In order: Shock, honor, panic.

I’ve spent the past two nights throwing together a PowerPoint presentation that I hope the class will find (1) informative and (2) entertaining. (”Wait — strike that — reverse it.” - Willy Wonka.) The class is 80 minutes long but my slot is going to last 50 minutes. If you’ve ever heard me talk about the Commodore before … let’s just say I could easily talk for 50 minutes about any of at least a dozen different games. My goal tomorrow is to talk for 30 minutes, leaving 20 minutes for questions and answers (or hey, for getting out of class early — I was a college student once myself, you know). But that 30 minutes time frame … yeah … You know, I try to make my podcasts run 30 minutes and the last one ran around 75 minutes. The PowerPoint I put together has three separate two-minute video clips (games, demos, and a direct comparison of Apple II vs. C64 games) so that leaves me with 24 minutes to make it through the rest of the slides.

I’mmaHaveToTalkRealFast.

Note: I just ran through my presentation and I clocked in at 41 minutes. Not 30, but under 50. I may ask to start a little sooner, just to be safe.

The apples and bananas Susan brought home the week before last were riper than usual, and because of this they attracted fruit flies. As the week went on the problem got worse. There were tiny fruit flies (or were they gnats?) in the sink, in the cupboard, and buzzing all around the fruit.

I checked Google and found an easy way to get rid of fruit flies. The page I read said to put vinegar in a bowl and set it out on your counter. I did that before going to bed one night, and within a day or two my fruit fly problem had multiplied ten-fold. Turns out, there was a second page that I neglected to read. I missed the whole part about how to kill them; all I had done was attract more. I had put out an inviting feast for the little buggers. “Come on in, the vinegar’s fine!”

Now that you could barely walk through the kitchen without seeing or touching a fruit fly, I went back to the Internet and found a method for getting rid of fruit flies. The method I read sounded so stupid that I just had to try it. I found a hundred variations of the method, but they are all essentially the same: take a glass, put something sweet in the bottom of it, and put something across the top that allows the fruit flies to go in, but not come out. I found multiple suggestions for the something sweet, the most common being wine or fruit. As for the trap part, there were two common suggestions. The first involves putting saran wrap over the top of your cup or bowl and punching holes in it. The second involves using a funnel or a paper cone. The flies are attracted to the sweet smell and fly down into the bowl or cup and then can’t find their way out.

Really? This sounded kind of stupid to me. Are flies really that stupid that they would fly down a funnel and not be able to find their way back out?

Turns out, they are. After a little experimentation with just saran wrap, here’s my final trap.

The bottom inch of the cup is filled with wine (well, Boones Farm — it’s what we had on hand, and the flies didn’t deserve any better). Since I was serving wine I used my old Cheers glass. I also read that a drop of dishwashing liquid breaks the wine’s surface tension and helps the flies stick and drown — I don’t know if that’s true, but I decided it couldn’t hurt so I squirted a little Palmolive in there for good measure. I covered the top of the glass with saran wrap to make a tight seal (I’m not even sure that was necessary, to be honest), poked a small hole in the top, and shoved the plastic funnel through the hole. I sat the contraption on the counter top next to the sink overnight, and the next morning here’s what I found.

My little “wine swimming pool of death” actually worked! The kitchen is almost completely fruit fly free! Fantastic! The few I’ve seen seem to be coming from the pantry, which is where the death trap has been relocated.

I should note that before using the funnel, I simply tried covering the bowl full of vinegar with saran wrap and punching holes in it. I caught a few that way but I wasn’t sure if my holes were too big, or not nig enough. The funnel made things a lot simpler. Originally I was afraid the hole in the bottom of the funnel (which is quite large; I can easily stick my pinky through it) would be too big and the flies would just leave, but that turned out not to be the case.

Google 1, Fruit Flies 0.

“Oh, I’m not really a writer,” I said, looking down and shuffling my feet.

“What?” my friend said. “You just published your second book!”

“Oh, yeah … that …” I said, hiding an embarassed smirk.

What was it about the word “writer” that made me so uncomfortable? I’ve been thinking about that scene for almost a month now.

When I was a kid, my dad’s company had its yearly company picnic each summer at Frontier City. Frontier City is an Oklahoma City amusement park with a western theme (now owned by Six Flags). As a youngster I was terrified of roller coasters and ferris wheels, so I spent most of my time at Frontier City doing other things. The log ride was always a favorite, as was the haunted mine ride, but the thing I always looked forward to the most was the Frontier City Magic Show.

Magicians have a sacred bond with their audience. It is not just a magician’s job to perform magic; it is their job to “maintain the act,” so to speak. Call it upholding the magician’s code or simply staying in character or whatever you want, but the idea is the same. Nobody wants to see a magician saw a lady in two and then shrug after the applause ends and say, “it’s just a trick. It’s no big deal.” Sure, a few magicians (Penn and Teller, and The Masked Magician, host of Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Revealed Parts I-IV) have revealed the secrets to many of magic’s biggest illusions and there is an audience for that, but it’s not kids. Kids, and people who love magic, don’t want the secrets revealed to them.

