Author: jkonrath
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Ode to a busted cell processor
God damn it. It is broken. Again. My PS3 is in a shop somewhere in Missouri, getting the yellow light of death beaten out of it. It went south in November and got all of the solder stripped away, the whole mess ultrasonically cleaned, then reflowed. Or something. Now it is dead again. I am…
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Review: On the Road (film)
So I got infected with the Kerouac bug late, toward the end of college, when I fell out of the computer thing and suddenly needed to read everything I saw to learn how to write. I locked into On the Road and loved it. It wasn’t cool to love it – I don’t know what it…
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New York, Again
It feels like I was just here, but I guess that was almost a year ago. And it feels like I just lived here, but that ended six years ago. Six years? Anyway. Woke up early. Packed a carry-on and a personal item. Drove to SFO and left the car at the wrong terminal, the…
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The Economics and Practicalities of Lofts
I live in a loft. This isn’t about that. (Maybe the coincidence somehow means it is, though.) I was playing this game yesterday, where I tried to write every single event I could remember about a person from twenty years ago, every time I could remember us hanging out together, to try and brainstorm past…
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Sycophantic Mezmerization
I have been writing a lot, which means I have not been writing here. That happens. It makes me wonder what the hell I should be writing here, especially since blogging is essentially dead and I should just be posting pictures of my cats. (Here is a picture of one of my cats. I have…
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First first bass
I keep mentioning that my first bass was one of the Cort headless basses with the Steinberger licensed tuners. I’ve got a duplicate one sitting at the house now, and my old roommate has the original one. But that actually wasn’t my first bass. I have to start the story with how I first decided…
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Dropping computers
My Mac is back in the shop. It has TS4088. When it switches GPUs to save power, if the computer is hot enough, it crashes. It’s common on this specific make and vintage, and it’s the problem with buying a computer on the first day of a major revision. I complained to the right person,…
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Automated board loading machinery
I spent a good chunk of the summer of 1993 trying to find a job. I returned back to Elkhart for the summer, because even though that summer of 1992 in Bloomington was life-changing and ended up becoming my first book, I made absolutely no money selling glowsticks and telemarketing. I needed real work, factory…
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Notes from a trip journal, London
[I wrote this on 5.17.2012 and it doesn’t really have an ending.] I’m in Nuremberg today, sitting in my hotel with a glass bottle of Coke and listening to Jimi. I’ll get to the first leg of my German trip (and the horrible travel day I had getting here), probably about the time I’m leaving…
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First Falafel
About ten years ago, I lived in New York: rented a shithole apartment in Astoria, took the N train in to Times Square every day, and worked three floors down from Puff Daddy at a soon-to-be-irrelevant dotcom. My life consisted of TPS reports, delays on the N train, and arguing with old ladies in three…