• I was eating pancakes from the floor of a McDonald’s bathroom. It was an old-school seventies McDonald’s in Elkhart, Indiana, and had the bright orange floor tiles. I somehow thought the little packets of syrup would kill germs.
• It was my birthday. I was in Guam or the Philippines, on the set of a remake of the Chuck Norris Missing in Action movie. Months earlier, I’d deleted my birthday from Facebook, and I was now upset because zero people had remembered my birthday and posted on my wall. I tried turning back on my birthday, but the Facebook phone app was (is) shit, and every time I would click on something, it would press the thing next to it.
• I was in a food court in the Midway airport in Chicago. I was with Richard Rhodes (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb) and we were having an argument about John Lennon’s misogyny, and how the Sweet Sixteen has ruined NCAA basketball. We were at the Taco Bell, waiting for them to change from the breakfast to lunch menu, and I was debating whether or not I should just get both.

I recently reached the five-year mark at my day job, which is another topic entirely. But as a result of this, I was given an opportunity to order a bonus gift from a loyalty-type catalog online. These are usually a mixed bag, in my previous experience, SkyMall-style gadgets I don’t need like wine fridges and socket sets.

At Samsung, they did this at the end of every year, but the gifts were maybe four or five Samsung items that had dropped off the market, like the remaining stock of last year’s hot tablet. One year, I got a netbook that was sort of cute and decent for travel, but painfully slow and cheap. I took it apart to upgrade something, and ended up breaking it. The next year, I got a 40-inch TV, probably the last generation without the “smart” features, which is fine by me. They also had smaller gift things, like for merit-based recognition, and the gifts were much worse. I think once I got a fanny pack, and another time, I got some no-name bluetooth headphones that worked once.

Anyway, the work gifts were slightly better than that, but there wasn’t much I really needed or wanted. I didn’t really need another low-end point-shoot camera or a charcoal grill. I ended up ordering a Yamaha electric piano keyboard, and then sort of forgetting about it. It showed up yesterday, and I unboxed it and got into a strange nostalgia mode about the idea of piano.

When I was in high school and worked as a stagehand at the Performing Arts Center, I was around pianos constantly. I think we had like a dozen of them; there was a flawless Steinway concert grand, and a really nice Yamaha upright. But there were also other uprights of various manufacture in pretty much every practice room in the music department, along with other floaters that moved around everywhere. Some of these were decent. Some had survived elementary schools and were latex painted bright orange and barely stayed in tune. I never played piano, but I moved a lot of them, cleaned them, and spent a lot of time polishing the Steinway, like it was a sports car. The idea of piano intrigued me, especially after being around so many people who could play.

In my senior year, they started teaching a piano for non-music-majors class, and got a lab full of really nice Yamaha digital pianos. I took the class in my final semester, and about eight of us sat in the little room, plinking away and learning basic chords and how to use both of our hands at the same time. It was neat to me, because this was in 1989, the height of MIDI and pop music using Korg M1s and Yamaha DX7s in everything. The keyboards we used had very convincing sampled sound, maybe a dozen instruments, like a pipe organ and marimba, along with concert grand and electric pianos. They had weighted keys and felt very nice, at least to a person like me with no experience whatsoever.

They were also wired together in a network. We each had our own headphones to hear ourselves, but the teacher could share his audio to all of us, to play examples. He could also snoop on each of us during our free practice time. We had a similar setup in the new Apple II lab that I practically lived in. This was the very start of a networked world, which has now become unimaginably huge. Teachers can share and network and spy and monitor more than I could have ever dreamed in 1989. I’m not harping on the spying stuff; I just find it interesting that I lived most of high school in an era when there was no technology beyond overhead projectors with transparencies and ditto machines, and saw the very first edge of interconnected machines used in learning. I even helped perpetuate this - my first programming job ever was writing a schedule-maker program for sports teams, so a coach could enter all the home and away games and practices on a calendar, then save it to disk for later and print a handout for all the players’ families.

The piano class was fun. I mean, I took it because I’d finished all but one class before my last semester, and took all fuck-off classes for the most part: two study halls (one to work in the theater), a drafting class where I worked on whatever I wanted, a computer class where I did all the assignments in the first week and spent the rest of the year working on that schedule program or playing chess. I’d never played a musical instrument, and just getting to the point where I could play a chord and a melody in straight time and almost read music was an enjoyable challenge that made me use a different part of my brain. I also ended up meeting someone I briefly dated and went to prom with, so that’s another memory that came out of it.

I did buy a cheap Casio keyboard at the time, one with mid-sized plastic keys and a bunch of cheap sounds, but I never religiously practiced outside of school. There was some invisible wall for me, aside from my own brain issues. I’m not really that musically inclined, but also piano was never seriously “cool” to me. There are occasional bits and bobs of interesting keyboard music, like I remember buying a Journey songbook and trying to plink out the song “Faithfully,” but that was already five or six years behind the curve. I ended up starting bass guitar shortly after that, and then drifting away from that as college got underway.

