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…

I bought a new iPod yesterday, to replace the second-gen 20 Gig one that I’ve had for a few years now. The battery was starting to go, and it’s on the second battery, plus I wanted more space and all of the new features, so I went to the Apple store and ponied up the plastic for the new one. They are really starting to nickel and dime you, though; I had to pay an extra $39 for a dock, and it didn’t come with a cable. I also had to pay $39 more dollars for a cabled remote. You’d think at least one of those two would be included on the highest-end model, but then you’d think people would want a model that held more than 100 songs, and I guess nobody does.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that iTunes (at least on the Mac) properly behaves when given a new iPod. I assumed that there was a direct iTunes to iPod relationship, and I would go through sheer hell getting all of the old tunes onto the new guy. But it turns out that there is a profile for each iPod, and the profile does the library to iPod mapping. So I could have one iPod only sync a subset of my library, or something weird like that, and it’s no problem. My old iPod will go to the Konrath Museum of Old Technical Devices, to be forgotten about for a decade or two, until people are like “What’s an iPod?”. Or something.

The new color iPod display is incredible! I have not messed with the photo features, which are kind of useless to me. (The iPod “Photo” model was rolled into all of the models as of the last rev.) But the screen is incredibly readable, very crisp and smooth. It’s also nice to see a few new features in the BIOS (or is it OS? whatever.) You can enable and disable the items shown on the menu, so I can finally make that stupid podcast link go away.

One of the coolest non-features is that a little thumbnail icon of an album is shown when you are playing a song. The JPEGs are put into the MP3 tags by iTunes, sort of. The pain in the ass is, there isn’t a “go find every single album cover” button or script. The closest I’ve found is that Konfabulator has an “iTunes buddy” that shows the album cover in a little widget. It hunts all of the Amazon sites and finds the image for you, and then shoots it into iTunes, which then gets it into the MP3s and onto your iPod. But this would only really work if I sat and listened to every single song in my playlist to get the tags fixed up, and that would take about 7 years. If you know of any other solution for this, let me know.

I’ve been pulling albums to add albums and stay under 20 gigs for about a year now, so it sure is nice having about 2.5 times as much space to add more stuff. (You don’t really get 60 gigs; it’s more like 55 after formatting and that crap.) I’m now on a mad rampage to rip all of the b-string CDs that I previously didn’t add to iTunes. Because I’m in the middle of moving, I have a third of my CDs in the new place and the rest back in Astoria. I think most of this weekend will involve shuffling CDs around. And I’ve decided that the days of having CDs out on shelves and racks is over. With most of my stuff being retired to “backup” status, I am planning to pack away things in corrugated plastic boxes. Each box holds a hundred discs, and those will go on a shelf or in a closet or something. I don’t really feel a need to have my house look like the back storage room of a store in the mall. My DVDs are now put in binders, which massively saved space. (About 99% of a packaged DVD is air.) And the CDs will now be hidden. The books - that’s still a big issue.

I have been at war with IKEA over trying to get a new desk. I ordered a $100 desk about three weeks ago, and they sent a vague response basically saying “don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Today, they responded, saying that shipping would be… another $100 bucks, plus about $40 of tax. (And to be fair, Sarah handled war-dialing them and trying to keep track of the order, so most of the credit for dealing with these idiots goes to her.) I just ordered another desk from Staples. Maybe I’ll get that by the end of the year. I’m currently working off of a small folding card table that sort of freaks me out, because it’s the type with legs coming out of the middle, and it sometimes makes a little creak and changes height by a couple of millimeters. I have fears of the Mac and giant monitor falling to the floor when I get up to move my chair or something. It’s a brand new table, and very nice for the occasional dinner party, but I don’t think it’s suited for all of my computer gear.

Oh, I now have three pair of those white iPod headphones, and I don’t use any of them. I guess I could “look cool” and/or get targeted by thieves, but I really hate those in-ear things. I’d sell them on eBay, except anyone can buy them new for $12 or something. Oh well.

I’ve been wasting all of my free time lately reviewing CDs. I’m not sure why, because I don’t want to be in the business of having a bunch of crappy death metal bands emailing me their mp3s to review. But I have a lot of loose reviews around, and I wanted to write more long-form reviews and find a place to put them, and I’ve got it about figured out now. When I get more than about 7 reviews done, I’ll post a link. Anyway, that’s why I haven’t been writing here much. It’s far easier to write 1500 words on an old Metallica album than it is to try to come up with 500 words when nothing is going on that I want to write about, except maybe the weather. So, there you go.

