The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • bones and memories

    I visited Indiana recently – actually, it wasn’t that recent, but I meant to write about it at the time, and now two months have passed. It was an interesting quick trip, for a few good and bad reasons, so I wanted to play catch-up and get a few words down on it.

    I booked a quick solo trip at the beginning of August, partly because of my sister’s birthday, and partly because I had to cancel a family trip to Florida in the spring and felt bad about that. I got an out-on-Wednesday, back-on-Monday long weekend, which seemed to work well for me. Time was at a bit of a premium, but it’s a bit like visiting Vegas; a week is overkill, but a weekend is not enough.

    Not to dwell on the bad, but here goes: first, I screwed up my rental car reservation. Arrived in Chicago, and had a car waiting for me in South Bend, when I really needed a car in Chicago to drive to South Bend. Second, on Friday, at about 5:00, one of my crowns came off. After much panic and calling a bunch of phone numbers, I found a dentist nearby who opened back up and glued the crown back in, which was awesome. I still ate mostly liquid for the rest of the trip, until I could get back home and have my dentist permanently glue in the tooth. Also, on the last day of the trip, I lost my credit card, and while at the airport waiting for a very late flight, I found out and had to cancel it. So that’s the bad.

    I stayed in an extended stay hotel in Mishawaka, right near the University Park mall. It was on Main and Douglas, which was mostly vacant when I left Indiana, but since, a second main drag of big box stores and restaurants has started there, one big street over from the Grape Road arterial of the same sorts of big boxes. It’s always odd and nostalgic and weird for me to stay right by the mall where I spent so much time as a teen, but it’s a newer hotel, close to everything, and that works for me.

    Every time I go back, it’s amazing to me that the default routes and streets and terrain immediately pop back into my head. A lot of Indiana hasn’t changed, or at least the “bones” have not. If you asked me to drive from UP mall to the IUSB campus, I could do it without thinking, just on muscle memory. Never mind that the IUSB campus has basically doubled, and every store in UP mall has changed hands, but the roads and turns are still the same.

    Indiana does change, but on a very slow scale. I think people find a certain comfort in that, and it’s understandable. There are changes, and things fade and vanish, plus simple economics dictate amendments and revisions. Some chains die, and some mom-and-pop businesses go away with time, but new ones pop up. Sometimes things are completely bulldozed, like the Scottsdale and Pierre Moran malls, which were both torn down and “de-malled” into plazas of freestanding stores. But other things still have the same “bones” for better or for worse. Old first-generation Taco Bells get painted blue and turned into Chinese buffets. The UP mall got additions and food courts and new Barnes and Noble grafted onto its front, with the concourses updated and the tenants being bumped up in scale and stature. (Like the tiny Software Etc. is long gone, but across the way, there’s a giant new Apple store.) I walked the mall and tried to think of what was where, back in the day, but I couldn’t spot any one store that was the same, aside from the big Sears and JC Penney anchor stores.

    Driving, though – driving from Mishawaka to Edwardsburg, Elkhart to Millersburg, those things all looked almost identical. The amber waves of grain were still amber waves of grain. A few were turned into new industrial parks or large retirement communities, but for the most part, it looked like Indiana had aged two California years in the last 25. And normally, a twenty-something me would have found this disgusting, that all of the state should get off their ass and progress at a rapid rate. But like I said, part of me sees the comfort in this, the idea that things wouldn’t change. I’ve always thought that many people in that area feared change, and I think there’s some truth in that. When I was 18, that pissed me off beyond end. As a 44-year-old, I could see why someone might like that.