At IU though, it seemed like everyone I knew had some degree of literacy with piano. I mean, it’s the biggest and best music school in the world, and you have to take keyboard proficiency as an undergrad. There were also pianos everywhere; I worked in the Musical Arts Center and was constantly moving pianos, plus every practice room had one; every dorm lounge had one or two; the basement of my dorm had its own practice rooms, too. It always amazed me when someone who wasn’t a music major, like some economics major friend, was suddenly presented with a piano, and would do the “oh, I had to take it as a kid” and then could belt out “The Entertainer” or some random Billy Joel riff ten times better than I ever could.

I would sometimes sneak into a practice room and mess around. This was fairly easy the year I was at IUSB, because I worked late and had keys and 24-hour access. It was both cathartic and frustrating, because I’d quickly run through the four or five stupid tunes I knew, Christmas songs and “Camptown Races” and whatever else, then drift into stupid experimental free-form garbage, just banging on keys until something sounded right for a second, and wishing I had the ability to do more.

So now I have this new keyboard in front of me. It’s got 41 full-sized keys, but they’re cheap plastic and not weighted, and not touch sensitive. It also has no MIDI or USB out, just a headphone jack, so no way to use it as a synth with my computer. It has the usual 300-some styles, some cheesy and some decent, and some built-in demo songs and drum patterns and other junk I’ll never use. It could be a fun toy to plink around with. But, I’ve got other musical instruments here I’m not learning well, and too many other things taking up my time. And I’ve got so much junk in the house lately. Maybe I will buy a dummies book and give it a month, see what I can learn. Maybe it will go to a more worthy home. We’ll see.

I planned on blogging more from KonCon in Las Vegas last week, but I didn’t, because I am lazy. I probably should write a synopsis of the trip, but the TL;DR is that it was way too fucking hot - usually at or above 110 each day, and even hours after the sun set, it was still above 100. So that’s why it’s so cheap to go in July.

Someone asked me for some advice on Vegas while I was gone. I have not spent much time there in years, and everything I mentioned in my book about Vegas is largely gone. But my response to this question in an email is an interesting companion to the trip itself and my thoughts during it, so I’ll just leave this here for your amusement.

• I waste a lot of time on this site when I am planning: http://www.lvrevealed.com/deathwatch/ - their casino reviews are decent, but I am sort of obsessed with who is rumored to get imploded in the near future.
• If you look at a map of the strip, most of the mid-strip properties are what I’d consider first tier (Bellagio, Paris, Harrah’s, Caesars, etc), and the Wynn is north strip, but I’d group it in with those mid-strip properties. Same with Aria/City Center, which is technically south strip. It’s the newest; I’ve never stayed there, but from eating/shopping there, it’s pretty high end.
• The south strip was the big deal maybe 10-15 years ago, and that stuff is now dated, but can be tolerable to stay there. It can be cheap, and the location is decent. So Mandalay Bay, MGM, NYNY, Luxor, Excalibur in that order. (Most of those are owned/run by the same monopoly, so they’re similar.) Tropicana got bought by Hilton and redone, so the rooms are nice, but there’s not a lot in there.An example: the Luxor is not that trendy of a property - I think it was so-so when I stayed there in like 99, and now it’s really lost its focus. It used to be Egyptian-themed, and they decided that maybe flyover rednecks aren’t into that, so they started de-theming it and ripping out the king tut stuff, but it’s still got these random stone pyramid walls in places.  But, the rooms are now ridiculously cheap, and it’s a really good location, and connected to the big mall by Mandalay Bay. So if you don’t plan on spending a lot of time in your room, it could be an option.
• Everything north strip is shit. Everything downtown is total shit. Everything that’s not on the strip is mostly shit, unless you stumble on some deal to stay in a timeshare at Trump or something weird like that.
• Absolutely do not stay at Hooters like I did.  I won’t go into the horror stories, but I’ve stayed at hotels in rural Mexico that were much nicer.
• I used to never rent a car and cab it from the airport and around town. But the last few times, I’ve found an okay deal on a rental car bundled with the hotel (I think I used Expedia this time) and if you drive at least once a day, it’s usually a better deal. You can generally park at any hotel for free, or valet for almost nothing.
• If you are driving, don’t actually drive on the strip to get north/south. Either go west to I-15, or go east to Paradise, Maryland, or Eastern.
• Think of whatever amount of water a person would drink in a day that would be entirely excessive, and double that.
• You can drive off the strip and buy a case of water for four bucks or whatever, or you can buy two bottles of water at a hotel for seven bucks. The problem is almost none of the hotels have a fridge. You can buy a crappy foam cooler at the grocery store and then commit to filling it with ice every other hour, but that’s a huge pain in the ass.
• Opentable is a good way to get reservations for dinner.  There’s a surprisingly large number of high-end restaurants with decent food.
• Every buffet is a ripoff. Wynn is almost tolerable, if you pace yourself and don’t eat all day and go in with the plan of fucking them by eating five pounds of lobster. But I made the mistake of going to the MGM buffet, and paid $35 for about $10 of Sizzler-grade food.
• If you’re into steak, Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak at the MGM has a fairly insane three-course beef selection that is not cheap but is awesome. Or in the opposite direction, there’s the Golden Steer, which looks a little dodgy because it’s ancient and has never been remodeled, but it’s cool because it’s ancient and has never been remodeled - it’s one of those old-school places where the brat pack used to hang out.
• Everyone associates the Grand Canyon with Vegas, but really it’s like a 4-5 hour drive each way, and easy to kill an entire day to spend a few minutes there.
• If you are actually interested in going to Area 51/Rachel I could fill up another post with details on that.
• If you are there and hit the wall and need to bug out and go somewhere quiet to get work done or whatever, go to UNLV. You can hide in their library and use wifi without any hassle.
• There’s a huge Fry’s Electronics south of the strip, at a big outdoor mall right before 215. There’s a Target at Flamingo and Maryland. There’s a few Vons grocery stores (Safeway-owned, I think) on Tropicana and Flamingo.
• Pinball Hall of Fame on Tropicana is worth checking out. The atomic testing museum on Flamingo is neat, but their Area 51 exhibit is pretty cheesy.
• If you want to tour the neon graveyard, book it early.  They have limited tours and they always fill up.
• Don’t stay at Hooters.

