So, I sold my Colorado land this week. I probably need to explain this. I used to have a page about it, but it went away two or three web redesigns ago. Here’s the whole story, in case you haven’t heard it.

Back in 2002, I bought forty acres of land in southern Colorado. I’d always had the idea to build a house in the middle of nowhere, probably going back to when I studied architecture in high school and watched too many episodes of This Old House. I don’t remember when or how I found the seller online, but I used to waste a lot of time at work falling down random google searches. (It may have been Alta Vista searches back then, actually.) I did various research on land in Montana, central Washington, and a few other places, but ended up with Colorado.

I think there were a few other things in my head when I bought the land. This was a few years into my New York experience, and I think the day-to-day of being crowded on the island with so many people put the zap on me. My thinking was that I’d stick around Manhattan for my prime earning years, then punch out and go into hiding to write. I was also going through a mild identity crisis around my 30th birthday, trying to figure out what to do with my life. And 9/11 multiplied all of this. I wasn’t a person who was going to wrap their house in duct tape because of domestic terrorism, but there was a real strong vibe in town that something was going to go down again. People seem to forget the Manhattan mass-exodus in 2001/2002, but it weighed heavily on my thought process at that time.

I bought the land right after my 31st birthday. Actually, I think I was exchanging emails with the seller while I was in an Elvis suite  at the Stardust in Vegas on a birthday trip with Bill, Lon, and Todd. The purchase sent me down a giant research k-hole of determining what to do. I bought every book I could find on alternative construction and Earthships and solar power and how to build your own house. I was constantly trying to figure out the best way to get started, maybe buy a geodesic dome kit or something, start planting trees and plowing under clover, whatever. I needed a well; I needed a tractor; I needed to learn how to grow my own food, and this was a time when every meal I ate was delivery food. There was a lot to learn.

Like any of my other hobbies, the land was something that would be white-hot for a week or two, and then quickly fade, get pushed to the back of the stove or off the stove. But I had to get out there, see the place, see the surrounding area. That summer, I booked another Vegas trip, then rented a car to drive out across Arizona and half of New Mexico, and take a left and get to the land.

About the area: this is maybe five miles north of the NM/CO border. Mesita is more or less a ghost town, a half-dozen houses and abandoned buildings are clustered around one intersection, and not much else is there. The nearest town is San Luis, about 15 minutes away. It’s the biggest town in the county, with just over 600 people, a Family Dollar, a gas station, and not much more. The next “big” town is Alamosa, which is an hour away, and is about 10,000 people. It reminds me of Goshen, Indiana back in the 80s, with a small college campus (Adams State) and the usual big box stores - Walmart, Safeway, a Chili’s, Big R, and so on. (There used to be a K-Mart, but you know how that went.)

The land was at about 7,800 feet, in the Sangre de Christo mountains. It’s a high mesa, basically a desert. It looks like it was maybe used for cattle ranching a century ago, and worn dead. The ground is loosely covered with scrub brush and wild pinion trees that are more like bushes. There’s a whole lot of nothing out by the land; every once in a while, you’ll see a farm, but it’s mostly completely abandoned land.

The first trip was somewhat disconcerting. First, that drive from Vegas was horrible. Then the stay in Alamosa was not entirely optimal. I booked a one-star motel that was right across from an AM radio station, and whenever I tried to use the phone, the entire wiring system rang with interference, so I would hear mariachi music in the background of every call. I drove out to the land, looked at it, walked around, and thought, “well, this was stupid.” I had some plans to go to K-Mart and buy a shovel, some water buckets, and a few sapling trees to transplant on a hail mary that they’d live. But this was a summer when there was a large wildfire hours west, and the sky made my eyes burn red the entire time. Plus I was woozy from altitude sickness. After about a day, I gave up and drove back to Vegas.

One ominous thing that stuck with me was that I was driving back to the motel on one of the hour-long loops down to the property, and I went past a graveyard. There was no green grass; just a bunch of tombstones stuck in an acre or two of dirt and brown crabgrass. I had this long thought about if this was where I’d end up someday, buried in a brown field hours away from civilization. This part of the trip made the budget room at the decades-old Tropicana I had back in Vegas a few days before feel absolutely regal.

I visited the land a couple more times after moving to Denver, but never got anything done. Mesita was maybe four hours away, but an incredibly long drive through the mountains and destitute plains. If I was super motivated, I would have spent my weekends hauling house parts bit-by-bit, building temporary shelter, setting up a cabin, whatever. But I never did. I’m lazy; I can barely keep my own house clean. I don’t have the gumption to build another one from scratch. And this whole project was the dream of a bachelor. After I got married, this compound/retreat thing wasn’t going to happen. If we want to spend time in a cabin, I’ll go to VRBO and search in Tahoe, and even then, we’d be sick of it after a few nights. Neither of us are the camping type, and the older I get, the more I think there’s no way I could ever dig a foundation or put a roof on my own house. I had to replace the plumbing under a sink the other day and it damn near killed me.