    Some things, though, have atrophied beyond belief. I went to the Concord Mall, which was a mile from my house, my default mall as a kid. When I was a teenager and worked in that mall, I practically lived there. I would go to the store and hang out even on my days off. Now, it looks like nothing has been done to the mall at all since the last time I punched out at the time clock in 1993. The Wards store where I worked is gone, converted into a Hobby Lobby that has locked itself off from the rest of the mall with huge glass doors. Almost every store in the mall has closed; most are covered in plywood. The old Osco’s drug store was converted to a food court, and every stall is currently empty, except for a single, lonely Subway sandwich shop. Some shops have these weird, temporary businesses in them, like a vacant store with a bouncy castle set up inside it, or the horribly sad dollar stores with nothing worth a dollar in them. There are multiple churches in the mall now; it seems like every business in Elkhart that goes bust turns into a church or a Mexican bodega. There was even a “church” that just beamed in the services from a megachurch in Kansas or Nebraska, and of course took your money. The mall itself was almost abandoned, nobody in sight, like an empty shopping center in a zombie movie. After seeing that, I made it a point to not do anything else in Elkhart, dredge up any more memories or see the old subdivision or school or anything else.

    Not all of the region was that destitute, though. The UP mall was filled with customers, even on a weeknight. And I went to Goshen one day, and it was actually transformed from what I remember. Most of the main street was art galleries, and small mom-and-pop businesses, a wave of hipsterization running through there. In 1990, I had a girlfriend who lived on Main Street, and at that time, it was largely abandoned, boarded up and done. Now, there are these brewpubs and artisanal butcher shops and groceries, almost like something I’d see in the hippest part of a college town like Bloomington.

    The thing that struck me the most was the feeling, the weather, the atmosphere. I haven’t visited Indiana outside of Christmas in years, decades. I think in the late 90s, I made a trip or two in October, and I drove through Indiana in April of 99, during my Seattle to New York move. But I don’t remember an August in Indiana probably since 1994, the year before I left. I’m very sensitive to temperatures and weather and the feeling of a place at a certain time of year, much more than I could ever describe it. And when I was there, the air held the same feeling as the summer before I first left for college, in 1989.

    I so distinctly remember that summer, because it would be hot in the day, maybe in the 80s, but then at night, it would cool to the 60s. I was working days in a department store, just started dating someone, and we’d meet up at 9:00 every night, when the mall closed, to drive around aimlessly, stay up all night, go from Perkins to Bob Evans to Big Boy’s, making the loop of the few 24-hour places in Elkhart at that time. And I’d come home late at night, or early in the morning, and feel the summer’s humidity converted to a light mist, to dew on the grass. The summer had a certain freedom, of the end of high school, a brief period where I almost thought I had my life together and was leaving behind the shroud of depression that blanketed me throughout my four years there. But there was also the uncertainty and excitement and fear of packing up my entire life and moving it off to campus in a few short weeks.

    Each day of the visit, I did the family stuff during the day, and it was good to see all of them. But then I’d return to the hotel, and either drive around by the mall, or walk at night, and just feel that weather, the cool evenings and the dew on my sneakers. (That’s another thing – there were no sidewalks by the hotel, and everyone was staring at me for walking, like wondering what happened that resulted in me not having a car.) Or I would sit in the hotel writing, with the windows open, feeling the air outside.

    I spent a lot of time wondering if I could ever go back. There’s a part of me, as I plummet into The Crisis that has hit at this age, that wishes I had a three-bedroom ranch and a garage and a lawn and everything else, working on an old car or a boat or something. I know I could never live in Indiana because of the politics and money and career. And the crippling nostalgia of being back there would consume me. But it was interesting to see it for a moment.

  • recent dreams

    • I was eating pancakes from the floor of a McDonald’s bathroom. It was an old-school seventies McDonald’s in Elkhart, Indiana, and had the bright orange floor tiles. I somehow thought the little packets of syrup would kill germs.
    • It was my birthday. I was in Guam or the Philippines, on the set of a remake of the Chuck Norris Missing in Action movie. Months earlier, I’d deleted my birthday from Facebook, and I was now upset because zero people had remembered my birthday and posted on my wall. I tried turning back on my birthday, but the Facebook phone app was (is) shit, and every time I would click on something, it would press the thing next to it.
    • I was in a food court in the Midway airport in Chicago. I was with Richard Rhodes (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb) and we were having an argument about John Lennon’s misogyny, and how the Sweet Sixteen has ruined NCAA basketball. We were at the Taco Bell, waiting for them to change from the breakfast to lunch menu, and I was debating whether or not I should just get both.

