Author: jkonrath

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Log analysis is masturbation

I thought I’d start with some year-end statistics and bookkeeping, since I thought it would be a good time for answering the question “How many people read this thing, anyway?” So I downloaded all of my logs to my home machine, and used the handy grep, cut and wc commands to crunch away on the raw logs. But before we start, a few disclaimers.

Disclaimer #1: I did not “wash” these logs to remove search engine crawling in any way. I’m sure there are nice tools to do this, but I’m doing this in the most rudimentary way. And just from looking at raw logs, there are a fuck of a lot of search engines out there hitting web sites. If someone told me that 50% of all web traffic was currently web crawlers, I would not be surprised. And even though Google and their huge image-crawling project are the cause for much of the traffic, everyone and their brother is running a web crawler. Jabronis in garages running searches to find email addresses for spam operations are all over my logs, with malformed headers and IDs to try to protect their get-rich-quick operations. Oh, and they’re doing it with the bandwidth I pay for, which is even more heartwarming.

Disclaimer #2: I’m not using a log analysis program. There are hundreds of programs out there, and 99% of the web is using Analog, one of the least interesting of the bunch. Why? Try to get any of the others to work and you’ll find out. If your ISP has some neato package to generate reports on how long people view your pages and stuff like that, great. I’d rather pay for an ISP that’s always working and won’t be shut down in a year when the owner goes to college. So anyway, my stats are based on just raw searches and counting of logs, and nothing fluffier.

Disclaimer #3: Of course, hits include both people who read every word of a page and enjoy it, and people who typed “butt sex” in google and somehow ended up at my page and didn’t read one damn thing when they saw there were no free videos.

Okay. In 2005, 34.216.9.77/ had 1,508,132 hits total. In comparison, there were 86,022 hits in 2004, and 53,972 in 2003. That’s about double from last year. There was a similar trend on just the people that came to any of the URLs south of 34.216.9.77/journal (I.e the page you’re currently reading.) 2005’s total hits were 153,586, while 2004 was 86,022 and 2003 was 53,972, which is close to the same trend.

What about unique users? Overall, the entire site had 55,044 in 2005, compared to 44,917 in 2004, and 40,592 in 2003. (I calculated a unique user as a unique IP number or hostname in the logs. I realize that the same person could read both at home and at work and be counted twice; but then many people reading behind a firewall or NAT appliance or whatever could all be considered one visitor, too.) That means that in 2005, the average person read just over 27 pages. Of course, when you factor in all of the people who googled over to my page hoping to download some free Metallica MP3s and only read one page, it balances out with those of you who read all of my entries.

As far as the unique visitors on the journal page, there were 7008 in 2005, which is down from 2004 at 8612 and up from 2003’s 6994. I don’t know why there was a drop, although it’s possible that all of the press I got about Adam Gadahn in 2004 bumped up the number, plus I didn’t write as much in 2005. (56 entries in 2005 versus 91 in 2004.)

So those are the numbers. 7008 readers (minus the search engines and people looking for free porn) is orders of magnitude higher than I would expect, based on the comments and the fact that I really don’t know that many people that read this thing. I don’t advertise; I am not in any weird web rings or communities or whatever; I don’t really socialize with bloggers (I don’t even consider this thing a blog to begin with) and I don’t really whore things out as far as links and whatnot. I did blogexplosion briefly, and go there when I’m eternally bored, but most of the blogs there are either mommy blogs or are so hopelessly useless because they’re nothing but political repostings of day-old news.

I’m happy with the numbers only in that this isn’t my life. It’s a side project, something I do when I can’t write and I don’t have other things to do, and the main reason I do this is so that in five years, I will be able to go back and read this and enjoy it. My guilty pleasure is to go back a few years and read my old entries, and I really love it when I hit stuff I’ve almost totally forgotten and I love the old writing. I put out a book of the first three years of the journals, and it sold about 6 copies, but I admit one of the reasons I did it was to have a paper copy I could read in bed. I still waver back and forth on whether or not I should do a second volume, and maybe throw in some pictures or scans of paper journals or something just to make it interesting. Maybe I will. Who knows.

In other news, I finished reading First Man, James Hansen’s authorized biography of astronaut Neil Armstrong, and I really did enjoy it. Armstrong kept out of the public light for years, hoping he wouldn’t get mauled by the media like his hero and friend Charles Lindberg. For years, there’s been little information about his life, and various second-hand info from other NASA colleagues about the lunar mission. This is a huge book (almost 800 pages) but it was very rewarding as far as how Neil grew up in rural Ohio, went to school at Purdue, joined the Navy and flew jets from carriers in Korea, and became a test pilot before getting tapped for the astronaut job.

I think a lot of the reason I liked the book is that Armstrong was so different than other astronauts or test pilots. He was all about the science behind the mission, and he loved the engineering aspect. Strapping into an X-15 rocket plane and flying to the edge of the atmosphere wasn’t about the joyride, or the “extreme” aspect of the mission; it was totally about gathering the data to prove or disprove the theorems that the guys with the sliderules were throwing down in the labs. Armstrong probably could have been elected king of the world in 1969, but he was always shy about politics, and though it was best to not discuss one’s political views, as has become the national sport in the 21st century. He was greatly honored to meet both LBJ and Nixon, but not because they were the highest red or blue, but because they were in charge, and you honor the office over the person. He was from a very religious family, and certainly was religious, but he said so little about it, people accused him of being an atheist. Instead of becoming a token president of a fortune 500 company, like some of his other Apollo buddies, he taught undergrad physics at a small university. He could have just had his name put on the door of a big university, so he could do nothing or maybe dabble in research. Instead, he wanted to go somewhere that would let him teach, because he thought furthering kids’ educations was more important. It’s all of those little things that make him so much more interesting to me, and now that I got a full dose of the official story, I’m happy. (But, Neil’s crewmate Michael Collins’, autobiography still stands as the best I’ve read sofar.)