Thoughts?  Leave ‘em in the comments.

The other day when I posted about Google Photos, I mentioned how I hoped some of its features for image discovery and auto-categorization would come to other tools like Flickr. Well, I should probably log onto my Flickr account more often, because it looks like they did.

Flickr now has a feature called Magic View. If you go to your Camera Roll view, there is a slider at the top that defaults to Date Taken, but you can toggle it to Magic View mode, which groups together photos into various object categories.

My Google Photos uploader worked away all weekend, eventually transferring about 27,000 unedited photos to their cloud. The Assistant wizard is still churning away, sending me various alerts as it groups together things into animations or “stories.” I only have about 10,000 photos on Flickr, because I use it as a repository of public albums of sorted and edited photos, and not a complete bucket of everything I take. But there’s enough there to compare the two.

In general, Flickr is way better at auto-categorizing things. For example, I take a lot of pictures of my cats. If they are at all blurry, or the cats are wearing a costume (don’t judge), they are categorized by Google as dogs. My long-haired cat got identified as a raccoon a bunch of times. I have a category called “Race Tracks” on Google, which consists of pictures of stalled traffic on the Bay Bridge, and baseball diamonds. I also have a category named “Football” that is pictures of swimming pools and people in the desert. Flickr isn’t perfect; it thinks snowmobiles are bikes, and thinks a lot of old Las Vegas is an amusement park.  (Maybe it is, from a metaphorical standpoint.) But Flickr seems to be a bit better for me.

Flickr has some interesting categorizations. One I like is a “style” category, that identifies things like pictures with strong depth-of-field or abstract composition. Google has some other interesting concrete categorizations, like taking a stab at identifying when something is a wedding, art museum, or concert.  (Although for me it also grouped proms, hotel lobbies, and night portraits in those respective buckets.)

Google does group by people, place, and thing, and the first two of those are mostly absent from Flickr. Flickr does no facial recognition, but the Photos software by Google only groups your like-faced photos with no identifying tags, just within your photos, so it’s not as accurate, and gives you no way to label a collection as being a person, like you could in iPhoto, Picasa/G+, or Facebook.  Flickr can store geo data and group your photos on a map, but that’s a different interface, and it’s slightly clunky. It would be nice to see a list of cities/countries with all of my photos in that location. I guess it’s possible to write an app to do that, or maybe somebody has.

Flickr also doesn’t do any of the Assistant things that Google does, like auto-stitching photos into panoramas, or making “Stories,” which are slideshows from auto-curated chunks of photos spanning multiple albums.  These can be pretty goofy, though, especially because there’s no metadata or context to things you’ve mass-dumped into Google Photos. Like I have these stories titled “Ten Days in Oakland” that are assembled-together slideshows of crap I saw at the grocery store.

This further brings up the issue of using a cloud service like this as a private cache of everything I’ve taken, versus a public set of edited photos. I use my phone as an extension of my memory, and I’m always snapping pictures of notes or grocery lists or things I need to remember. I also try to document things only I’m interested in, because I know that now I wish I would have taken more photos of things in the past so I could go through them now when writing or sinking into a pit of nostalgia. I don’t want those to be public, but it might sometimes be interesting to have them grouped. I might continue mirroring photos on Google, but keeping everything public on Flickr.

Oh, in case you’re curious, I’m on flickr at https://www.flickr.com/people/jkonrath/

[2020 update: of course they removed this feature a year or two ago.]

In addition to being a world-famous fiction writer, cough syrup enthusiast, and inventor of the zero-g bong, did you know I, Jon Konrath, am an ordained minister?

Seriously - I am legally ordained. I can perform marriages. I’m available for your wedding. Schedule permitting (I don’t like to leave the house), buy me a plane ticket and put me up somewhere that has free wifi, and I’ll marry you and your sweetheart for a very nominal fee.  (Depending on your state, I might need to get some additional paperwork first, which takes time and money.)

I can also perform funerals, although note that if you ask me to do the eulogy, there’s a strong possibility I will talk about RoboCop for an hour.