  • piano nostalgia

    I recently reached the five-year mark at my day job, which is another topic entirely. But as a result of this, I was given an opportunity to order a bonus gift from a loyalty-type catalog online. These are usually a mixed bag, in my previous experience, SkyMall-style gadgets I don’t need like wine fridges and socket sets.

    At Samsung, they did this at the end of every year, but the gifts were maybe four or five Samsung items that had dropped off the market, like the remaining stock of last year’s hot tablet. One year, I got a netbook that was sort of cute and decent for travel, but painfully slow and cheap. I took it apart to upgrade something, and ended up breaking it. The next year, I got a 40-inch TV, probably the last generation without the “smart” features, which is fine by me. They also had smaller gift things, like for merit-based recognition, and the gifts were much worse. I think once I got a fanny pack, and another time, I got some no-name bluetooth headphones that worked once.

    Anyway, the work gifts were slightly better than that, but there wasn’t much I really needed or wanted. I didn’t really need another low-end point-shoot camera or a charcoal grill. I ended up ordering a Yamaha electric piano keyboard, and then sort of forgetting about it. It showed up yesterday, and I unboxed it and got into a strange nostalgia mode about the idea of piano.

    When I was in high school and worked as a stagehand at the Performing Arts Center, I was around pianos constantly. I think we had like a dozen of them; there was a flawless Steinway concert grand, and a really nice Yamaha upright. But there were also other uprights of various manufacture in pretty much every practice room in the music department, along with other floaters that moved around everywhere. Some of these were decent. Some had survived elementary schools and were latex painted bright orange and barely stayed in tune. I never played piano, but I moved a lot of them, cleaned them, and spent a lot of time polishing the Steinway, like it was a sports car. The idea of piano intrigued me, especially after being around so many people who could play.

    In my senior year, they started teaching a piano for non-music-majors class, and got a lab full of really nice Yamaha digital pianos. I took the class in my final semester, and about eight of us sat in the little room, plinking away and learning basic chords and how to use both of our hands at the same time. It was neat to me, because this was in 1989, the height of MIDI and pop music using Korg M1s and Yamaha DX7s in everything. The keyboards we used had very convincing sampled sound, maybe a dozen instruments, like a pipe organ and marimba, along with concert grand and electric pianos. They had weighted keys and felt very nice, at least to a person like me with no experience whatsoever.

    They were also wired together in a network. We each had our own headphones to hear ourselves, but the teacher could share his audio to all of us, to play examples. He could also snoop on each of us during our free practice time. We had a similar setup in the new Apple II lab that I practically lived in. This was the very start of a networked world, which has now become unimaginably huge. Teachers can share and network and spy and monitor more than I could have ever dreamed in 1989. I’m not harping on the spying stuff; I just find it interesting that I lived most of high school in an era when there was no technology beyond overhead projectors with transparencies and ditto machines, and saw the very first edge of interconnected machines used in learning. I even helped perpetuate this – my first programming job ever was writing a schedule-maker program for sports teams, so a coach could enter all the home and away games and practices on a calendar, then save it to disk for later and print a handout for all the players’ families.

    The piano class was fun. I mean, I took it because I’d finished all but one class before my last semester, and took all fuck-off classes for the most part: two study halls (one to work in the theater), a drafting class where I worked on whatever I wanted, a computer class where I did all the assignments in the first week and spent the rest of the year working on that schedule program or playing chess. I’d never played a musical instrument, and just getting to the point where I could play a chord and a melody in straight time and almost read music was an enjoyable challenge that made me use a different part of my brain. I also ended up meeting someone I briefly dated and went to prom with, so that’s another memory that came out of it.

    I did buy a cheap Casio keyboard at the time, one with mid-sized plastic keys and a bunch of cheap sounds, but I never religiously practiced outside of school. There was some invisible wall for me, aside from my own brain issues. I’m not really that musically inclined, but also piano was never seriously “cool” to me. There are occasional bits and bobs of interesting keyboard music, like I remember buying a Journey songbook and trying to plink out the song “Faithfully,” but that was already five or six years behind the curve. I ended up starting bass guitar shortly after that, and then drifting away from that as college got underway.