Quiet Saturday here. In a week and a couple of days, we go to Vegas for the annual birthday celebration, and I can’t wait to get out of town. Until then, I’m taking it easy…

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Xanadu House and 80s nostalgia

I sometimes have this weird nostalgia that’s much more complicated than just “remember the 80s,” but rather a deep nostalgia for what I saw as cutting edge or a glimpse of the future way back when. It’s hard to explain, but it’s that weird feeling I had twenty years ago when I looked at some futuristic computer or technology, and I had this premonition that in the year 2000, this would be “it.” And the feeling is stronger when there are a lot of other interconnected memories or feelings about it. And the other day, this totally happened in a way that is easily explained, but probably still doesn’t capture what the fuck I’m rambling on about.

Okay, Wikipedia had a featured article the other day about The Xanadu House. No, it has nothing to do with Olivia Newton-John or the Rush song from Farewell to Kings. It was a series of three houses built as demo/museum units by the architect as a showcase to “the home of tomorrow.” They were made of sprayed polyurethane foam and looked something like Yoda’s house or maybe something a Hobbit would live in. They were a very 70s-looking design, and I could totally see something like them in a Roger Dean-airbrushed Yes double gatefold album cover, or maybe done up on the side of a van with a wizard shooting lightning bolts that lit up along with the 8-track player.

Okay, the outside did look pretty borderline artschool-project, but the inside was the interesting stuff. There were computers everywhere: controlling the lights, monitoring the bitchin’ hot tub, cooking your food; measuring your calories and watching your weight; integrated into the Elvis-like wall of TVs, one tuned to each station (total: 3); and everywhere else. The house was a full-on wet dream of automation. Now you see why I was somewhat pulled into reading all about this house and scouring the web for more info. I’ve still got this land out in Colorado with nothing but cacti and prarie dogs on it, and the idea of building some huge, fucked up, unconventional structure like a geodesic dome or a decommissioned jet airliner or a giant tube made out of a million egg cartons and some nuclear-proof epoxy solution is pretty appealing. Add to that a slew of computers that I don’t really need and that’s damn near what-I’d-do-if-I-hit-the-Lotto material for me.

But as I dove deeper, I found a lot of threads that pulled me back to when they got this house built down in Florida, in 1983. These computers back in the day weren’t a bunch of IBM blade servers or anything; turns out the builders were using a slew of good old Commodore 64s in the styrofoam innards of this dream palace. The TVs weren’t giant plasmas like Bill Gates would have, but rather the old-school, silver, two-knob not-so-flat CRT sets like you’d find at your Aunt Barbara’s rec room back in ’80. The online shopping system wired into the food-processor kitchen used a 12″ analog laserdisc for its info. The “home gym” consists of the same non-resistance exercise bike your parents bought back in ’78 and used as a clothes rack for ten years before unloading it at a yard sale. This wasn’t a Jetsons home as much as it was my Christmas list from 1983.

And that’s when this unfamiliar house became a home I knew, at least in proxy, for some weird reason. I was IN Florida, in Orlando, in 1983. My parents loaded us up in the station wagon and drove south a thousand miles, first to Tampa, and then to the Disney kingdom. And we didn’t go to the Xanadu house, but it looks a lot like the kind of place we would have stopped. We hit a lot of roadside attractions that trip, and a lot of the gift shops and historical viewpoints, from Tarpon Springs to the Atlantic coast, had the same tacky yet “futuristic” sign that graced the front of the Xanadu house. Everything about the old pictures, the way they were framed, the style of the furniture, just rubs some weird brain cell deep in my head that makes me think of a million memories that have nothing to do with this house and everything to do with my own life.

For example, I remember, again on the trip, going to a Showbiz pizza with my family. For those who don’t remember, Showbiz was similar to Chuck E. Cheese, the pizza parlor where you bring the rugrats for birthdays and parties. But back in the day, Showbiz was very oriented toward arcade games, and had a fuckload of consoles, including duplicates of many popular games. And at that time, the big deal were laserdisc-based games like Dragon’s Lair. Nobody seems to remember this particular fad, but these machines had a big giant laser disc player in them, and when you jerked around the joystick, different scenes from this Disney-eque cartoon would play. The game totally sucked from a playability standpoint, but everyone was too busy circle-jerking over the fact that the output was basically like DVD-quality animation and sound, and this was at a time when most arcade heroes were 16 by 16 pixel sprites. I remember staring at people playing these games in amazement, thinking this was the future of arcade games. Of course, the future was that nobody wanted to pay 50 cents per game (this was one of the first two-coin titles), the laser players crapped out and took forever to load, and in another year, the entire coin-op arcade game industry would take a crap and completely implode, meaning nobody would be too interested in the progress of games for another five years. (About when Nintendo started slapping NES guts into consoles and charging people to play games on a console you could just buy and play at home on a TV – that is if you could find a NES, which you couldn’t, because Nintendo was in the middle of a price-fixing, fake-supply-problem war.)

And I went to Epcot on that trip, which was right when it opened and they had a lot of cool displays about the future and how science would win everything. (They’ve long since ripped all of this shit out and replaced it with “Bob the Builder’s Why Every Kid Should Buy More of My Garbage” exhibits.) And the exhibit showed electronic cars that we’d all drive to work in 1997, and ways to raise more food for the world through hydroponic greenhouses we’d all use when we went to Mars, and so on. Epcot was originally going to be a huge experiment in sustainable living, but when Disney realized there was no money in that, they had GE, GM, and AT&T drop these huge advertisements for life in the future. And the same thing is, in 1983, it all seemed so fucking feasible that in 20 years we’d all have video phones and TVs with smellovision and pod cars, and I remember that view of the future so vividly. And now that future is in the past, and none of it happened. I used to read in Compute magazine about how, maybe if we all tried hard, cars might have a single microprocessor in them, and it would be so cool to get so much blazing power out of an 8-bit 6510 wired into our engine. And now, I’ve got at least twenty processors sitting on my desk, in my watch, in my camera, in my mouse, and none of them are doing anything remotely as interesting as what I thought they would be. I have ten times the computing power of that Xanadu house sitting in the battery charger to my camera, and none of it is being used to automatically cook my food or turn on the jaccuzi when I get home from work. And that’s sad, in a way.

