of the existing apps.

So I think the sweet spot in price and performace finally happened, mostly due to Dell offering the X3 at a slightly reduced rate. Most Pocket PC machines start at about $300, and price modifiers include processor speed, WiFi, or Bluetooth, with features like physical size, looks, memory, and expansion slots fitting in there also. I thought about getting some sort of wireless, but as neither my work or home is equipped, I worried that it would become a huge money sink, with me eventually spending a grand on routers and wireless access points and cards and whatnot. So I hemmed and hawed on different configurations and different manufacturers before I finally went to Dell.

Dell originally released the X5, and now came out with the slightly smaller X3. The X3 is also available in a WiFi version that’s called the X3i, and I decided not to spend the extra $50 on it, although now I wonder if that was the right decision in the long run. (In defense of the no-WiFi version, it gets much better batter life, and I don’t need to rush out and buy all that extra shit and spend the next 9 weekends configuring it.) Anyway, there’s a low-end X3 with half the memory and a slower processor, but I spent about $270 on the version with a 400mhz XScale processor and 64mb SDRAM and another 64mb of flash ROM. I’ve had pretty good luck with my Dell laptop and other Dell machines at work, so I figured I’d be okay with trying them out with this, too.

My first impression was that this thing is LIGHT. I mean, it’s lighter than the cheap 4-function calculator you get free with a fillup at your local Marathon station. There’s absolutely nothing inside of it, and the battery, which is smaller than a nine-volt and a third as thick, also feels completely hollow. It’s also a very good-looking unit. The cradle is very strange, because the front of it is chromed, but the chrome is see-through, like mirrorshade glasses. There’s a blue glowing Dell logo inside the cradle, and when it is on, it looks like a hologram or something.

Windows Mobile 2003 (the marketspeak name for the latest WinCE) is pretty weird at first. Many of the GUI rules are different than Windows or just not there. Instead of right-click menus, you click and hold on an item, and a menu comes up. And because every window takes up the whole display, it’s a bit off when you are running more than one app at once. There is this switcher app you can run that lets you swap in and out of things fast, but it takes a few minutes of dicking around to get the hang of everything.

The interface dumps you into a “Today” page by default, where you can have your appointments or other various things show up. There are a lot of apps included, like pocket versions of IE, Word, Excel, a book reader, and Windows Media Player. I immediately got the Bubb Rub video and dumped it to the device. It was pretty easy to do: there is a link on my desktop of my Windows PC that now goes to the Pocket PC. So I just dragged the file to that directory, and a couple of seconds later, it was on the handheld. The Windows Media Player lets you do a landscape full-screen mode, and the 3.5″ screen showed the video with as much color and clarity as a TV set, if not better. This thing will be excellent for watching movies on a plane.

There is a single Secure Digital slot on top of the unit for memory cards and expansion. I almost wished I would have paid $100 more for the X5, which includes SD and CompactFlash, because there are far more peripherals with CF. I hope that the new generation of SD-only handhelds will push manufacturers to make more devices for SD. I went out on Saturday and picked up a 256mb card, which should last me for a while. I also eyed some of the shrinkwrapped software; there are a couple of dictionaries and games out there, in the $20-$40 range, shipping on SD cards. Maybe when I grow bored of the freeware on the net, I’ll consider that.

I now need to install a bunch of junk. I didn’t bring the cradle home this weekend, so I filled the SD card with stuff from the web. Most freeware consists of an installer that runs on a desktop machine and shoots the installation through the ActiveSync conduit and onto the handheld, so I can’t do that without the cradle and it’s assorted services. I did manage to get AvantGo set up before I left work on Friday. This runs a program on your Windows machine to grab various web news articles and then smash them down into a handheld-friendly size and push them onto your PocketPC. So I’ll be able to catch the news and a few articles from Wired on the train.

Not much else going on. I finished reading Idoru by William Gibson, and had mixed feelings about it. There was a lot of cool imagery, neat technology ideas, that made part of it really appealing to me, in a Snow Crash sort of way. But it also really felt like he phoned this one in, and it’s one of those “two people with plots colliding” thrillers where halfway through the book you know how it will all end. It was not horrible, but it wasn’t Gibson’s best. I started reading something else that I am not really into, and I have a huge Amazon order that got delayed that is finally shipping, so I’m finding it hard to commit to anything in order to keep my plate clean.

