Crosswalks to Nowhere

This is one of the tip-ins when I was considering buying an iBook: Solarian II.

This was an awesome game on the Mac II back in the early 1990s, and it's just as addictive in its current incarnation as it was back then. It's a variation on Space Invaders or Galaga, only with some really cool sound effects (which I'll record and post in the future).

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Here are the White Sox outfielders during a pitcher switch at today's game against the Seattle Mariners. That's Jermaine Dye, Aaron Rowland, and Scott Podsednik taking a short break.

Rowland had the defensive play of the game when he snagged Richie Sexson's fly ball by bouncing off the center field wall, and it happened just a few feet from us.

I got my hands on some great tickets-- front-row bleachers in center-left field-- and Becky said they were the best tickets she ever had at a baseball game. I think this was the first time I've been in the bleachers since I was about 13. Of course, back then it was old Comiskey Park and Harry Caray would come out the the bleachers and lead the Seventh Inning Stretch surrounded by fans with stacks of Falstaff Beer Cups.

Times change, and the old park and Harry are gone (I never thought of Harry as the "Cub Man"-- real Chicago fans know that title belongs to Jack Brickhouse-- to me, he'll always be the guy slurring his words through a staticy picture on channel 44).

We had a great time. It was a perfect day, too: the only clouds in the sky were the ones created by the fireworks that went off after each of the Sox' home runs. When it got a little too hot, fans were cooling off in the shower booth just beneath the scoreboard:

It was also Carlton Fisk tribute day, so we each got oversized baseball cards with Fisk's stats on them:

The Sox beat the Mariners 3-1, and are now in a commanding lead, with the best record in baseball as I write this. Chicago fans need to look south if they want to see a winning team in their own front yard.

Things I learned on my week off that just ended:

- My favorite rides at Great America are still The Demon, The American Eagle, and Batman;

- The crowd we walked through at The Mane Event in downtown AH Friday Night ultimately reached 12,000 people;

- It took almost a gallon of primer and a gallon of paint to do my kitchen (photos to come);

- The Ilo DVD04 is proving to be a pretty good value in DVD recorders;

- Sky High is a pretty cute movie-- Emma really liked it, too-- although they could have broken the Disney mold by using the original artists' versions of the songs in the soundtrack. I mean, TMBG does a good job of Devo's "Through Being Cool," but Bowling For Soup doing "I Melt With You?" Come on.

- Ikea on a Saturday Afternoon is always a bad idea. Although we decided "North To Ikea" (the sign on the Schaumburg Free Trolley) would make a great album name;

- The episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 featuring The Giant Gila Monster is still the best;

- Smithwick's Ale ($4.00 a pint this month at Peggy's) is pretty good;

- Toma Rosa's pizza is astonishingly delicious;

- One more day off would be nice.

And so the new work week begins. :-)

There's an article on Gizmodo this week about how portable CD players are still outselling digital music players by a wide margin. The article quotes an IDC survey that says while 53% of all US households have a portable CD player, six percent have some sort of digital music player.

Six percent, folks. Think about that the next time you read a breathless article about how podcasting is changing the world as we know it, and you'd better join the legions of white-headphone-wearers or you'll be cast to the.... well, someplace where unhip people go.

The author refers to the higher cost of iPods and other digital players being a factor in that low number, but the most poignant part of the article is this:

The other reason you have to factor into the CD player’s continued reign, of course, is that digital audio remains too convoluted for the AOL demographic. Too few MP3 players feature direct encoding; given the inherent laziness of mankind, too few people are willing to use their computers as intermediaries, despite the obvious long-term benefits of having all your music in a single location. And here’s the real kicker in the CD’s favor: Since the latest generation of portable CD players can accomodate MP3- and WMA-encoded discs, too, folks can tote around 100 or so songs on a single sliver of media.

A technology has to appeal to the masses and be ridiculously usable before it can become really successful: it has to become an appliance. Until the technology companies get their act together and make it easy for Grandma to use their products, the numbers will remain low.

This was our view this morning when we took the kids to the Signature Room in the John Hancock Building. We were there for lunch and to watch the Chicago Air and Water Show.