The house has a much more sad ending, though. It ran as a museum until the ’90s, then sat vacant, as Florida mold consumed the sterile white interior. Squatters broke in and tore up the interior, and eventually, last year, the owners bulldozed the place, and plan on putting in a condo on the land. There are a lot of pictures on line of the interior in disrepair, and then the dozer taking out the foam walls. Very sad stuff.

Anyway, I forgot what my point is, other than to somehow describe that feeling I get when I look at an old Amiga or something. I remember the summer of 85 when all of the computer magazines were abuzz about that thing like all of the glamour mags are currently abuzz about the Jessica Simpson divorce or something. I mowed lawns and babysat and applied at every McDonald’s and Hardees within 10-speed distance of my house to scrape up money for that A-1000, and never made it. Just looking at the magazine pictures was like a view into the future of computing, something that could draw multiple windows and 4096 simultaneous colors! Looking back at the old beige-platinum machines, I imagine this massive future, but then I realize that my old Palm Pilot is probably faster and with a better screen.

Ah well, enough rambling. I’m still reading this Neil Armstrong book and it’s going to take me forever to finish. Better invest some more time into it…

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general

Goodbye 2005

Okay, it looks like the annual archive-last-year-and-start anew journal maintenance worked, and I’m ready to start 2006. Because I cobbled together this system back in 1997 and slowly added new features to it over the years, I can never remember exactly how to do this big shift at the end of the year, and every year I swear I will rewrite the whole thing to make it easier, but I never do. Maybe before 2007.

We had a pretty quiet but nice new year. We went to Balthazar for an early dinner, and that was pretty damn good. Actually, the problem there is that the same owner or restaurant umbrella or whatever also runs a bar called Schiller’s in our neighborhood, and they have a decent bar food menu with some similar entrees, and they deliver. We’re pretty much on a first-name basis with their delivery guy because they’re now the default delivery choice, and having their entrees constantly sort of ruins going to the restaurant and ordering them. But it was neat to see everything in full swing for the big night. We got out of there by like seven though, and went home to lay in diabetic coma after the big meal and watch TV. Nothing exciting, but it was nice.

In conversation, Sarah asked me what I did last year, and I couldn’t even remember. I probably watched Platoon for the 8000th time and contemplated rigging up tripwires and punji sticks to take out my neighbors. I haven’t done anything for the new year in a while. I know everyone thinks that all New Yorkers stand in Times Square, but I haven’t done that and probably never will, since even if the weather is ultra-nice on the 29th and 30th, it always turns horrible on the day of the 31st and dips below freezing, as if someone out there knows there will be tens of thousands of people standing out there waiting to get frostbite. The flipside of this is that every bar and restaurant in the city suddenly adds an extra zero or two to their rates, and you end up spending a grand to sit in a greasy spoon with a thimble of champagne bought at CostCo, getting loaded with a bunch of strangers. So I’ve always avoided leaving the house.

I think the last time I actually threw a party was when I lived with Simms and Liggett in Bloomington at West Sixth. That was in 94/95, and we had a huge bottle rocket war outside, lots of Simms’ chili, a keg in the kitchen, a ton of people, and Chuck’s nephew Eric made this fortified distilled champagne that was like rocket fuel and gave me a hangover for like a week. But without the huge college house and a bunch of roommates and ultra-cheap Big Red Liquors right down the road, it’s hard to throw a big bash like that. And the whole “too old” thing comes into play, especially since I don’t drink anymore, and it actually took some effort to stay up till midnight last night.

I considered typing up some huge year-in-review meme and decided not to. I really don’t give a shit about what happened this year outside my life, and it seems like most preassembled sets of questions seem to require me giving a shit about the hurricanes or Tom Delay or whatever else, and I honestly don’t. I had a good year in the sense that I met Sarah, and moved out of Astoria, and finally got out of the country on vacation (Canada doesn’t count). I got to Hawaii again, and I got some new states checked off of my list (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island.) I got the next issue of the zine out, which was good. Nobody bought it, which isn’t.

I really don’t feel like I got much done as far as writing this last year. I barely wrote in here (50,000 words compared to 2004’s 80,000), and a lot of that has to do with my own neuroses about what a blog should be and what I should put out there for people to read and all of that shit. Part of it is also just apathy. I didn’t write much in my paper journal, either. And other than the production of the zine, I didn’t really get any work done on any large projects. I think I cycled between six and eight ideas, all somewhat bad, and did little work in any of them. I don’t set new year resolutions, but if I did, it would be to get my shit straight on all of that, pick a project, and get some work done on it. I don’t even give a shit about the whole selling and finding a market and all of the other stuff that other so-called authors get stuck on. I just want to find a project and WRITE and get words on paper and come up with something that rivals the other two books in length, depth, complexity, etc. I have a bunch of ideas for scraping together various crap and stories and journals and photos and putting them into books that nobody will buy, but I’m so tired of the fact that all of those are the equivalent to “greatest hits” packages, and I need to move on to something new.

Add to that the usual resolutions, like getting in shape, paying off debt, etc. I also want to focus a lot more on completely ignoring politics, which will be important with the elections in the coming year. I’m also trying to read more this year, and maybe I should help enforce that by writing more book reviews and stuff. I have a huge stack of books from Christmas that I need to get through, so that should keep me busy.

We have a nice, three-day weekend, so today’s a day for lounging around. We also got started with zipcar, and tomorrow we are taking the afternoon to drive to New Jersey and go to the mall and to Target and just to get the hell out of the city for a day. I know there’s a common perception that Jersey is horrible, but after being cooped up on this little island for the last month or two, going out there is like panacea. So, happy new year and all of that stuff. I’m going to go read for a while.