I get letters every few weeks about the land, blind offers made from investors who grab the tax records from the county and spam out form letters to everyone. They are usually ridiculously lowball offers, but they’ve slowly crept up in price. I finally decided to give up the ghost and see if I could line something up. I think it took a few months of paperwork and research on the buyer’s end, but I got a deal set up. I would lose money on it, but I no longer have to pay property tax on a land I will realistically never visit again. The only other two scenarios I could see here are that I stop paying taxes and the land eventually gets sold by the county at auction, or after I die, whoever handles my estate has to figure out how to sell the place. I’d rather have the cash in the bank now.

And I won’t go on and on about this (but am about to anyway), but everyone constantly hits me with “why don’t you…” scenarios that are impossible to do, which is annoying. The land has no water, no utilities, nothing on it. Drilling a well would easily cost $20,000 and not guarantee water. It only rains a foot a year. Despite nobody being around, the county has strict building codes that prevent any hippy-dippy alternative housing one might dream of: no rammed-earth; no yurts; no tire houses; no shipping containers; no tiny houses; septic field required; no composting toilets; no permanent RV parking. If you think “what about…” the answer is no, unless it’s a ranch house that meets every building code a house would need anywhere else. Winters are absolutely brutal up there, minus-40 temps and high winds; summers hit triple-digits and bone-dry, with that altitude making it even worse. There’s absolutely nothing around except live-free-or-die times hunkering down in makeshift trailer compounds, armed to the teeth and brimming with crazy ideologies that don’t mesh well with me (or anyone, really). It’s the poorest part of the state, absolutely abject property, pretty much half the population under the poverty line. If you built that expensive solar array and then left the house for a week, it would get stripped bare. There’s just no practical way to do anything there except struggle to live. It’s cheap for a reason: it’s like living on the surface of Mars.

Despite all of this, after I closed the deal and got the money, a profound sadness hit me. Having this land for twenty years was a big part of my identity, albeit one that has faded somewhat in recent years. I always joked about building a Hunter S. Thompson compound out there, or a writer’s retreat, or whatever. But the dream is dead. That really bothered me. I guess when I bought the place in 2002, there was some intense need to have that thing that defined me. I couldn’t work on a classic car in the city with no place to park it; I couldn’t afford to buy a boat; I couldn’t build a model railroad in the basement I didn’t have. I don’t know why I had (and have) such a strong desire to do something outside of my job and my bills, but I do. And that’s still going on, and I don’t have an answer to that issue yet. The depression over this mostly passed in a day or two, but I really need to figure out the big-picture void this leaves.

Anyway. More pictures, if you’re curious: https://flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/albums/72177720296890491

So, another one bites the dust. Tanforan Mall (aka “The Shops at Tanforan”) in San Bruno got bought for $328M recently, and will be razed to build a mixed-use biotech research campus and housing.

Tanforan has a weird history. It was a horse racing track at the start of the 20th century, and Seabiscuit used to race there. It was also occasionally used as an airfield. Then in 1941, they used it as an internment camp, housing Japanese Americans in the old horse stalls as an assembly center until they moved everyone to more permanent relocation centers in 1942. Then it became an Army camp, then a Navy base, then a racetrack that burned down, and then in 1971, it became a mall. It underwent a major reconfiguration and reconstruction in 2005, and they added a large movie theater in 2008.

I moved to South San Francisco in the fall of 2008, and for the year I lived there, this was my default mall. I drove past it every day on the way to work; I shopped at the attached Target pretty much weekly. The giant Barnes and Noble was the place for skimming computer books, and I bought my first iPhone there in 2009. My dentist was (and is) there, and the Petco was the usual place to grab cat food and litter on a regular basis. I also remember watching a ton of movies at the theater there.

It’s weird because the building itself is physically in great shape without the usual deferred maintenance problems you’d see in a shuttering mall. They basically rebuilt everything from the ground up except the anchors in 2005, and the structure, especially around the food court atrium, looks incredibly modern and new. But it’s not that physically big - the main concourse is maybe eight or ten shops long. And it’s had all the usual exits from national chain bankruptcy and degradation: Forever 21, Toys R Us, Old Navy, and most notably the death of their Sears, which was probably 30% of the total square footage of the place.