But, the other day, I was digging around and found a bunch of ROMS to various stand-up arcade games I had from my old laptop. So I downloaded a MAME emulator program for the Mac, and started digging around all of these old games. I don’t know about you, but I played a lot of arcade games back in the day, and I don’t just mean the really popular Pac-Man/Donkey Kong/Centipede era. I found a lot of these games and played them, and they totally reminded me of my days in a Bally’s, wasting a couple dollars while at the mall. And video game brand loyalty is a huge thing, and it made me think about all of the different brands and games and the whole caste system of consoles, and who played what.

For example, there were certain games that I absolutely loved to play. Like there was the Star Wars vector game, the original Tetris, this Tetris plus enhancements called Bloxxed, and Roadblasters. If an arcade had all of those, it was excellent. If it had one or two of them, it was good. If an arcade (like that shitty one in Pierre Moran Mall, or maybe one in an airport or something) didn’t have any of those games, it sucked, and either I’d play nothing and go off to the Walden Books, or maybe drop a quarter on a sub-par game, just to see if maybe it was really okay. There were a lot of games that either I didn’t like or didn’t see the point of, like most of the three-button-attack quarter-eater types that came out later, or the driving games that didn’t have a good catch to them. I mean, for a buck in gas, I could drive around the parking lot of the mall in my real car and have more fun than half of the sloppy-controller stand-up drivers out there in the early 90s.

But different people liked different games, which always made it weird when you went with other people, because people always had different allegiances to different games. It’s weird, because now, decades later, I can still remember what friends liked what games, way more than I could remember their favorite beer or band or movie. And that would be cool, but sometimes, based on the games there, it would cause problems. Like, sometimes I’d go to the Bally’s in College Mall in Bloomington with Bill, and I’d inevitably buy into some “a shitload of tokens for $20” deal before I’d remember that they had absolutely no machines I liked. I mean, the best game on the list was a Ms. Pac Man, and I could play that for about six months on $20 of change, given that I wouldn’t die of boredom. But there was some game there that he loved, and he’d play it all day, even though I was either no good at it or hated it. So you have that. Another example is that Spaceport had some pretty esoteric game machines, so if you stopped in there with someone who just wanted to play the core Atari games, they’d be screwed.

Oh, at the lowest end of the totem pole were the situations where you only had one or two games, and you had to pick one. A classic example is when you’re with your family at Pizza Hut, and there are two games, and it’s either Bust-a-Move or Robocop, and neither one are very good, but you need something to do until the breadsticks arrive or something. This also applies to dorms with a couple of stray machines, or little arcades in laundromats or whatever.

Another game I didn’t get were the sports games, like the football, hockey, and whatnot. None of my friends played these, because I think you had to like the sport in question, and none of my friends were huge soccer fans. The only sports game that was the exception to the rule was Summer Games. This - I think it came out around the time of the 84 Olympics, but wasn’t a sponsored game or anything - it was all of the track and field events, like throwing discus and running around a track and soforth. But the thing is, to run, you had to slap two buttons really fast to get your dude to run or throw or something. And for some reason, that made it different; it wasn’t about your ability to know about NFL football. It was about how fast you could slap two buttons, and dammit, you knew you could do it faster than the other guy. The sport part was secondary - it could have been monster trucks or shooting dragons or anything else, as long as it was competitive and measured your ability to pretty buttons at light-speed. I knew a lot of people who were really into that, and you could always tell when someone was playing, because it sounded like someone was bitch-slapping a keyboard. And now we wonder why so many people have RSI.

The competitive games, or more likely the collaborative ones, are the things that have so much memory to me. I’ve already written many times about how me and Ray used to play Smash TV for hours, feeding many quarters into it. I think the first game like this I remember is the original Gauntlet. When I play this now, it reminds me of Adam Pletcher, who I knew from school, and who is now more known for working on the video game Descent and a million others. We played the game a couple times at the Aladdin’s Castle in the Concord Mall, although at that point, the game was so damn popular, all four slots would be full, and the second someone ran out of change, someone else would jump in. Games like this were great, and it’s amazing how shitty some of them are when you look at them now. There’s a Simpsons game that came out in 90 or so that was the same console as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and X-Men game. Then, the graphics were mind-numbing, but now, I cannot stop laughing my ass off the images are so blocky and bad. But being able to get two or three people on a machine to all kick ass hid the poor graphics somewhat.