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general

Transit strike

I stayed home today to try to beat the end of a bad cold that has been going on for almost two weeks. It was made worse by the fact that I had to walk to work the last two days because of the transit strike. The strike is allegedly over now, and the busses and subway system are slowly coming back to life, but I think it’s 50/50 on having my F train operational tomorrow morning for work. A bus runs right outside of our apartment on Grand St, but I haven’t seen one yet. Who knows. I’m sure someone in Chinatown has “I survived the subway strike” t-shirts for sale, though.

I’ve been reading a lot, because I’ve been sick and also have a lot of books coming in as presents. I started reading Neal Cassady’s collected letters, which were interesting, but I stalled about halfway through. Maybe I’ll get back to it later. I still have more astronaut stuff to read, and I’m about halfway through Michael Collins’ autobiography. He was the CSM pilot on Apollo 11, i.e. the one that didn’t walk on the moon. His book is probably one of the best astronaut biographies I’ve read. He was a test pilot, and seems much more “human” than others, in the way he describes things. He’s not writing as a big huge mega-person who is larger than life, or a politician, or someone shilling you a message via the fact that they were spam in a can a few times. He spends a lot more time talking about how they got ready and developed things for these trips, and most of his writing is as a pilot, not a scientist or a spokesman. It’s good stuff. There’s a new Neil Armstrong authorized bio out now, so I will have to order a copy and contrast/compare. I guess Armstrong was on 60 Minutes recently, and they showed him flying his glider. I wish I could track down info on that and find out what he’s flying.

That’s about it here. I think I’m going to go back to bed until dinner.

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EKGs and LASIK

It has been a long week, and has involved many views of myself I’d normally not see. First, I had an annual physical, and I guess that view involved an EKG, which is always weird, but was, luckily, fine. I am under 40, so I did not get the pleasure of another little test that won’t be discussed. I did get a bunch of blood tests done, so in a few days, I will get to see another view of myself, in the form of little numbers telling me the range of various chemicals in my blood, which is always a little more interesting than just a glance in the mirror. Nothing strange expected there, although I’m sure my cholestorol is high and that’s always a fun bridge to cross with any doctor, especially one who loves writing prescriptions.

On Friday morning, I woke up three hours early to Blizzard 05 (a couple of inches) and trudged my way to another doctor, this time to look at my eyes and see if I can get LASIK. I had a short battery of interesting tests, including a computerized photo-mapping of my eye, which is a new one for me. I got to see a big color digital picture of my ocular devices, which resembled a view of a sun-like star, but crossed with a couple of blood vessels of some sort. I also got some numbing drops, which are not exactly the fun party game you might expect, and the nurse stuck a very sharp, very tiny probe right into my eye to get a depth of my cornea. Unfortunately, after all of this fun, it turns out I can’t get LASIK, or the also-nifty LASEK or PRK surgeries, because my prescription is too high and my cornea is too thin for all of that slicing and dicing. When they do the correction, they carve down the cornea to get the right shape, and in my case, there’s just not enough to carve. There is a procedure that’s brand new where they implant a tiny sliver of a lens underneath there, and you have a permanent contact lens that never needs cleaning. But this is about twice as expensive, and it’s more of a pain in the ass (or eye, rather), and it’s all too many if if ifs.

So today I went to LensCrafters and ran through another set of tests, this time for plain old glasses. I got more pictures of myself in the form of eye shots, and did a bunch of “this or this.” The doctor, it turns out, is also a graduate of IU, and we roamed the Bloomington campus at the same time. Small world. Big prescription though, and even bigger bill by the time they got those high-index lenses all figured out. Hey, more views of myself, with new frames! I won’t get to see them for a few more weeks, while they hunt down the vintage Coke bottles on e-bay to make my lenses. And then I got a haircut, and I can see my ears!

And that’s about it. I need to go shop for a few more presents online, and spend the last few dollars I have on that. And I’m reading the new David Foster Wallace already, thanks to Marie, who was also thanked inside. So, off to that.

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general

Goodbye Astoria

The last of the Astoria move-out was completed on Saturday. Now all I need to do is send my keys to my landlord and get ripped off for my entire security deposit. Saturday’s work involved a last trip to the Neptune Diner, and then about three or four hours of clearing out every remaining item in the place. I had some grand scheme of donating things to some charity, selling stuff off on craigslist, listing stuff on freecycle, or whatever else. But when it came down to it, I simply couldn’t deal with waiting on other people and whatever else, so it all went to the curb or in the garbage cans. And as quickly as we could put stuff out there, it vanished. It was like christmas for some poor bastards that hauled that stuff out of there.

The worst of the last stuff were the loveseat and single chair that I bought back in 2000. Because of the weird s-curve layout of my front door, it was like a very bad 3-D tetris game trying to get the couch out of there. It was too wide and too deep, and the depth of the curve made it impossible to take it out long-ways at an angle. I can’t even really describe it, but it was a horror to get that thing out. After clearing everything, we did a real quick sweep of the place with broom and swifter, just to get the big chunks up. Like I said, the landlord’s going to fuck me on the deposit anyway, so there’s no reason for me to get out a toothbrush and go OCD on the place.

As we left, it hit me that I’d never see the place again, and despite all of the horrific problems with it, I’m sort of sad to see it go. I lived in the place for six years, which is longer than I’ve ever lived in any place since my parents’ house. A lot’s gone on there. Every book I’ve published was cranked out while I lived there. (Some of them were started before then, but the ISBNs hit the jackets while I was living in Astoria.) I crossed the millenium there. It was a good run, I guess. I didn’t like the place as much as, say, the 600 7th Ave place in Seattle, but I’m glad to move on, but shit, that’s a sixth of my life. Leaving didn’t blow me away as much as it did to leave the Mitchell Street House in ’93, or leaving Seattle in ’99, but still. End of an era.