All of this area around South San Francisco is exploding with biotech campuses and identical-looking housing complexes. This mall is right on a BART train stop and very close to the confluence of multiple highways, so it’s super valuable land. This project won’t be one of the usual ho-hum de-mall jobs where they slap down a strip mall or a fake “town center” and then 95% of the stores sit vacant forever. I’m pretty sure that in a year, it will be crammed with science fiction buildings that sprouted up instantly, like the long stretch of glass towers of science lining the 101 now.

I was just in the old neighborhood last month, and it’s amazing how the bones are still there, but wide swaths of old sprawl have been instantly replaced with 5-over-one buildings with goofy names and slogans. (“Cadence apartments - where life, style, work, and play come full circle!”) We vaguely looked at buying a townhouse or condo in that area in 2009, and I can’t imagine what it would be like living there now.

It’s dumb and typical that a mall where I spent so little time has such a nostalgia hold on my brain. I’ll be sad to see this one go. Also, I need to find a new dentist now.

So, yesterday I did this:

I was bored and wanted to make this keyboard look a bit retro. I forget what kind of ancient terminal I was looking at when I decided the colors. I think it was an old Raytheon terminal. I honestly wanted something a bit more orange for the modifier keys, like a glossy bright orange, and then a chocolate brown Commodore 64-style for the letters. But this is close.

I’ve written about the Kinesis before. I wasn’t 100% happy with the new version I got last year, so I’ve been on the hunt for new keycaps, but the Advantage has some oddball keys, especially in the thumb clusters. The folks at pimpmykeyboard.com have the hookup, though. In their DSA Standard keyset, there is an option for the 28 modifier keys, with either text or icons. Then a 50-key standard alpha set makes up the meat of the keys.

The Advantage comes with ABS keys, and these ones are PBT plastic, which feels slightly more textured and not glossy. They feel better and are supposed to be more durable, and won’t get greasy over time, which is a plus for me, given how much I eat at my computer. The PBT keycaps sound slightly different, maybe a bit sharper than ABS. They’re also all the same height, which is weird in a few places. The thumb keys were slightly higher in the stock set.

Also, there is a Panic button on the § button in the lower left. The only time I ever hit that key is accidentally, and I usually do panic then.

The color codes on these are GQN for the gray and OAX for the orange. The orange is slightly too orange for me, I think, but I’m getting used to it. They gray reminds me a bit of the later-model DEC keyboard for the VT-420 terminal. When I was at IU, the labs of terminals (like SPEA or the HPER) had old VT-240s with the more dark beige color scheme. But I remember the registrar’s office getting a fleet of brand new VT-420s when they digitized class signup, and those were a much more white keycaps.

DEC (and HP, and IBM) had the symbols more in the upper left corner of each key, instead of centrally like these. These ones remind me more of old old terminals, like the TeleVideo terminals we had at IUSB, which never worked right with emacs or any OS written in the 70s or beyond. (Just a reminder: if you ever worked on PRIMOS, you’re probably eligible to make 401K catch-up contributions now.) Same with the Commodore 64, although they went with the upper corner starting with the Plus 4.

I couldn’t find the little function key caps, so they stay stock. I also just realized that the stupid keypad layer thing won’t work for me, because the symbols aren’t on the front of the keys. I almost never use that, except when I have to insert a trademark symbol, and my new company trademarks almost nothing, so I’m safe for now, I guess.

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Semi-related: this keyboard completely died about a week ago. I would press a character and it would type in Klingon. I tried a different dongle, a different computer, rebooted computers, rebooted the keyboard, nothing. Emailed Kinesis and then realized I bought this from a third-party vendor on Amazon and would likely be hosed on the warranty. I took it apart, reseated the cables, but expected the little motherboard on it to be toast. So I got out my old Advantage, took it all apart, and cleaned everything with rubbing alcohol, because it had ten years of food and cat hair inside it. I have pictures, and you don’t want to see them. Got it all running, and then the next day, I plugged in the new/broke keyboard to see if I could get a diagnostic report for support. Everything worked 100% fine. No problem. Of course.

Kinesis has a new Advantage out now, which is a full split, and has no function keys, just a layer where you press some other key and the number keys to get a function key. I think they moved the Esc key to where Caps Lock normally is. I have Esc in the left thumb cluster, along with an extra Ctrl key, because having just a right-side Ctrl is a problem. So I probably won’t upgrade for a while. I’d like to think this one would last another ten years and that I’ll be retired by then, but who knows. Maybe I’ll have to keep modifying the same one to keep it going for the rest of my career. Or maybe I’ll switch to something completely different? We’ll see how this one goes.