One of the games that I played but didn’t entirely like at first was Golden Axe. The student union had a room with maybe six or eight game machines, all of them duds, and one of them was Golden Axe. I reluctantly played the side-scroller for a while, and it really grew on me. The animations weren’t bad, but the sound effects were horrible. (When I was playing the other day, Sarah said that the dying people’s screams sounded like some kind of Crunk rap.) It’s also a collective game, although I played by myself a lot. I got the ROM and actually finished the game, which I guess is easier when you’re pressing a button instead of feeding in a coin, but it brought back so many memories of wasting time at the IMU.

Anyway, just some vague thoughts. I think if I had a lot of time and could remember more of this, I could write some kind of book or at least a good essay on greater taxonomy of video games. But, I’ve got these music reviews to write…

I rode my bike to work today, for the first time in a while. When I originally bought it last spring, I planned to ride it every day, but I was thrown off by cold weather, hot weather, food poisoning, vacations, and a bunch of other lame excuses. But today, I made it. Of course, I cheated a bit. I’ve been spending more and more time at Sarah’s lately, because my apartment sucks, and I’ve been gradually moving over things. First, it started with an extra deodorant and toothbrush, then a few extra pairs of unmentionables and socks, and then I started leaving books and DVDs. Now I’m moving over stuff a gym bag at a time, and on Saturday we got a limo (no, you non-New Yorkers, not a 68-foot-long stretch Caddy with a wet bar and hot tub - here limo means “non-yellow cab”) and pulled over a few hundred pounds of stuff, including my bike. So, now I will try to ride more.

It’s in my favor that my door-to-door trip is about a mile. (Okay, 1.59 - thank you mapquest.) It’s also much easier for me to get the bike in an out of the place here, since the old place involved a dozen tight turns to get out of the door. There’s no bridge to contend with. And a horrific trip through midtown is no longer needed. But, I no longer have long passages of nothing in Queens, which is kindof nice, and I have a lot of pretty testy drivers and pedestrians on my trip through Chinatown. Most of the ride is of the heavy-defensive sort, with little in the way of long cruises. So that sucks, but it’s still fun. Bicycle is about the best way to get around Manhattan, if you’re up for it. After riding a bike, I really hate walking - it seems so slow and monotonous, especially after you can cruise down a long block in a matter of seconds.

I’m glad to be back on the bike, too. There’s a real difference between your time and personal space on a train versus driving or being on a bike. I’d really want to be in a car, where you can totally cocoon yourself from the world and just have totally private time to yourself. From the second I had a license and a set of keys, I totally enjoyed being able to just put in a tape and drive loops around nowhere, to the mall and back, out on the back roads, and to friends’ houses for no reason. I always bitch about it, and even at three bucks a gallon, I miss that freedom. That’s one of the biggest problems with living in New York. (I mean, aside from the smell.)

But before I had a car, I had a bike. And I spent ALL of my time riding somewhere, or nowhere. The same people who have a hard time imagining that I used to weigh a hundred pounds less than I currently do probably wouldn’t believe that I used to ride hundreds of miles a week. I was not competitive about it; I just liked to get out and explore. Northern Indiana was set up for it, since most of the outlying area was meshed by county roads a mile apart in each direction. That made it easy to keep track of mileage: you get on CR 17 and ride from CR 26 to CR 28, and that’s a mile. CR 30, another mile. I used to have this loop from my mom’s house to Bristol and then out almost to Nappanee and back, and it was just over 25 miles. I used to ride that pretty much every day, and I’d double it on Saturdays and Sundays.

This started back when I was 15. I bought a new 10-speed, and it wasn’t anything special, just some Huffy piece of shit or something. But every time I had a couple of bucks, I’d buy some gear for it, a new helmet, some gloves, whatever. No spandex. I rode all through the fall, and rode this St. Jude’s rideathon where you did laps of a church parking lot that was a quarter mile around. I brought a walkman, extra batteries, and about 50 tapes, and spent the whole afternoon doing the same stupid lap, over and over. This was the kind of thing where kids came and rode their BMX on training wheels and made 5 laps and everyone was all happy and the money went to The Kids or whatever, and I listened to like every Rush album to date in a row and ended up doing 50 miles.