We had a good Thanksgiving, too. We went up to Guy and Scott’s, Sarah’s friends, up in upstate New York again. Sarah went up on Tuesday night to help with the shopping and the preparation, and I worked on Wednesday and then took the bus up. The Port Authority looked like some kind of apocalypse disaster movie on Wednesday afternoon, but once I got on a bus and headed north, it wasn’t a bad run. I think I made it to Rosendale in under two hours, door to door, and was greeted at the bus stop by Guy and Sarah, who then took us to a shopping center where we got Chinese and pizza from two different places, and I headed into a Dunkin’ Donuts for a dozen of those, just in case.

Guy and Scott’s friend Beth was there with her two-and-a-half year old son Ian and her dog Gus. Guy already started the dinner preparation, and we all ate and hung out that night, knowing the oven would get fired up in the morning for the big bird. We crashed somewhat early, and in the morning woke to find a couple of inches of fresh powder covering everything outside. Given that this is in the middle of nowhere, it meant there was virgin white snow all over everything. When you live in the city, where snow is immediately smooshed by busses and trucks and turned horrid colors of black and grey by pollution, you really appreciate the pure white of a real snowfall. Gus, a collie/alaskan husky mix, enjoyed it too. He spent a lot of the day outside, running through the drifts, trying to chase the wild turkeys and deer that cross through the yard. He was so happy, he would roll around on his back in the snow and jump around like a kid on Christmas morning.

Guy’s dinner was perfect. I’d put Guy up against anybody’s pefect grandmother’s cooking dinners anyday. He’s totally into cooking way too much food and making all of it great, so you don’t want to get in his way when he’s cooking, but you totally want to be there for the product. Guy’s pre-dinner dinner is better than most dinners, and it’s just a long onslaught of food. It’s like the iron man triathalon of food. I had to pace myself and quit early, before the handmade pies happened. We stayed Thursday night again, and then I had bacon and eggs before Beth drove us back to the city. We got back before 2:00, which meant we had the rest of Friday plus the whole weekend to chill out and do nothing, which we did.

I should throw out a few book reviews for good measure, since I’ve been reading a lot. First, Andrew Smith’s Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth. I’ve been reading a lot of space stuff lately, but this really put a new twist on things, by trying to catch up with the nine remaining Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon. Smith chases after the elusive lunar explorers, trying to bring out more than just the stock NASA facts, but to really determine what happened to these men who had the great apex of their life happen at a young age, and then had the entire country’s interest in space exploration collapse after the moon walks. Some guys are still trying to champion space missions, like Buzz Aldrin, while others turned to religion, philosophy, art, or private industry ranging from beer bottling to football team management. Many divorced and had family problems, many felt betrayed by their country for dropping the ball on the space program. Overall, the backstory is excellent and a great page-turner.

An impulse purchase I greatly enjoyed was Sam Posey’s Playing with Trains. Posey, a former Grand Prix race car driver and long-time race commentator, also spends a lot of time playing with HO trains down in his basement, something that goes back to his childhood and a Lionel train set around the Christmas tree. The first half of the book goes through the fifteen-year saga of Posey restarting his hobby as an adult when he has a baby boy, going through the construction of a massive layout in his basement. During the steps of this journal, we learn a bit about the industry behind the hobby, and the various steps you need to go from a little loop of track to a full-blown system. In the second part, he gets his journalistic background fired up and starts to go out and meet the other people with his obsession, as well as the major suppliers and magazines covering the hobby. He also goes out and tries a 1:1 scale steam locomotive, and makes a few field trips to the crumbling remains of the once-mighty rail system in this country. While I never re-started the hobby (no basement, no attention span), I had the Tyco starter set and a bunch of Life-Like buildings nailed to a piece of plywood when I was a kid, and always dreamed of a giant 1:87 reproduction of some Santa Fe freight line rumbling through a scale city. The book reminded me of all of that, and I’m sure if I did have a basement, I’d be down there right now with $700 of new HO-scale equipment.

Another great one was Michael Harris – The Atomic Times: My H-Bomb Year at the Pacific Proving Ground. Harris was drafted back in the fifties, and spent a year of his two-year commitment at the Eniwetok Atoll. He was there in 1955 for Operation: Redwing, a series of some of the biggest H-bomb explosions ever. He spent the first part of his stay editing The Atomic Times, a little mimeo base newspaper, which reminded me a bit of John Sheppard’s stories of Army journalism. He later spent time typing requisition forms and destroying carbons for top-secret shipments of nuts and bolts. On the day of the tests, with no morning, the enlisted would get pulled out of bed and ordered to stand at attention, facing away from the blast, while 20 megatons of test-device vaporized islands and ocean water. Much of his story deals with being stuck on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere (a lot like Lost, but no hot chicks) and dealing with the stupidity and pranks of various draftee-quality Army privates removed from their small towns for the first time. A minor caveat on this one is that Harris tends to be a little choppy and informal in his writing, and loves to use incomplete sentences. But the subject matter is great, and it’s a unique look at the history behind the H-bomb.

I also bought the new Vonnegut book, A Man Without A Country. Vonnegut said he’d stop after his last one, Timequake, but he came back to cash in a bit with a thin little volume of retread material. If you’ve seen Vonnegut speak in the last 10 or 15 years, take that stock speech and add in a bit of whining about George Bush, and there you go. Vonnegut’s always been a favorite writer to me, and I love all of his novels and books, but there wasn’t much to this collection except maybe a sly way to get the Air America crowd to rush out and buy it and say “best book ever!” because he compares Bush to Hitler. There’s a really funny example (or 40) of this on the Amazon reviews for the books; all of these people’s reviews are like “Hi, I’m 23 and a college graduate and I’ve never heard of Kurt Vonnegut, but I saw him on the Daily Show, which I think is a real news program, and rushed out to buy his book.” It’s also somewhat sad to see that Vonnegut has been preaching this “the world is ending tomorrow” luddite viewpoint, but he’s been doing it for 40 years now, and the world hasn’t ended. Oh well. Three out of four ain’t bad.

This entry is far too long. Sorry.