I am fifty-one today.

I’m not sure what to say about this oddball number. After 21, only the big round numbers matter. This is the first post-50 birthday, so I’m now into my quinquagenarian years. I can contribute an extra $6,500 to my 401K. Car insurance is easier to get. Life insurance isn’t. 50 was a giant wall in my mind, but I got to like the age. It’s easy to say “I’m fifty” than it is to say “I’m fifty-one.” I mean, I will probably be saying I’m fifty for the next six months, just like I’m writing 2021 on everything. (Cognitive function is another discussion.)

51 in binary is 110011, which looks neat. It’s a pentagonal number, a Motzkin number, a Perrin number, and a Størmer number, none of which mean anything to me. Other than itself and one, its only divisors are 3 and 17. I don’t believe in numerology, so I don’t know what to say about that. I’ve always favored even-numbered ages and disliked odd ones, for whatever reason. 32 was cool. 44 was cool. 37 seemed dumb. So did 47. So 51 is 51.

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The first thing about 51 that pops in my head is Area 51. This is now a touchy subject for me. First, I am completely done with conspiracy theories. The current events of the last five years have made it completely impossible to enjoy reading about UFOs or whatever else. Conspiracy theories have been completely weaponized, and everyone who uses them as currency is A Problem. I have to walk away from that stuff entirely. I’m also trying to reevaluate my relationship with military planes, which is the other big part of Area 51. I’ve had an obsession with them ever since I started putting together plastic models as a kid. But there’s also a plague within the community that makes it difficult to deal with. I like airplanes and drones and technology and stuff, and I can easily fall down a k-hole on stealth bombers or whatever. But the rah-rah stuff is too much for me now. I hate to get political about it, and I don’t know what should replace it, but that’s how I feel.

There was a baseball team called the Las Vegas 51s, but they changed their name to the Aviators when they moved to a new park. I also have zero interest in baseball now. The Rockies’ inept ownership finally broke me, and I could not convert to another new team. The shortened season, new dumb rule changes, and lockout also tarnished things for me. And see also the fan community and politics situation I described above. Without going into it, with the social justice issues of the last few years and the general alignment of the fan base of the sport, I’m not entirely in agreement with things. I still peek in at what’s going on, and if the Oakland A’s manage to build a new stadium near my house (they won’t; they’re moving to Vegas), maybe I’d go to some games. But that’s another thing I’m moving past.

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All the usual post-50 thoughts are still in full effect. I need to save as much as possible. I need to pay off this house. I need to look after my health. I’ve lost a ton of weight this year, and I need to keep that off. I also need to think about my brain and what else I want to do. I’ve been taking photography classes. Taking a ton of pictures. This would be a great time to do more travel, except it totally isn’t. So I need to work on all of that.

Most googling on the age of 51 is stuff about how that is the average age of menopause in American woman. No problems there. I am losing the war of male-pattern baldness, but haven’t fully committed to buzzing everything away. I’m not running out to get hair plugs either. I guess a side benefit of not leaving the house for two years is I haven’t had to make a decision on that one.

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I’ve now survived longer than many notable people: Rod Serling, Raymond Carver, Steve McQueen, Michael Jackson, Bernie Mac, Dee Dee Ramone. I guess the very good news is I didn’t have a gripper up until now. But the other edge of that blade is I haven’t exactly reinvented the American short story or the anthology television series in my years on this planet. I sometimes think too much about what I have and haven’t done, and I can’t waste any time on that today.

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The only weird thing that 51 made pop into my head is that I’m exactly three times older than I was when I was 17, and that nostalgia problem I described last year makes me think too much about when I was a teenager, in my junior year of high school, in 1988. That’s another rabbit hole I want to avoid, but it’s on my mind.

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I have not updated in forever, and there’s lots to update about, but I should do that outside the context of this little birthday post, which I’m mostly doing it so I can find it later with the rest of my other birthday updates.

Anyway, day off. Time to go walk a mall, maybe take some pictures.

Because apparently I don’t have enough film cameras in the house, I got another one recently: the Canon EOS 620.

Film isn’t cheap right now, and some cameras are getting ridiculous. The Canonet QL17 rangefinder I bought in 2014, probably one of my best film cameras, costs roughly three times as much on the open market now. An Olympus XA2 you couldn’t give away for $20 back in the early 00s when digital hit could easily fetch $150 or more on the bay. Don’t even think about a used Leica.

