Crosswalks to Nowhere

Last night, we watched one of my favorite documentaries.

It's the story of three people who made history in the world of technology: the first was someone who fancied himself a technologist but appeared far more interested in achieving fame for himself, and was known for his publicity-grabbing grandstanding; the second was a genius who was more interested in solving technical issues than in furthering his own renown; and the third was someone who saw opportunity in a brand-new market and created a seemingly-unstoppable corporate behemoth. These three men (along with many others) took what was a hobby and turned it into a serious business that touched nearly every life on the planet.

The documentary is Empire of the Air: The Men Who Built Radio, and the people were Lee de Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff.

You're forgiven if you came up with three different, more contemporary names.

Based on Tom Lewis' book of the same name, Empire of the Air shows how each of these people achieved their places in the history of radio. We learn that de Forest may or may not have developed the revolutionary Audion tube, and spent a lifetime promoting himself as "The Father of Radio." We see how Armstrong improved upon de Forest's and others' work and made AM radio practical-- and created FM radio. And we hear the tale of David Sarnoff's rise from a poor paperboy to the chairman of RCA.

And while telling these stories, we spend a lot of time in courtrooms.

Well, not really-- but this was a litigious bunch of people, and as one watches Empire of the Air it's hard to resist drawing parallels to the personalities in today's technology world. And while it's certainly unfair to either set of people to draw the comparisons, I can't help but have the familiar names floating through my mind while listening to the stories.

Produced by Ken Burns in 1992, Empire of the Air is a fascinating documentary even to those without a technical background. The emphasis is on the people, their circumstances, and the world they lived in-- and not the inner workings of a regenerative circuit. Old photos, music, and archival film are mixed in with interviews with family, friends, coworkers, and radio insiders like Norman Corwin and Garrison Keillor.

You can find a copy of the movie here.

Why am I talking about this now, 15 years after the movie was first aired? (Incidentally, it was shown about a week before my daughter Becka was born. :-) Well, two reasons: Lisa and I were talking about my interest in the radio hobby (check my radio page), and then I got the idea to build a radio from a kit, like I did when I was a kid. It's a modernized version of a crystal set, and I'll post about it here within the next week.

In the meantime, check out Empire of the Air-- you'll find it enlightening, especially when you realize things haven't changed all that much.

Vacation time is here again. With all the excitement of earlier this year, we decided to stay close to home for the week.

First, a stop at Frontier Days where we saw American English on the 4th and Kansas on the 6th:

...and here's Sears Tower as seen from the top of the Ferris Wheel (it's faint and to the left of the antenna tower):

...then, out traditional first-of-the-summer visit to Superdawg:

We spent a day at Gurnee Mills:

Followed by dinner at Green Basil Thai, including this soft-shell crab:

And there's more of the week to go.

I've been meaning to get the tent out now that we have a backyard, and yesterday was the day. (The last time this saw daylight was when I did the MS150.)

We got the sleeping bags out of storage, Becka strung the patio lights, Lisa got a fire going in the firepit, and we turned the yard into a mini-Wisconsin Dells, without the go-karts.

We all made it through the night-- the first time I camped out in the backyard since I was, I dunno, 11?

We went to the Cubs game today and watched them win over the Astros by a score of 7-6. (Well, you can see that above.) Lisa's brother got the tickets, and her folks came up for the game.

The photo was taken just before the "W" flag was hoisted.

And thanks to Lisa's new digital camera, you can even see the dude working the scoreboard. :-)

Fellow podcaster pal Shelly hit me with an old blogging chestnut, and boy, does the back of my head hurt (RIMSHOT).

But seriously: I've been tagged to do an "Eight Things You May Not Know About Me" blog entry. I could have sworn I did one here years ago, but 'twasn't the case. So here it is:

1.My very first posting to the Internet (or, to be accurate: Usenet) was on April 28, 1989. You can see it here. Aside from proving that I'm old, it also shows that things you put on the 'net never go away.

2. I was a winning contestant on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. I won the Listener Limerick Challenge on the March 29, 2003 show.