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Amsterdam

I’m back from Amsterdam, and we had a good time there. Part of me wants to write a big trip report, but part of me wants to do a rm -rf ~/www/journal on a fairly constant basis, (and that might be coming soon), so no report. The basic synopsis is that the jetlag really fucked me, I got a bad cold and was not able to buy any medicine to get better, but we still got a lot in, and the trip was more than worth it. Pictures are posted, but I’m too lazy to add a link, so figure it out.

Although I’ve been to most of the 50 states, and I’ve been to Canada a half-dozen times, I’ve never left the country otherwise, so this was a cool trip. Ever since the first time I went to Canada in high school, bought a Coke can from a machine, and felt the slight difference, I have been fascinated by finding out the differences in places based on their consumer goods. I don’t land in Utah and seek out the Mormon people or find out why it’s called the Beehive state; I immediately find out if they have a Denny’s, an IHOP, a 7-Eleven, or where people go to buy their records. I enjoy travel to states that are test markets for new soft drinks, or that have odd hamburger chains I can’t find anywhere else. I know I should care more about the history or culture or climate or something else, but seriously, fuck that. I want to know about the things I consume, that I use.

In that sense, The Netherlands were very interesting, because EVERYTHING was different. Okay, this wasn’t like going to some third-world former Soviet shithole where people drink chlorinated rainwater and eat gamey horsemeat on important holidays. The Dutch speak English and enjoy many of the same foods as Americans. But the differences I look for were there in spades: .33L bottles of Coke; Fanta everywhere; bottled water in those plastic-impregnated cardboard boxes like soy milk; automats; coin-op bathrooms that were cleaner than hospital operating rooms; weird soaps; weird cell phones; weird cars. Everything was interesting. I wanted to buy one of everything just to open it, taste it, smell it, and decide if it was better or worse than what I’d become used to over the last 34 years. Even the money was weird; it took some time to get used to having a fistful of coins that was worth like forty bucks.

Everyone in Amsterdam speaks English. I read that before I left, but I was very surprised at how well most people did. And I’m not talking “your total is ten Euros” sort of proficiency; I mean, I had conversations with people who spoke such unbroken English that I could have sworn they grew up back in the states. The bad news is that everything is in Dutch, with occasional English subtitles. Shopping in a grocery store was a little difficult; I almost walked out with a large bottle of drinking water that was in reality vinegar. The most odd aspect of the whole English-Dutch thing was the number of times a cashier started talking to me in Dutch instead of English. You’d think I would have a giant “American” sign above me, but I guess not.

I mentioned elsewhere that things were completely politically neutral, which was nice. I was at the very least expecting a huge fuck-george-bush display in a city square, or some hippies hassling the American tourists over their fascist leader. But nobody said shit, and furthermore, there was no real display of political strife or issue locally. I was very pleased to find a place to go where I didn’t have to hear someone drone on and on about it.

I think my favorite thing was the botanical garden, which had three different big greenhouse climates with different temperatures and humidities, plus some smaller rooms and a lot of excellent landscaping and scenery. It was maybe in the fifties when we were there, but one of the big rooms was a jungle climate and so humid that my glasses and camera fogged over. They had some huge trees in there, and of course, this immediately made me wish I had a similar setup out on my Colorado land.

Anyway, that’s the basic story. Now I have to get over this cold, and start on my next project, which is learning Apple Pages, the new word processor/page layout program that’s part of iWork. It’s basically an Apple version of something like Adobe InDesign, and I think it might enable me to drop FrameMaker when I design my next book. I have only played with it for a few minutes, but it’s very fun.

But first, the evening’s Nyquil…

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Collectorism

I am beat. This weekend, I rented a moving truck and we hauled over everything that I’m going to keep from the Astoria apartment to my new place. I got the truck for the whole weekend, and envisioned lap after lap between the two boroughs. But on Friday, we got everything loaded into a single, densely-packed truckload, then parked the car overnight in a locked lot and spent most of Saturday afternoon hauling everything in. I think we were back at the Budget lot and done with it by maybe three. I spent the rest of the night and some of today unloading boxes, packing away things, and hooking up electronics. It’s not done, but it’s really getting there.

As far as what fits in a ten foot moving truck, this load included five bookcases, a wood and glass TV pedestal, a 27-inch TV, a surround sound receiver, DVD player, CD player, tape player, VCR, 12″ 3-way speakers, five surround speakers, a powered subwoofer, a bass amp, my keyboard, a bunch of bike parts, my tools, all of my dishes, papers, fans, an air conditioner, a ton of old cassettes and VHS tapes, and probably a thousand pounds of books. I wish I was joking about the book thing, but I’m not; I had about 20 boxes of books, each one weighing about 40 or 50 pounds. That’s why I feel completely devastated today. I never want to move again. I know we will move, but I don’t want to be the one doing it. It’s much easier for me to write a check than it is to unload boxes of books. I know I’m out of shape and everything, but this was a true affirmation that I am getting old. When I was 22 years old, I unloaded a 40-foot semi truck full of furniture, lawn tractors, refrigerators, and boxes of consumer crap every morning for a summer. Now I’m tired just typing that sentence.

This move has also created an entire phase-shift in my relationship to Stuff. I used to, for some reason unknown to me because I was in the center of things, like to accumulate Stuff. When I was single, I would buy Stuff. To me, Stuff consisted mostly of DVDs, CDs, and books, but once you get locked into those things, your collection of Stuff also grows to things like magazines or ticket stubs or photos or clippings about the creators of your Stuff. I’ve also gone through various other collectorial phases, collecting Stuff like gadgets and electronics. I’ve never gone over the edge as far as comics or toys or japanimation or any of that. But I’ve bought a lot of Stuff. And maybe I bought Stuff because I was unhappy, and I thought it would make me happy. But it never really did. All it did was take up space.