    At IU though, it seemed like everyone I knew had some degree of literacy with piano. I mean, it’s the biggest and best music school in the world, and you have to take keyboard proficiency as an undergrad. There were also pianos everywhere; I worked in the Musical Arts Center and was constantly moving pianos, plus every practice room had one; every dorm lounge had one or two; the basement of my dorm had its own practice rooms, too. It always amazed me when someone who wasn’t a music major, like some economics major friend, was suddenly presented with a piano, and would do the “oh, I had to take it as a kid” and then could belt out “The Entertainer” or some random Billy Joel riff ten times better than I ever could.

    I would sometimes sneak into a practice room and mess around. This was fairly easy the year I was at IUSB, because I worked late and had keys and 24-hour access. It was both cathartic and frustrating, because I’d quickly run through the four or five stupid tunes I knew, Christmas songs and “Camptown Races” and whatever else, then drift into stupid experimental free-form garbage, just banging on keys until something sounded right for a second, and wishing I had the ability to do more.

    So now I have this new keyboard in front of me. It’s got 41 full-sized keys, but they’re cheap plastic and not weighted, and not touch sensitive. It also has no MIDI or USB out, just a headphone jack, so no way to use it as a synth with my computer. It has the usual 300-some styles, some cheesy and some decent, and some built-in demo songs and drum patterns and other junk I’ll never use. It could be a fun toy to plink around with. But, I’ve got other musical instruments here I’m not learning well, and too many other things taking up my time. And I’ve got so much junk in the house lately. Maybe I will buy a dummies book and give it a month, see what I can learn. Maybe it will go to a more worthy home. We’ll see.

  • Yes, I have a new book out now

    Yes, I have a new book out!

    No, it’s not like the last one!

    No, I don’t have a snazzy elevator pitch to describe it in a sentence by saying it’s like this movie meets that movie! I don’t write those kind of books. Actually, I did write one of those books, my last one, and it was sort of silly. So let me assure you that this book isn’t like that.

    This book is titled He. It consists of a hundred short microfiction pieces. Each piece begins with the word “He.” Like my book Atmospheres, the pieces are related, but if you flipped the book open to any random piece, you could read just that and read it and then LOL and put the book back next to the toilet and finish your business.

    (For some reason, a lot of people read my book on the toilet. Maybe the toilet is sort of like my Hot Pockets or Pringles can/tennis ball factory. I don’t know. I’m just glad you read the books.)

    The book is funny and dark and offensive to everyone, including you. I’d say sorry, but I’m not.

    I realize this is a bad description, and I should have thought of a better title instead of He, and books with more color on the cover sell more, blah blah blah.  I don’t give a shit.  I write what I write.

    I took the cover photo on the way to Area 51 this year at KonCon 2015. Just think, if you would have went, you could have your picture on a book. Also, I hope you like my new author photo. I’ll leave it as a surprise.

    The links:

    The book is on Kindle Unlimited, so if you have that, you can read it for free. It is also on Kindle Match, so if you buy the paperback from Amazon, you can download the book on Kindle for free.

    No plans for an audio book. (You probably should check out the Atmospheres audio book, though. It’s pretty awesome.) No plans for a not-Kindle ebook.

    Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to for the last year. Please, please, please, share the shit out of this on your face places or whatever. If you review books, get in touch. If you know anybody at Kraft Foods who works on Lunchables who can get me an endorsement deal, get in touch. Thank you.

  • Various Vegas thoughts

    I planned on blogging more from KonCon in Las Vegas last week, but I didn’t, because I am lazy. I probably should write a synopsis of the trip, but the TL;DR is that it was way too fucking hot – usually at or above 110 each day, and even hours after the sun set, it was still above 100. So that’s why it’s so cheap to go in July.

    Someone asked me for some advice on Vegas while I was gone. I have not spent much time there in years, and everything I mentioned in my book about Vegas is largely gone. But my response to this question in an email is an interesting companion to the trip itself and my thoughts during it, so I’ll just leave this here for your amusement.