3. I rarely swear. I believe it's a sign of intelligence to be able to express yourself firmly, powerfully, and creatively without resorting to one of the "deadly seven." And at the risk of sounding like an old man, I am appalled by the way people drop the f-word so casually.

4. I live by the two best pieces of advice I've ever received. The first came from my father: "Trust your gut," and the second from my friend Bob: "Don't let people rent space in your head." The third best piece of advice was spoken by Sir Anthony Hopkins in The Mask of Zorro: "Lesson number one: never attack in anger." That pretty much covers it.

5. My two favorite TV shows of all time are The Dick Van Dyke Show and SCTV. Aside from the brilliant writing, they provide all sorts of wonderful archetypes: Rob Petrie as the suburban husband and father who works in the city, Alan Brady as the overbearing boss, and Johnny LaRue as the successful entepreneur, TV host, and ladies' man.

6. I always treat the people who provide a service to me with an extra level of respect. It gets you much further than treating them like servants. Build the relationship, even if it's just for the duration of dinner.

7. If there's one key lesson I've learned from my life experiences, it's that life is very precious, it's all over too soon, and so very little is worth fretting over. And we need to cherish every single good thing in our lives and to stop bitching about everything that's wrong, while acting to change the things we can. I sometimes forget that, but it doesn't take much to bring me back: usually, it's the three sets of eyes looking at me.

8. My early musical tastes were greatly influenced by my older siblings, then later by my stint as a DJ on my college's radio station. My listening habits grew more eclectic from there. It wouldn't be unusual for my iPod to play "Dedicated to the One I Love" by the Mamas and the Papas, followed by "Respectable Street" by XTC, then "Solitude" by Duke Ellington, "Hotel Song" by Regina Spektor, and "Unbroken Chain" by The Grateful Dead. Oh, and I can sing you a song in Portuguese about mermaids, and it isn't even dirty.

That's it for me. I am going to tag Lisa and Becka for the next round. :-)

I admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for pop music-- good pop music. It probably stems from growing up listening to my older siblings' Beatles records as well as the stuff we used to hear on WLS and WCFL.

In the summer of 1979, there was a two-page ad in Billboard magazine for a UK-based music label which had finally struck a major distribution deal with a huge American company. The ad talked about the history of the label, and how its sole reason for existence was for its owner to spend his huge inheritance as quickly as possible. The ad also had descriptions of the label's four initial releases under the new joint venture.

The label was Virgin Records. One of the releases was a self-titled album called The Records. The description in the ad described a guitar-based pop band who were destined for great things.

Okay, it was an ad. They're allowed to say that kind of thing.

I picked up a copy of The Records based solely on the description of the ad and the sale price of $4.99 at my local Laury's Records store in Des Plaines, Illinois. It was, and still is, one of the best $5 purchases I've ever made. The album contained some of the most catchy, hook-laden, and jangly (pre-dating even REM) power pop tunes I'd ever heard. For weeks, this was what you'd hear coming from my bedroom or '74 VW Super Beetle.

The album featured the band's biggest hit, "Starry Eyes," which made the Billboard Hot 100 (lyrics on the next page). The better retro-80s radio shows usually play this song, so you may have heard it. Their second, less-big hit from the album was a song called "Teenarama."

The Records was a "US-ified" version of the band's original UK album, Shades in Bed. (US Record companies used to do this: they'd take a UK release and re-order the songs and change versions for release in the US market.) A few months after buying The Records a local shop (Record City in Skokie, where I spent many many hours and a lot of money) had an import of Shades in Bed, so I got to hear the album in its original form.

The Records also released a few EPs, including am infectious cover of "Rock 'n' Roll Love Letter." In fact, they recorded that song twice, with two different producers-- one being Mutt Lange (that's "Mr. Shania Twain" to you).

In the summer of 1980, the band released its followup, Crashes (shown above). There had been a couple of personnel changes and the band didn't repeat the chart success of their first time out, but the new album retained its power-pop sound. They even toured the US that year, and I got to see them at Chicagofest in August of 1980.