If you divide the world into people who are all about collecting Stuff and those who think it’s disgusting to collect Stuff, it’s funny, because one side will never understand the other. People with no food on their table but their entire house swarming with unopened Beanie Babies from eBay will recoil in horror at the thought of a nice apartment with nothing on the shelves. People with tens of thousands of records in their collection immediately pounce on someone’s 40-CD collection when they visit in the most mocking of tones. And hey, I’ve been there. But I’ve never taken a big step back to think about what all of this Stuff really gets me in life, how much I really need it, and how it really impacts me.

One of the big things in this move is that I’ve tried to shed some Stuff. A lot of stuff that I’d never really need again went in the garbage. Lots of papers, little tchotchkis, unneeded cables and adapters (no need for all of those 9-to-7-to-male-to-female-to-usb-to-printer cables with the new Mac) and other crap. Any time in the past when I said “hey, I might need this later” led to something in a closet that went. And I did save some stuff, but a lot of it went. The same philosophy went to the DVDs, tapes, CDs, and other media. And I shed a few hundred books before I left.

I’ve pretty much stopped buying DVDs, oddly enough. Part of that is Netflix, part is that I’ve been introducing Sarah to a lot of the old stuff I have in my collection, and part is that we simply don’t sit around and watch that many movies. All of the DVDs went into leather binders with plastic binder pages inside. This turned a giant wall of a collection into three small binders that hide away nicely. And now the notion of buying DVDs seems silly, since for the most part I only watch them once, if that, and then they take up space. I used to think it was ultra-important to have every DVD that I personally liked on-hand so if I woke up at three in the morning and absolutely had to watch Blade Runner, I could. But you know what? That doesn’t really happen that much. And the more DVDs you get, the more you need.

I still get the occasional CD. But I listen to CDs (or the derived MP3s, anyway) on my iPod or at home or work a lot. I might listen to a CD five times in a week, and I never do that with a DVD (except maybe Platoon.) But now that I use iTunes and the iPod for everything now, I don’t really need the CDs around. Those got banished to the closet, in some cardboard boxes I bought especially for that purpose.

At some point, I used to think it was great being surrounded by all of this media, the CDs and DVDs sitting spine-out on shelf after endless shelf. I think it was part of the mental sickness of whatever disease creates completeists, the people who live for Stuff. I guess I struggled with this as a writer for a while, because sometimes I wanted to just buy Stuff, and hunt down that long-missing, elusive Stuff on eBay that would somehow make life better. But then part of me thought instead of getting or buying this stuff, I should be making it. And my most creative periods were when I was so broke, I could barely afford food let alone Stuff, but typing into an emacs buffer is always free. Okay, of course you have to pay the power bill. And maybe you always wanted the latest computer, which is also Stuff-ism, or maybe you need some CDs to play while you write – that’s how you start to justify buying more Stuff instead of writing, which is what kills the muse.

Books are still a problem. I’m paring them down, but I have much more of a connection to the books I read, and this will be a harder bug to kill. But it’s getting there.

P.S.: No more trip to Cancun. We rebooked, and will be going to Amsterdam on the 9th. I realize it will be a bit cold, but at least it’s not underwater. (knock wood.)

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Upstate

I just got back a few hours ago from a nice little weekend in upstate New York with Sarah and her friends Guy and Scott. They have a place in High Falls. It’s hard to explain directions and locations upstate to people, because to some, upstate means Lake Placid, and to others, it means everything above 125th Street. This is, for lack of a link to google maps, in the same general ball park as Woodstock. (The actual city, not the location of any of the concerts.) Guy has a fabulous place up there, and we spent part of the time driving around the country, looking at the leaves that have turned, buying apple cider at the roadside stands, and all of that nature-y jazz. We also spent part of the time shopping.

As far as the nature, it sure is wonderful to be in a place where everything is spread out, with lots of winding roads and hills, and trees in every color of the rainbow, but mostly gravitating to the reds and yellows and oranges. It was cold up there, not freezing, but enough that you really needed a coat. I especially liked, though, that at night, you could hear absolutely NOTHING. And it was so damn dark. I got up in the middle of the night to get some water, and I was shocked that I actually had my night vision. A small part of that was the 10000% RDA of vitamin A I’ve taken in the last few weeks to fight colds, but I just never get to be in a place this devoid of light pollution, unless I’m in a Vegas suite with the bomb shelter blackout drapes.

The other part of the equation, of course, was driving into Kingston and shopping at the mall. I love my malls, and since there are none in Manhattan, that further fuels my need to go to suburban shopping centers. We went to a huge Target for a round of buying stuff, then walked through the small connected mall, mostly to see what stores were there and what was new. There were a few places selling Halloween gear, but most of the retailers were bracing themselves for a huge holiday season. We finished off the trip with some lunch at an Applebee’s, and then the crown jewel, a trip to Hannaford’s, the local grocery. That place was about as big as an old Indiana Marsh store from my college years, with a produce department bigger than most New York grocery stores, and a cereal aisle with stuff that I didn’t even know existed. The frozen section also contained a deluge of products I wish I could have at my convenience on a regular basis, except that it would eventually involve me getting cut out of my apartment by paramedics. But overall, the shopping really hit the spot.

Another strange thing about the area is that I’ve been up there before, and it was a weird sort of worlds-collide thing for me. Back when I was 17, my dad and stepmom Diane took me and my sisters to upstate New York for two weeks. Diane’s family in “the city” vacationed up there in the summer, at one of these little resort-camp things that has a bunch of little bungalows and a center building with a kitchen facility that cooked everyone three meals a day and had some AC and a TV room and whatnot, in case you got bored of bocci ball and complaining about your various nephews and grandkids and medical ailments. We did not stay at the main compound, but rather at a motel that was made of a bunch of cabin-type rooms. That was just west of Cairo, which is a bit west of the actual city of Catskill.