    • I waste a lot of time on this site when I am planning: http://www.lvrevealed.com/deathwatch/ – their casino reviews are decent, but I am sort of obsessed with who is rumored to get imploded in the near future.
    • If you look at a map of the strip, most of the mid-strip properties are what I’d consider first tier (Bellagio, Paris, Harrah’s, Caesars, etc), and the Wynn is north strip, but I’d group it in with those mid-strip properties. Same with Aria/City Center, which is technically south strip. It’s the newest; I’ve never stayed there, but from eating/shopping there, it’s pretty high end.
    • The south strip was the big deal maybe 10-15 years ago, and that stuff is now dated, but can be tolerable to stay there. It can be cheap, and the location is decent. So Mandalay Bay, MGM, NYNY, Luxor, Excalibur in that order. (Most of those are owned/run by the same monopoly, so they’re similar.) Tropicana got bought by Hilton and redone, so the rooms are nice, but there’s not a lot in there.An example: the Luxor is not that trendy of a property – I think it was so-so when I stayed there in like 99, and now it’s really lost its focus. It used to be Egyptian-themed, and they decided that maybe flyover rednecks aren’t into that, so they started de-theming it and ripping out the king tut stuff, but it’s still got these random stone pyramid walls in places.  But, the rooms are now ridiculously cheap, and it’s a really good location, and connected to the big mall by Mandalay Bay. So if you don’t plan on spending a lot of time in your room, it could be an option.
    • Everything north strip is shit. Everything downtown is total shit. Everything that’s not on the strip is mostly shit, unless you stumble on some deal to stay in a timeshare at Trump or something weird like that.
    • Absolutely do not stay at Hooters like I did.  I won’t go into the horror stories, but I’ve stayed at hotels in rural Mexico that were much nicer.
    • I used to never rent a car and cab it from the airport and around town. But the last few times, I’ve found an okay deal on a rental car bundled with the hotel (I think I used Expedia this time) and if you drive at least once a day, it’s usually a better deal. You can generally park at any hotel for free, or valet for almost nothing.
    • If you are driving, don’t actually drive on the strip to get north/south. Either go west to I-15, or go east to Paradise, Maryland, or Eastern.
    • Think of whatever amount of water a person would drink in a day that would be entirely excessive, and double that.
    • You can drive off the strip and buy a case of water for four bucks or whatever, or you can buy two bottles of water at a hotel for seven bucks. The problem is almost none of the hotels have a fridge. You can buy a crappy foam cooler at the grocery store and then commit to filling it with ice every other hour, but that’s a huge pain in the ass.
    • Opentable is a good way to get reservations for dinner.  There’s a surprisingly large number of high-end restaurants with decent food.
    • Every buffet is a ripoff. Wynn is almost tolerable, if you pace yourself and don’t eat all day and go in with the plan of fucking them by eating five pounds of lobster. But I made the mistake of going to the MGM buffet, and paid $35 for about $10 of Sizzler-grade food.
    • If you’re into steak, Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak at the MGM has a fairly insane three-course beef selection that is not cheap but is awesome. Or in the opposite direction, there’s the Golden Steer, which looks a little dodgy because it’s ancient and has never been remodeled, but it’s cool because it’s ancient and has never been remodeled – it’s one of those old-school places where the brat pack used to hang out.
    • Everyone associates the Grand Canyon with Vegas, but really it’s like a 4-5 hour drive each way, and easy to kill an entire day to spend a few minutes there.
    • If you are actually interested in going to Area 51/Rachel I could fill up another post with details on that.
    • If you are there and hit the wall and need to bug out and go somewhere quiet to get work done or whatever, go to UNLV. You can hide in their library and use wifi without any hassle.
    • There’s a huge Fry’s Electronics south of the strip, at a big outdoor mall right before 215. There’s a Target at Flamingo and Maryland. There’s a few Vons grocery stores (Safeway-owned, I think) on Tropicana and Flamingo.
    • Pinball Hall of Fame on Tropicana is worth checking out. The atomic testing museum on Flamingo is neat, but their Area 51 exhibit is pretty cheesy.
    • If you want to tour the neon graveyard, book it early.  They have limited tours and they always fill up.
    • Don’t stay at Hooters.