I kept riding into the fall and through the winter, still going to Bristol every day. The cornfields went from amber to wispy brown and then fell into husks and broken stalks, and the cold made it harder to pedal, but I could do the 25 miles in my sleep at this point. I explored the back roads and took different routes, but they were all mostly the same, identical miles of farmland, with the occasional farmhouse. I had the roads to myself for the most point, except for the occasional car that blew past at sixty. I probably averaged about ten miles an hour, sometimes faster. I usually went out for about two hours, longer on the weekends.

I thought about a lot of stuff back then, which seems stupid, as I’m more than twice as old and I have way too much stuff to think about, to the point where I wonder if I need some prescription medication to possibly think about less. But back then, I somehow needed the time away from my family and away from friends and classmates to - I don’t know what. I mean, I listened to a lot of music, and I guess at that point in your life, your favorite bands require some great amount of dissemination, whereas now you listen to stuff just to have a sound in the background that sounds nice. But when you’re 15, that Rush album Subdivisions - it means something, because that’s you. And I’m sure I thought a lot about the opposite sex, and how I’d ever talk to girls, and all of that shit, and I wish I had a record of that, because it eventually all worked itself out, but I remember burning a lot of cycles thinking I was different and I’d somehow need to escape all of this. But I also spent a lot of time thinking about my first car, and maybe how cool it would be to ride my bike across the country, like maybe by strapping a bunch of racks to the front and rear and filling them up with bottled water and snickers bars and maybe some kind of tent so I could camp between stops. Now that I think about it, I have no idea what the fuck I thought about, but I spent a lot of time doing it.

And I still remember Indiana roads, and the kinds of roadways they had there. Most county roads were this asphalt, but they were old, and weren’t black, but maybe this greyish color, like a really overdone hamburger. The roads had a decent texture, like the kind of thing you could only mold out of plastic now. And those had a lot of cracks, and gravel in a bead on the side, and cars made this humming sound from ten miles back on this kind of road. When those got really old and fucked up, and they weren’t a main road that got a lot of use, the county would spray them down with this gluey tar and then dump a fine gravel on them. This kind of road totally sucked shit for a bike, because the underpainting of glue stuck to everything on your bike and was a horrible smelling petroleum product - it was like they just dumped out a bunch of engine oil, and then covered it with coarse sand. And that sand-gravel didn’t do much good on a bike with one inch wide wheels, either. Those roads sucked, and I always avoided them. The best were the main roads, like State Road 15, which were more concrete-like, and made from real asphalt, with a good surface that made you feel like you gained five miles an hour on it.

So I rode a lot. I think the last big thing I did was this 100K bike ride sponsored by WTRC, a local country station. It ended up being closer to 80 miles, and I think I rode it in eight hours. It was total hell, and it rained all day, with huge wind gusts. I remember turning into this really long stretch, and it had a totally killer headwind, and I was pretty much ready to just put down the bike, lay in the road, and hope someone would kill me. It was an okay ride though, and it was pretty weird because it went way north into Michigan and through Edwardsburg, and I saw all of these things that normally I’d just see when hanging out with my dad, like my uncle Don’s house, the golf course, and a bunch of other little landmarks. It was fun, and I wonder how I ever had the discipline to stick out eight hours of that shit, given that now I seldom have the discipline to make a sandwich.

Anyway, a year later, I got a car, I almost never rode the bike after. I brought it to Bloomington for a year, but almost never rode it. (Tip: do not wear toe clips in a college town.) I brought it back, had to ride to the mall when my car was broken, and got a flat. Left it at Concord Mall, and forgot about it until months later, when it was gone. Oh well.

Speaking of sandwich, I’ve been writing forever, and now I’m starving. I was going to put some kind of lofty conclusion on this tying together how much I like riding my bike now and all of that stuff above about how I used to ride my bike and think about stuff, but now I’m thinking about food instead, so you’ll need to put that one together on your own. Bon appetite.

I love google. More specifically, I love searching the web, because way before I used google, it was all about AltaVista, and before that, I was using yahoo when it was still a machine on Stanford’s network. I love putting in people’s names, looking for old bands, searching on the places I’ve lived and the cars I’ve owned and the places I’ve worked. Some people might think this is a waste of time or sad, but it’s not like I’m non-interactively watching a screen that displays a fictional character’s life in half-hour intervals each week, and pretty much everybody does that.