P.S. a random aside – if you read this and you have an AIM username that I don’t know about, mail it to me. I always keep mine open, but I feel stupid looking for those of friends or whatever. And if, for whatever reason, you don’t feel comfortable emailing me or commenting about anything (tinfoil hat, etc.) you can use this to write me. It tracks your IP and hostname, but maybe for some reason this would be better than putting my name in a mail program and hitting send, who knows. I mostly use it so I don’t have to put my real email address on all of my web pages, although I still get more spam than ever.

over and out.

Categories
general

Missing Emerald City, sort of

Re new nephew, his name is Wesley Douglas Owens, and all is well. I know that me gloating over a new nephew is very unkonrathian given that I hate kids, but I’ve found that I’ve actually enjoyed having my first nephew Phillip. My younger sister managed to be a good mom and raise a kid that’s smart, funny, and well-behaved, and I’m more than certain that Monica will be a good mother too. And what’s weird is that I remember when I was Phillip’s age, and being around him is almost like a portal into my past, the days when I spent all of my time playing with Legos and the last Star Wars movie was bigger than Jesus. So that’s cool, and I’ll enjoy watching another one grow up.

There’s a new guy at work who came to us from Seattle, and when I first talked to him on Friday, it turns out his wife also worked at WRQ, my last employer in the Emerald city. I always have the same conversation when I meet another Seattleite, similar to the one I have when I meet a fellow Hoosier that is expatriated and living in New York. It’s the conversation that starts with where you lived, where you worked, where you hung out, and goes into how much you miss Safeway or the Upstairs Pub or Garcia’s, and how cool it was to hang out in the Pike Place fish market or the Irish Lion, and how you can’t get good salmon or parking or whatever else. But this conversation was even more detailed, because we talked about the offices on Lake Union and the benefits policies and the Fourth of Julys on the terraces with the fireworks on the lake and the company picnics at Mount Si. And then I thought more about it, and realized it has been FIVE YEARS since I left. FIVE YEARS.

That’s a real sack of bricks in the gut right there. I guess when I talk about Seattle, there are a lot of reasons I’m finally glad I did get out when I did, and try something new. I mean, it’s not hard to create a list of reasons why the place hit the shitter around 2000: the vanishing job market, the WTO riots, the vaporware monorail and the taxes that prop it up, the taxes for the two stadiums (a quarter billion dollars to a football team that was 6 and 10 in 2000, so they can play six home games a year in a non-multi-purpose stadium), the traffic, the Microsoft millionaires driving up the rents, etc. etc. etc.

But I still miss it. Seattle was a far more liveable city if you can overlook the flaws. I mean, New York has way more to offer to most people, but the quality of life issues are so horrible, and you’ve got to spend some cash to avoid them. I have a lot of good memories of Seattle though. I think the real problem is that the Seattle in my mind is Seattle 1997, and I can never go back to that, just like I can’t go back to Bloomington 1992.

Speaking of getting out of New York to improve the quality of life, I’m thinking about vacations in a vague sense. I might try to skip out of town for a week in August, to spend it in cooler climates or at least in air conditioned hotel rooms for the worst part of the heat. I bought some book called 1001 things to see before you die or something, it is a giant flip-through book that you read when you are bored rather than when you want to travel, but it has all sorts of crazy ideas in it. I’d like to do something cool and travel-oriented like drive a dune buggy around or go rally racing or even snowmobiles, but I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. Maybe I’ll just go to Coney Island and ride the kiddie go-karts.

OK, gotta go write…

Categories
general

New nephew

My sister Monica had her kid this morning, after about 15 hours of labor. It’s a boy, and was something like 7 pounds, and both are healthy and okay. I didn’t get any other details yet, but photos are forthcoming. So I’m happy to have another nephew, as this will mean another round of buying all of the toys I wanted as a kid. If she had a girl, I would have had no idea what to do, unless I just stuck with Lego anyway.

It’s mostly been a boring weekend, and my biggest excitement was going out into Queens to shop at Target. That used to be part of my big weekend routine, going to Target to get the usual junk, like deodorant and cases of Coke and film and batteries and other supplies. I really miss having a Target just a quick drive away, like I miss having a car to drive to places like that to convenience shop. I can always walk to the crap grocery store here, but then you have a choice of like three kinds of deodorant, and each one is $20. At Target, there’s a wall of deodorant bigger than the grocery store down the street. Unfortunately, the Target in Queens Center didn’t really do it for me, as it’s pretty small and split up into two floors, and it’s fairly run down. It’s nothing like the Super Targets that spring up all over the Midwest. Oh well.

I’m allegedly going to the bookstore today so I need to get moving…