    Thoughts?  Leave ’em in the comments.

  • Flickr Magic View

    The other day when I posted about Google Photos, I mentioned how I hoped some of its features for image discovery and auto-categorization would come to other tools like Flickr. Well, I should probably log onto my Flickr account more often, because it looks like they did.

    Flickr now has a feature called Magic View. If you go to your Camera Roll view, there is a slider at the top that defaults to Date Taken, but you can toggle it to Magic View mode, which groups together photos into various object categories.

    My Google Photos uploader worked away all weekend, eventually transferring about 27,000 unedited photos to their cloud. The Assistant wizard is still churning away, sending me various alerts as it groups together things into animations or “stories.” I only have about 10,000 photos on Flickr, because I use it as a repository of public albums of sorted and edited photos, and not a complete bucket of everything I take. But there’s enough there to compare the two.

    In general, Flickr is way better at auto-categorizing things. For example, I take a lot of pictures of my cats. If they are at all blurry, or the cats are wearing a costume (don’t judge), they are categorized by Google as dogs. My long-haired cat got identified as a raccoon a bunch of times. I have a category called “Race Tracks” on Google, which consists of pictures of stalled traffic on the Bay Bridge, and baseball diamonds. I also have a category named “Football” that is pictures of swimming pools and people in the desert. Flickr isn’t perfect; it thinks snowmobiles are bikes, and thinks a lot of old Las Vegas is an amusement park.  (Maybe it is, from a metaphorical standpoint.) But Flickr seems to be a bit better for me.

    Flickr has some interesting categorizations. One I like is a “style” category, that identifies things like pictures with strong depth-of-field or abstract composition. Google has some other interesting concrete categorizations, like taking a stab at identifying when something is a wedding, art museum, or concert.  (Although for me it also grouped proms, hotel lobbies, and night portraits in those respective buckets.)

    Google does group by people, place, and thing, and the first two of those are mostly absent from Flickr. Flickr does no facial recognition, but the Photos software by Google only groups your like-faced photos with no identifying tags, just within your photos, so it’s not as accurate, and gives you no way to label a collection as being a person, like you could in iPhoto, Picasa/G+, or Facebook.  Flickr can store geo data and group your photos on a map, but that’s a different interface, and it’s slightly clunky. It would be nice to see a list of cities/countries with all of my photos in that location. I guess it’s possible to write an app to do that, or maybe somebody has.

    Flickr also doesn’t do any of the Assistant things that Google does, like auto-stitching photos into panoramas, or making “Stories,” which are slideshows from auto-curated chunks of photos spanning multiple albums.  These can be pretty goofy, though, especially because there’s no metadata or context to things you’ve mass-dumped into Google Photos. Like I have these stories titled “Ten Days in Oakland” that are assembled-together slideshows of crap I saw at the grocery store.

    This further brings up the issue of using a cloud service like this as a private cache of everything I’ve taken, versus a public set of edited photos. I use my phone as an extension of my memory, and I’m always snapping pictures of notes or grocery lists or things I need to remember. I also try to document things only I’m interested in, because I know that now I wish I would have taken more photos of things in the past so I could go through them now when writing or sinking into a pit of nostalgia. I don’t want those to be public, but it might sometimes be interesting to have them grouped. I might continue mirroring photos on Google, but keeping everything public on Flickr.

    Oh, in case you’re curious, I’m on flickr at https://www.flickr.com/people/jkonrath/

    [2020 update: of course they removed this feature a year or two ago.]

  • Yes, I can legally perform your satanic gay wedding

    In addition to being a world-famous fiction writer, cough syrup enthusiast, and inventor of the zero-g bong, did you know I, Jon Konrath, am an ordained minister?

    Seriously – I am legally ordained. I can perform marriages. I’m available for your wedding. Schedule permitting (I don’t like to leave the house), buy me a plane ticket and put me up somewhere that has free wifi, and I’ll marry you and your sweetheart for a very nominal fee.  (Depending on your state, I might need to get some additional paperwork first, which takes time and money.)

    I can also perform funerals, although note that if you ask me to do the eulogy, there’s a strong possibility I will talk about RoboCop for an hour.