Band founder John Wicks still performs and records with a new version of The Records, and his web site is here. You can also check out the band's Wikipedia page here. Cofounder/drummer Will Birch has a web site at this link and has written a book about the 1970s Pub Rock scene called No Sleep Till Canvey Island which is currently on my wish list.

On the next page, you'll find the lyrics to two of my favorite Records tracks: "Hearts in Her Eyes" from Crash, and "Starry Eyes."

(Side note: One of the other albums in the ad was XTC's Drums and Wires.)

(Another side note: I started writing this posting on June 17, 2005. It's about time I got around to finishing it. :-)

When I was a kid, my dad brought home a Radio Shack Crystal Radio kit for me to assemble. It was a fairly simple little kit-- there was no soldering necessary because everything was held together by these little spring clip thingies.

Over the years, I built a bunch of other little electronic kits-- never anything like one of those Heathkit Oscilloscopes, but little cool things, usually radios from kit-building companies like Graymark. Between my kit-building and the fact that I worked at an electronics-assembly plant while I was in high school and college, I became fairly proficient with a soldering iron. I think one of my favorite projects was a device I built that decoded weather maps that were sent via fax over shortwave radio. I built that one about 10 years ago from instructions in a magazine. I recently found it in a box of stuff that's been sitting in storage until we moved recently.

A few weeks ago, I built the Little Sister Crystal Radio Kit from The Xtal Set Society, a group dedicated to keeping the spirit of crystal sets alive by developing new ways of creating very simple radio receivers with the most basic parts available. The very essence of a crystal radio is the ability to receive radio signals without using battery power or AC current-- it's an entirely self-powered device.

The Little Sister uses the most basic radio detection device-- a glass diode (the "crystal")-- and surrounds it with components to bring it a few years forward. I didn't have to wind a coil, which is usually a requirement for a crystal radio, because the designer substituted a pre-made solid state coil. And in contradiction to what I wrote above, this radio includes an audio amplification circuit that's powered by a 9-volt battery.

It took a couple of days to assemble the kit, working slowly for about an hour at a time at the workbench in the garage. (In the old days, I didn't need to use reading glasses for close work like this.) When the soldering iron heated up and that classic old smell of melting lead, aluminum, and flux entered my nose, my soldering "chops" came right back.

Like any radio of this design, you need to connect an antenna and an electrical ground. The ground was easy-- there's a pipe leading to an underground well in the garage, and I just ran a wire from there to the radio's "Ground" terminal.

The antenna was a slightly different challenge: normally, you can just run a wire from where you're sitting to a tree or something, but I wanted to put up an antenna I could also use with my shortwave radios. I bought some copper antenna wire from Universal Radio, dug out some insulators I bought from Radio Shack years ago, and strung about 50 feet of antenna wire between the roof of the house and the garage. I connected a wire to the antenna wire and ran it to the "Antenna" terminal of the radio.

Once I clipped the 9 volt battery in to place, the earphone came alive with the stronger AM signals in the area, with WGN and WBBM being the strongest. Like the simpler radios I built in the past, the stations tend to "bleed" over each other, but the tuning knob on the Little Sister helps to separate the stations.

One of the neat things about this radio is the fact that, with its audio amplification, it's pretty loud. I can sometimes hear the weather forecast playing through the earphone while I'm getting in my car in the morning.

I'd recommend this kit to anyone who's interested in beginning a hobby in electronics, or if you're like me, you want to rekindle an old interest. Or if you just want to start saying the word "Fahnestock" again.

(I'll be updating my radio site soon, and this radio will appear there, as well.)

Lisa tagged me with the following questionnaire, originally lifted from Microserfs (which I thought was okay, if a bit too navel-gazing). Enjoy...

If your life were a game of Jeopardy, what would your categories be?

1. Brazilian Music
2. Lines from It's A Wonderful Life
3. Snacks: Healthy and Un
4. How a Dad Kills Time When His Daughters Take Him Into Claire's
5. Elementary Gardening
6. Silent Movies
7. Anything That Can Possibly Go Wrong When Selling and Buying a Home

And in the spirit of all things bloggerific, I hereby tag Shelly and Steve.