When you look at magicians who have taken this to an extreme — say, David Blaine and Criss Angel — it sometimes looks a little silly. “I don’t know how these things happen,” Blaine says as he sticks a lit cigarette through the middle of a quarter. I know how they happen. Blaine bought the same gimmicked quarter that I bought from Heckler’s Magic Shop when I was eight-years-old (I used a crayon instead of a cigarette). But like I said, it would be a much less impressive trick if, while sticking the cigarette through the quarter, Blaine said, “I bought this trick quarter at a magic shop. It cost me five bucks. Tada!”

This same relationship exists between musicians and their fans. I learned this first hand in Spokane, while attending club shows. The night I learned this lesson was the night local heroes Oil Filter played to a sold out, standing room only club crowd. The band never looked better; lights flashed, sweat rolled, and the music resonated. To quote Jack Burton, Oil Filter “shook the pillars of heaven” that night.

Later that night after the show, I learned what a pillar-shaking performance like that pays. 100 people in the club x $3 a head = $300. Half goes to the house (down to $150) which is split between the three performing bands (down to $50) which is split between the band’s five members (down to $10 a person), half of which goes back into the band fund, leaving you with $5/person. Five bucks for packing up all your gear, driving across town to a club, hanging out for three hours waiting to go on and then performing for somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes.

But I can tell you this; the members of Oil Filter didn’t play that night like they were making five dollars each — they played like rock stars. They were gods standing ten-feet-tall, moving the earth foot by foot. There wasn’t a girl there who didn’t want to meet the band, and there wasn’t a guy there who didn’t want to be them.

There’s the myth of being a rock star and the reality of being a rock star. When people show up for a concert, they don’t want to know the reality. The reality is that most everybody you see playing guitar on stage at a club has a day job. The reality is you have a better chance of “being struck by lightning and winning the lottery on the same day than you do of getting a major label record deal.” The reality is that many touring bands are simply hoping to sell enough CDs or t-shirts to make enough to cover the gas money for their tour. Lots of bands sleep on the floors of their fans’ apartments to make it through a tour; others just sleep in the van.

But that’s not what you see though when a band takes the stage, and more importantly, that’s not what they talk about when asked. Of course you hear about the hardships after a band makes it. I’ll never forget Scott Ian (lead guitarist of Anthrax) talking about Metallica eating what he called a “loser lunch.” “It was a slice of bologna in hand, because [they] couldn’t afford white bread,” he said. During interviews at the time, Metallica didn’t talk about “loser lunches,” or living in their practice pad. They talked about taking over the world of heavy metal, which, for many years, they did. In 1983, after performing her first single “Holiday” on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, Clark asked Madonna what her goals were. “To rule the world,” was her response. A more realistic goal for her was to probably earn enough money to ditch her her roomates and make a living from singing, but hey — gotta set those goals high. For Madonna, Metallica, and lots of others, it paid off.

Somewhere here there is a common theme. The belief in oneself. The ability to allow yourself to say, “I AM a musician,” not just a guy who gets up on stage and plays guitar in a band part time. At some point, a guy’s gotta quit saying, “I’m a guy who does magic tricks,” and admit to others (and himself), “I’m a magician.”

…

So here’s where it gets weird (or more weird, if you felt the above was already weird).

Let’s say the average musician starts out as a music fan. Most music fans believe in the myth; that is, that rock stars are rich and happy. At some point this music fan becomes a musician, and sudden realities are realized. The musician is not rich, and may or may not be happy. Lots of musicians have quit the business after realizing the dream did not match the reality. Regardless, through personal experience, the musician learns the hard knocks of the music business.

So here is my quandry; like the magician, should the musician spoil the myth for his fans? After waiting outside a concert venue for two hours for an autograph, does a kid really want to know the reality?

…

I suppose the reason I am uncomfortable referring to myself as a writer or an author is because the reality has not lived up to the myth. In my mind a writer is a guy who lives in a big house up on a hill that overlooks some storybook lake somewhere. His mind is filled with wonderful stories, dying to get out out. He writes for a living, nothing he writes is awful, and all of his works are published.

Unfortunately, that’s not the reality — at least not mine. I’m just a guy who writes.

(Hey, I think I just admitted that I am a writer. A breakthrough!)

In the past two years I’ve had articles published in one major label book (Retro Gaming Hacks) and two print magazines (Videogame Collector Magazine and Forever Retro) and self-published two books (Commodork and Invading Spaces). Additionally I’ve written for countless websites, including Digital Press, The Log Book, and J2Games, just to name a few.

When discussing this blog entry (just before hitting “post”), Susan said, “you’re the only person that doesn’t consider you an author.”

Huh.

“I remember standing tall, telling you
I’m gonna be a Rock ‘n Roll star,
When someone said, ‘Sit down, boy
“You already are’ …” - Motley Crue, Raise Your Hands to Rock

I am a writer.

I am an author.