  • Google Photos

    Anyone else here trying out Google’s new Photos thing?

    They announced this new service the other day, a “gmail for photos.” Traditionally, Picasa had a quota, like any other cloud photo storage service, and then you paid for more space. Now, they offer an unlimited amount of storage for free. Also, unlike G+, this isn’t a place for you to simply share photos and make them public; by default, photos (and videos) are made private, and then you choose to share them if you want.

    This also isn’t a “social” play like G+, or sharing on Facebook or elsewhere. You can share photos from there, but it’s more like a storage bucket where you put things, and then optionally share them if you want.

    The interesting part to me is that Google is adding various features to automatically categorize or clump together photos. The obvious one is that it will create virtual collections of places, like when you dump all of your geo-tagged photos into one clump. But the other neat thing is that it guesses at other categorization. For example, I had categories magically show up for food, cats, baseball, stadiums, and sky. Your photos are still maintained in a chronological order, just a “firehose” dumping ground, like throwing everything into a folder, but it does this smart collection thing on its own. You can also sort and create collections, and share those, but I’m mostly interested in what it can do without my interaction.

    It’s not entirely clear if the original resolution photo is being kept, or if it is hosted. There’s some vague language saying that under 16MP files are kept in the original form. I think it’s serving up compressed versions of them, but you can get at the original (under-16MP) ones if you need them.

    I haven’t thought out fully how this would land within my workflow. I keep everything on my computer in Lightroom, which is backed up wholesale to CrashPlan and locally, and then sort through and make collections that are then shared to Flickr. In my head, here are some brief comparisons I could think of:

    • Vs. iCloud: I am not paying Apple to store a copy of my photo library and then killing my battery to constantly sync with it, sorry. It’s why I ditched Aperture.
    • Vs. Dropbox: Dropbox has a quota, and its sharing stuff is a bit clunky.
    • Vs. Amazon Prime photos: Amazon has an unlimited quota, and keeps originals, but their sorting/sharing/organizing is barely there.
    • Vs. Flickr: I don’t like to dump everything to Flickr, because I use it as a destination for albums of sorted, edited, and cropped photos, not everything I take. Plus it’s my “public” destination, so I’m not sending private photos there.
    • Vs. Instagram: I only see that as a one-shot thing for sharing a single, square-cropped photo, not entire albums.
    • Vs. hosting it myself on this site: ugh.

    I haven’t messed with the mobile app yet, but this seems like it could be a good solution for the person who only takes pictures on their phone or tablet, and don’t want to sync with a PC at all.  They have a Mac (and I assume Windows) uploader program that you can set loose on one or more directories, an iPhoto library, or any inserted cards/phones to upload the images.

    My current game plan is to keep my workflow as before: import my cards/cameras to a Lightroom master catalog, and import from my iPhone and iPad when physically plugged in. Then I’ll create collections, edit, and share to Flickr. But I’ll also upload to Google Photos in the background from my laptop, mirroring my LightRoom masters directory. When I need to one-off mail a picture, I can do that. I also mostly want a way to look at my entire collection when I’m not at my computer, without keeping 30,000 photos on my phone.

    One thing suspiciously missing (and this may be on purpose) is that there’s no way to embed a photo from Google Photos into a page here or elsewhere. That would be awesome, to drop a google link in an image tag on this blog, and have Google host it up instead of me. But I could see why they would leave that out on purpose.

    Anyway, photos.google.com. Try it out, let me know if it works for you.

  • Padres @ Giants, 5/5/15

    IMG_0560.jpgI got tickets to see San Diego play San Francisco last week, via my wife’s work. It was a last-second, unplanned thing, but my first game of the year, so I went to eat, take a few pictures, and eat.