I was a little worried about the weather-- when I woke up it was pouring, but then the sun came out and things seemed promising, and then it looked like it was going to rain again. Fortunately, the weather turned out perfectly: it seemed to keep the crowds on the street down, and the view from 95 floors up was very very cool.

We had lunch with Glenn and Lauren, and afterwards we went across the street to the Ghirardelli Chocolate Cafe, where Emma and I shared a banana split and Lisa and Bec split a chocolate brownie sundae. Glenn also had a banana split and Lauren had this awesome looking ice cream cone that featured a dipped waffle cone. We also spent some time in the Hershey's Chocolate Store, conveniently located across the street from Ghirardelli. We got out of there unscathed, at least by chocolate.

It's evening now and we're back home, trying to decide our evening plans.

I've started converting some of my old VHS tapes to DVD, which means I'm running across stuff I haven't seen since I recorded it years ago.

So far, I've run across several episodes of Chico and The Man, The Two Ronnies, Monty Python, lots of SCTV, and a bunch of random stuff that I taped once cable TV came to Mt. Prospect.

In some cases, I'm not exactly sure why I recorded them, so I wrote it off to the fact that I was just playing with a new toy.

(Unfortunately, I did not save any episodes of "Morrie's Markdown Mart," a weekly half-hour infomercial on the long-gone Modern Satellite Network, featuring products from the also-long-gone C.O.M.B. closeout distributors. The crown jewel of their product line was the Commodore SX-64, billed as "the portable version of the most popular personal computer in the world!!")

I also ran across some great MTV clips, including XTC's Andy Partridge hosting "Post-Modern" in 1989, and XTC's appearance on Late Night With David Letterman that same week.

The final episodes of Cheers, Newhart, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson also made it to tape. What makes some of these recordings interesting are the commercials that are still intact.

Chicago radio host Steve Dahl makes a few appearances here, with his Greetings From Graceland, An Extremely Low Budget Show, It's Too Early, and a couple episodes of his cable-access Steve Dahl Show, the highlight of which was Garry Meier riding a Chia Pet through the magic of Chroma-Key.

As I discover more things I find interesting, I'll mention them here, perhaps with vidcaps.

Not only is this an opportunity to archive the stuff I want to keep, but it's also creating a nice stack of videos which may find their way to eBay as I weed out my collection.

One item that will certainly be for sale soon is the complete 13-part series Hollywood: A Celebration of The American Silent Film by David Gill and Kenneth Brownlow. This is a must-have for anyone who's interested in the history of silent movies, and features hours of clips and interviews with the people who were there.

We watched Sunset Boulevard the other night on TCM, and thanks to the Hollywood series we were able to catch all the "inside" movie references (such as DeMille calling Norma Desmond "young fellow," which is what the real-life DeMille called Gloria Swanson when he directed her in the silent days).

Watch for my stuff on eBay and elsewhere. Commercial over.

One of my hopes is to digitize some of the material that I've converted and post it here. A couple people have written asking for copies of my Nite-Owl tape, and perhaps I'll get a few minutes ripped down for your viewing.

Now, all I need is the time to get through all this tape...

Following my iBook's repair, I received an email from Apple asking for comments on my experience. Let's just say I was very firm with them. I figured my comments would go into some database somewhere, to be treated as a number on a customer sat metric chart, and that would be the end of it.

I was wrong. About three weeks ago, the manager of the Michigan Avenue Apple Store called me to tell me that Apple wanted to make the situation right, and the company did exactly that.

My faith in Apple's Customer Service has been restored. Thanks to everyone at the company for making an unpleasant experience a much better one.

Note: Mac geekiness to follow...

This month's MacAddict has a nice tip for turning the dashboard on and off in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). This is useful if you find things running slowly due to memory issues, like I did on my iBook. I'm putting it here because I know I'll misplace the magazine at some point.

Turning off Dashboard
----
Open a terminal window and enter this:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

and then enter:

killall Dock

Turning on Dashboard
----
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

and then enter:

killall Dock

Enjoy.