I still remember clearly a day about five years ago, when Google Groups found an old Usenet archive on a dead machine, and launched it on the world. This might seem silly, to read a bunch of old posts by people arguing about whether or not Clinton inhaled, but the thing was, this archive contained MY POSTS! I plugged in my old email address and found hundreds of articles I wrote a decade before, going all the way back to 1990. It was like looking at the rings of an old tree to determine what seasons were festive or famine-ridden. Way back when, I posted a lot about the Space Shuttle and homemade explosives. Then I got into hacking and old computers. Then death metal and tastelessness. I found posts where I was selling old computer hardware; others where I reviewed then-new albums. Saying it was like a time machine would be an understatement. And now, I’m always looking for the high of learning something new like that, finding an old house on a satellite map or an old buddy with a new business or web page.

My latest diversion that I found on the web is a database served up by the Indiana Department of Corrections, that shows not only who is currently in the pen, but those who previously served time there, along with their infractions and sentences. I originally found this looking for my friend Jim, who may or may not be heading back to the state prison because he allegedly robbed a warehouse. But then I thought about it more, and started plugging in the names of everyone from my high school that, well, was on that career path. I quickly found at least three or four other guys who were in and out of prison for stuff like conversion, theft, breaking and entering, and battery. I emailed Larry and he gave me an armful of names to try, including our old assistant principal, who had some frequent problems blowing below a .08 while driving. It was all very interesting, to see the people who fell off the map. I mean, in the high school reunion page, you see everyone registered who became a mommy and has to tell everyone, or those with good jobs, good degrees, and all of that. You don’t see the people who ended up working at Pizza Hut or whatever, and you don’t see the ones who call Pendleton their alma mater.

I still didn’t find out if Jim was guilty of that burglary charge. He was arrested at the end of May. That either means he got bailed out (not that likely) or he’s in Elkhart County Jail, waiting for his trial, which might not even happen this year, given the court system there. And man, from the looks of the system, it is meth central up there. Anyway, if anyone has any wise ideas on how to find out more, let me know.

This reminds me of one of the things I always wanted to research, but found many dead ends. I went to school with this guy named Greg. He is, apparently, dead. I say apparently because the Elkhart Truth has a piss-poor database, and I have no other way of checking. But supposedly, he got killed in an accident while riding his bike. What’s touchy about the situation is that he was like the lowest member of the social pecking order at Concord. He came from a poor family, had greasy hair, some kind of speech impediment, and was into geek stuff like Dungeons and Dragons, but wasn’t a bright guy, either. All through junior high and high school, he was the whipping post for most of the guys, and he got beat up a lot and just took the punishment. He actually tried out for a lot of sports, and tried to become athletic, and play basketball and football, and I guess it says a lot to be involved in preppy-dominated sports like that when you’re the most hated kid in school.

I didn’t hate Greg, but I wasn’t his best friend either. He was in a lot of my drafting and architecture classes, despite the fact that he could not draw at all. In those classes, a lot of us always ragged on each other, and the whole thing was a lot of this who-isn’t-getting-laid and who-takes-it-in-the-ass sort of shit. Greg said he wanted to be an architect, which sounded ludicrous to me, because I already knew most architecture programs were too hard, too expensive, and too competitive for me, and I knew how to draw. I didn’t come right out and say “you’re fucked, buddy,” but I did tell him as tactfully as possible that maybe he should get a backup plan in place.

And I think part of why I didn’t outright just haze the guy continuously was the fact that I didn’t want to be his friend, but I realized I had a lot more in common with him than I did with the jocko sport guys in school. I mean, I had this thing in high school where everyone thought I was some kind of kid genius, so it didn’t matter if I only weighed 110 pounds of bones and skin and couldn’t do a single chin-up, because someday I’d start the next Apple Computers or something. But Greg didn’t have that going for him, so he tried to become a jock, which I guess didn’t work that well either.

Anyway, there is no Greg tomb of remembrance on the web, and I couldn’t even find an obituary or anything else online, except one hit that the public library would have one, but I’d have to go there and waste a day hunting for it, and it probably doesn’t have a story of what happened or anything.

Blah, I have no ending for this. I’m going to go search the db to see how much of my shop class is behind bars.