I distinctly remember hating about 80% of the vacation at the time; hating is actually a pretty strong word, but if you can imagine being 17 and not having your car, your CDs, your job that lets you buy CDs, your phone, and everything else, and then being in this weird land that’s mostly the same as Indiana and isn’t some monumental scene-change, like going to a desert or an island in the Bahamas or whatever, and that sort of sucked. And my dad’s cool and all, but every morning, we’d pile into the truck and drive an hour to some random thing and look at the historical plaque or whatever and then turn back around. At the time, I did not appreciate that sort of thing, but now, 20 years later, it’s the kind of thing that’s totally stuck in my head, and it’s also the kind of thing I’d pay thousands of dollars to do.

And we did some neat stuff, like going to downtown Woodstock, and going swimming a lot, and cruising through these little one-horse towns in the mountains and sort of absorbing in as much of it as I could at the time. I remember we went to Hunter Mountain and rode up the lifts and looked at the bare August mountains on the way up and then back down. And then we went into these huge lounges that were built for thousands of people during the height of ski season, except the place was totally empty except for us, and it totally made me feel like I was in The Shining. And the first time I ever flew was up there, at this little podunk airport that advertised 15 minutes for twenty bucks or something, so me and my sisters went up in a Cessna and did a loop or two over the hotel and above the Catskill Creek. So in the end, I did like our time up there.

And so it was weird driving around the hills and valleys, looking at the trees, and knowing that I probably drove around some of the same roads with my dad two decades before, and those kind of weird worlds-colliding moments always get me in a good sort of way. And at some point, I’ll have to drive around up there a bit more, and find the old swimming holes, or maybe the diner we always went to for lunch, and maybe even see if that pilot’s got his plane going up there so I can put down a few more twenties and get some good pictures from up there.

A few other things – yes, we are supposed to go on vacation in Cancun on the 9th of next month. Yes, we’re aware of the hurricane. We’ve gotta call back in a few days and see if the hotel is still standing, and if not, we get to plan the vacation a third time. This time, I’m not announcing where we’re going, even though we have decided, just in case one of you is fucking with the weather somehow. And on Friday, I pick up a ten-foot moving truck and we begin the heavy lifting to get the books, AV gear, and bookcases into the new place. So that will be fun. Okay, that’s all.

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Crossing the river East

First things first: I’ve moved. It’s just across the river to Manhattan, and it’s not 100% done. But I’m in the new place 100% of the time. So if you have need for my phone or postal address, please drop a line. (It’s at the username jkonrath plus this domain name, if you don’t know already.) Also, please drop a line with your current contact info, as I’m trying to get all of this stuff organized so I can sent out another holiday card this year.

I’ve had a back-breaking long weekend here. Sarah is in LA, so I’ve been trying to get the last of the worst stuff done in the old place. I hauled the last of my CDs here, and boxed up all of my books. I also went through a lot of old stuff, recycling papers and junking things that won’t make the move. I also did a lot of cleaning, although you can’t tell from the look of the place. Being on the first floor of a New York apartment means a constant layer of dust and smog, and it accumulated all under every piece of furniture. It’s a horrible thing. Now I am nervously trying to plan how I will move 21 boxes of books plus four huge bookshelves and all of my AV gear, plus how I will give away, sell, throw out, or burn a bunch of half-assed furniture that did not make the cut.

I’ve been thinking about the past too much lately, which is dangerous. I have this huge stack next to my desk that contains probably 20 or 30 spiral notebooks dating back to 1993, filled from cover to cover with daily notes about my aspirations, conquests, fears, and failures. And since all of my other books are in transit, I’ve found myself pulling out a random journal and paging through it in my downtime. What amazes me is how much I used to write, and how varied each entry was. And it also boggles me to see how great my dreams were ten years ago, when I was fresh out of school and had nowhere to go but up. You would not believe all of the wacky future plans I sketched out on Mead college rule while waiting for my food at a Seattle Dennys. I found academic plans on attaining PhDs, house layouts, book outlines, magazine pitches, movie script pieces, just about everything. It’s weird to me now, because my current future goals pretty much have to do with getting a Ryder truck to move all of these fucking books.

I found more of this stuff when cleaning today, pieces of printer paper with outlines or paragraphs scribbled on them, pieces that don’t make a complete puzzle, but are filled with ideas that I never get now. And I try to think of what would someone swing this back in my direction, like saying “yeah, well, I wasn’t planning for retirement back then” or something, that somehow justifies why I’m not doing stuff like that anymore. But I can’t really find a reason. I don’t have kids or commitments or anything else eating up my time. The only thing I can think of is that I used to have all of these great ideas, but they were just that – ideas. I was never able to take any of those wild thoughts and turn it into a concrete book or degree or story or whatever. Through experience, I learned what could and couldn’t fly, and I stopped chasing the things that would end up dead on the vine. And while it has saved me a lot of time, it’s also made life a lot more boring. And that’s the one thing I really miss when I go through old journals or old writing, is that it always seems much more interesting than where I’m at right now.

The stupid part of all of this is that at some point N years in the future, I will be reading this entry and saying “man, things were so much more happening back in 2005.”

As I was getting ready to head out of the apartment tonight, the dimwits that live in the back apartment started some sort of altercation with each other, with the usual screaming and yelling and door slamming and other bullshit. Normally, this would bug the fuck out of me, but it was so nice knowing I wouldn’t have to hear it anymore. I’ve had real mixed emotions leaving this place – I mean, I’ve been there for six years now. I’ve seen some good times there, and despite all of the problems, it’s been a good place to hole up and hide out. There are times when the neighborhood is quiet, the drug addict neighbors are passed out, the car alarms aren’t going off, and all is peaceful, when I’ve really enjoyed myself there. I will miss the place. I won’t miss the ceiling collapsing in the bathroom, the hot water going out, the heat not working in the coldest winter ever, my mail being stolen, my phone line going out at the drop of a hat, my power lines blowing out when you turn on three lamps, the insane neighbors, the heat, the bars on the windows, the truants dealing drugs below my windows, or the biggest bugs I’ve ever seen outside of a David Cronenberg movie. But you always miss an old place. Hell, I still miss my old place on Mitchell Street.

Okay, I’m dead tired….