But there’s a weird bubble at the end of the film era, where nobody wants those cameras. And that’s really interesting to me. I never had an SLR in college. Always wanted one, but wasn’t serious enough to drop the equivalent of a semester of tuition on a full kit. I could barely afford the hundred-dollar point-and-shoot Vivitar I bought in 1993. Now, these end-of-film-era cameras are going for cheap prices, maybe because they’re so similar to their digital counterparts.

Canon came out with the EOS 650 in 1987. (The EOS 620 came out a few months later, and added a faster shutter and some other minor improvements, despite the smaller model number.) The EOS was essentially a blank-slate start to an SLR, turning its back on the manual FD lens platform, and doing everything right the first time. Nikon was the choice of pros back then, and couldn’t turn their back on professionals who had massive investments in their existing lens system. Canon rolled the dice on this, and it was a good call.

The EOS 650 is built around the EF lens. EF stands for “Electro-Focus” and it’s an autofocus lens with no central mechanics in the camera itself. On previous systems, little gears levers or mechanical plungers were used between lenses and the body, so motors and other guts were kept in the camera itself. With an EF lens, there are seven little electrical contacts, and it’s all fly-by-wire. The lens contains any motors or electronics it needs to work. This was science fiction in 1987.

(Fun trivia: the very first image ever posted to the World Wide Web was taken with an EOS 650 and then scanned to a file. I’m not going to link to a Gizmodo story, but look it up.)

The EOS 650 (and 620) is also noteworthy because every EOS camera after it is based on the same essential design. I have the 620 and an EOS 750D sitting next to each other on my desk. The 620 is almost 30 years older, and the latter is a 24-megapixel digital camera that shoots video and has a fold-out screen. But there’s something in the basic design language that’s incredibly familiar with the two. Buttons are in the same place; the right grip feels similar; they both have a display on the upper right. The view through the viewfinder, the green aperture/shutter speed display below the image, looks almost identical. Obviously, one’s got no fold-out LCD screen and a little window that shows if the film is loaded, but they are very much from the same lineage.

The big attraction there is that the EOS 620 uses any EF lens from 1987 to present, and so do my DSLRs. I have a “nifty fifty” 50mm prime lens that I use a lot, and I slapped it on the 620, no problem. I’ve also got a nice 28-135 lens, and it works great on either.

(Minor nit: EF-S lenses made for crop-sensor APS-C digital cameras won’t work, and I’ve unfortunately got a lot of great EF-S lenses. Good news is EF lenses work great on APS-C cameras.)

(A less than minor nit: now that everyone’s going mirrorless, Canon’s introduced a new lens type called the RF. Mirrorless cameras with the RF mount can buy an optional adaptor and use their EF and EF-S lenses, but you can’t do the opposite. And there aren’t that many RF lenses yet. Also, this is the second time Canon’s tried this stunt. I have their older EOS-M, which used EF-M lenses, or an EF/EF-S adaptor. I’m not about to buy into this new system and have them change their mind a third time.)

Anyway, the EOS 620 is a strange shooting experience, because in many ways, it’s a normal shooting experience. It’s got a decent fast autofocus; a nice light meter; similar shooting modes and metering and exposure modes and all the usual stuff. Set it to P and shoot just like you would with a Canon Rebel. Swap to Tv or Av, same deal. Or shut off everything and go full manual. The one difference you’ll notice is the satisfying ca-chunk when you hit the shutter. It feels like a “real” camera.

There are some other advanced features I’d never expected in a film camera. The film loading is auto-everything, completely motorized. I guess my Vivitar point-shoot does this, but you drop in a cartridge, close the back, and it sucks in the film and tells you the frame number on the top. It’s fully motorized and fast (for the time), so you can set it on auto, hold down the shutter, and burn through three frames a second, much faster than simply lighting twenty-dollar bills on fire. And I never realized there were film cameras that did exposure bracketing, but if you want to shoot over/at/under a given exposure, set it to AEB and eat film three times as fast.

I think one thing that’s missing is there’s not any mystique or difference in the shooting experience versus using a modern DSLR. With a quirky camera like my Olympus Trip 35 or some vintage Polaroid, it’s so different from the typical experience, it’s like going from a Toyota Corolla to a Model T Ford with no roof. The 620 is like going from a 2015 Corolla to a 1995 Corolla. But try hand-cranking a Model T a few times, and you’ll see why a Corolla has its advantages. This won’t have any vintage vignetting or lens distortion like my toy cameras, but it will be nice to have something full-auto with no film loading drama involved.

Anyway, ran through a roll already, but let me do a few more and then get them off to the lab and see how it goes.

Related news: Kodak’s upping their film price by 25% in 2022. I’ve already started hoarding; I think I picked up 20 rolls since I heard that news.