    Here’s a quick bulleted list update of the game:

    • I took BART from West Oakland to SF, which itself was pretty fast, but I always underestimate the walk from the subway to the stadium, which took about 30 minutes.
    • I brought my full-sized DSLR, with the usual kit lens and zoom, plus a new 10-18mm wide. I also brought my EOS-M mirrorless with a 50mm prime.
    • I shot a touch of video with the EOS-M. The wide-angle lens didn’t work out. I feel like I keep taking the same pictures of AT&T park over and over again with the zoom. The 50mm and the mirrorless was great.
    • We had a box suite, but went downstairs to the club level to eat. I ended up getting a trio of sliders that were corned beef and briscuit, and a bratwurst. The corned beef was exceptionally good. The bratwurst was a bratwurst.
    • I’m still (allegedly) a Rockies fan, so I don’t like the Giants or the Padres. I won’t say anything bad, except that I think it’s chickenshit when a World Series champion’s fans boo every player’s at-bat, especially when you’re outspending all but three teams in the game.
    • I actually like the Padres’ dark uniforms. I think they remind me of the Brewers’ uniforms, minus the cool caps.
    • The game itself was eh. The Giants jumped ahead fast, and the Padres never scored.
    • It was Cinco De Mayo, and some dude proposed on the kiss-cam.
    • I saw a huge dude with a giant Bud Lite logo tattooed on his hand.
    • The Rockies game that I was going to passively follow was rained out.
    • We left after the 7th inning.

    A bit boring, but I do like going to AT&T for the food.

    Pictures are up on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/sets/72157652540439541

  • Latest Obsession: Guitar

    So a week ago, I decided to make a change, hobby-wise, and do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: learn to play guitar.

    I’ve been playing bass for about two and a half years now, after a recess of a few decades. And bass has been fun, but I’d hit a plateau, and thought I’d try something new. I’ve never really played guitar, although my stepdad had an ancient acoustic when I was a kid, and I learned like maybe two riffs, and used to mess with it a little. And I’d tried to resuscitate a few unplayable garage sale guitars when I was a teen, with no real success. (I remember getting a department store Les Paul clone with a snapped neck and trying to fashion a makeshift one from a piece of dimensional lumber, which didn’t work at all.)

    So, I ordered a cheap guitar from Amazon. I got the lowest-end Squier Affinity Stratocaster, in the “beginner” pack, which included a tiny shoebox-sized amp I’ll never use, plus other paraphernalia like a bag, a tuner, some picks, and a strap. I also started scouring the web for any lessons or videos that would be helpful. I also have a copy of Rocksmith, which I used for bass, but which works for guitar, too.

    The guitar: well, it was DOA out of the box. The jack screws were loose, hand-tight.  I took it apart, futzed with it, and it’s fine now. It looks very nice: a transparent blue, with a white pick guard. It’s a Strat, same size and design, with the three single-coil pickups, and same curves and lines as the more expensive cousin. The neck isn’t too bad, with a couple of sharp frets, but it was playable out of the box with no adjustment. It’s amazing to me that in the day of CNC machines and overseas factories, a hundred-dollar guitar is much more playable than what I’d find in a pawn shop for $100 back in high school or college.

    Physically, it’s taking some time to get used to it. It’s much lighter and shorter than a bass, which is nice. The strings are much thinner, and closer together, which makes it feel much different to me. And playing chords is an alien process, as is using a pick. After a week, I am starting to be able to play some chords without my fat fingers dragging across other strings, but it’s going to take much more practice to move around and get used to it.

    I’m having a lot of fun with it, though. There’s a complete different psychology to guitar, and it’s the reason I wanted to try it. I like and appreciate the bass, but it’s a different mindset, and I wanted to shift gears. I am not at the point where I can sit down and play complicated things yet, but it’s easy to turn on the distortion and Iommi away on some power chords.

    Anyway, here’s the short list of what I’ve found useful for learning guitar:

    • http://www.justinguitar.com – a great source of free lessons for beginners.
    • http://get.yousician.com – a fun game with a guided learning path and lessons. I’m just trying the free option, which is time-limited per day.
    • I got the Dummies book, but I’d only say it is half-useful. I don’t like the dead humor tone in it, and I think they burn a hundred pages on useless stuff before they really get going. Plus I don’t want to learn to play “On Top of Old Smokey” – I’m not seven.
    • This book is only four bucks in paperback, and is short (50 pages) but has good info. For that price, the back cover’s chord chart is worth it.