Scanning back through my MP3 collection I found a handful of songs with dates as early as March of 1997, but it wasn’t until that summer (June, specifically) that the collection really begins to grow. It’s no coincidence that right around that same time is when we first got a high-speed Internet connection at work …

It still took a long time for me to warm up to storing and listening to MP3 files on a computer. In fact, in the early days of MP3s I actually converted some of them to cassette tapes (!) for in-car listening. I only did that a few times; around that same time I had a CD player installed in the car, and I instead began using programs to convert the MP3s back to WAV files so that they could be burned as normal audio CDs. This was both a lengthy and somewhat expensive process (blank CDs were still $3-$5 each back then).

Technology progressed as technology does. When I moved back to Oklahoma in 1998 I met up with an old modem buddy of mine (Random) who had somehow amassed 11 CDs worth of MP3s. 11 CDs worth — can you imagine? After copying those I thought, “who on Earth would ever need this much music?” This was still before the days of ripping and trading full-length albums; people were still trading individual songs back then. The 11 CDs consist of directories like “70s,” “80s,” and “Funny.”

Compared to today’s MP3s, most of these old files suck. Today, a bit rate of 128k is bare minimum (I prefer at least 192k or VBR). These old files max out around 128k; some of them are 96k and some of them are less than that. There’s no rhyme or reason to the naming conventions, either. Some are “Band Name - Song Title” like they should be; others are backwards. Some files are all lowercase, some are all uppercase, some have underscores for spaces and some have no spaces at all. Ugh.

I’m not sure how, but those original few MP3 files grew into a digital mountain of music over the past ten years. What began as a few files grew into a few CDs, which has now grown into hundreds of CDs containing thousands of albums. I have more music than I could listen to in a lifetime. Additionally, I’ve ripped about half of my current CD collection (600 or so) to MP3 format, which means I have another 600 or so to go as well. I’m making headway, but it’s a slow process.

Recently I decided to build an MP3 Jukebox for the house. For this project I bought an external 1 terabyte drive. Doing a little math I figure I have somewhere around 400 gigabytes of MP3s files, and another 100 gigabytes of music videos. The terabyte drive (1,000 gigabytes) should easily hold everything and give me years of room for growth. The idea is that my digital music will be accessable from multiple places within the house, including our computers and Pivo in the living room.

And so, the project of copying 500+ CDs worth of MP3s to the terabyte drive has begun. I have a pretty streamlined process at this point; I wrote a tiny batch file (shovel.bat) that copies entire CDs to the external drive and then pauses when finished — all I have to do is insert another CD and press any key to restart the process. It’s a mindless process that I can do while watching television or whatever.

While the files copy, I’ve begun cleaning up the “singles” directory. That’s approximately 3,000 files that need to be manually renamed. To be honest, probably 90% of these songs are duplicates that I redownloaded when I began collecting MP3s in album-format, but good ol’ OCD won’t let me get rid of them. Then again, you never know when I’ll get the hankerin’ to listen to Mr. Bungle cover the Super Mario Bros theme.

One album I would never admit to owning is Guns and Roses’ Chinese Democracy …

Johnny is six-foot-two and “a lot of pounds.” Yours truly is six-foot-flat and also “a lot of pounds.” The Smart Car is 8.8 feet long (three feet less than a Mini Cooper), 5.1 feet tall and 5.1 feet wide. There’s not a joke you can think of that didn’t already pop into my mind (most of them involved Crisco) when the two of us decided to take the Smart out for a spin yesterday afternoon.

Surprisingly, we both fit. I’m not going to lie; it was pretty tight with two big boys inside, but we were both comfortable. The problem wasn’t with leg room or head room (there was plenty of both) but in the width; then again, part of that problem was our own width more than the car’s. Two average-size people (or even one XL and one average-size person) would do just fine.

The majority of the car’s interior is devoted to passenger space. The rear “storage area” located behind the car’s two seats has 8 cubic feet of storage. It’s enough room for three or four bags of groceries or a couple of duffle bags or suitcases (if you don’t mind blocking the rear window).

The Smart car is “the most fuel-efficient non-hybrid gasoline-powered vehicle in the USA today,” according to their website. This is due mostly to the car’s tiny engine; a three-cylinder engine that puts out 70hp. The car sips gas and the website claims 33mpg in town and 41mpg on the highway, although according to owners things like hills and lower octane gas can affect those numbers. Again, I was surprised with the car’s performance. While I wouldn’t take it out to the drag strip anytime soon (0-60 in twelve seconds), the car seemed peppy enough to get up to speed and hold its own on the Interstate. The Smart (made by Mercedes) received a five-star crash rating, due to its steel passenger cage and six airbags. I can’t imagine much would be left of the little thing, but supposedly its pretty safe for its cargo. Unfortunately, not even Mercedes could help the Smart’s suspension. Even with decent shocks and 15″ wheels, the car rides like any other eight-foot-long car … kind of like a go-kart.

Then again, those looking for performance probably aren’t buying Smart cars. What the car is designed to do, it does well. You can pretty much forget about parking problems with this baby; people are starting to pull them in nose first in between other parallel parkers. For zipping around town or saving money on morning commutes, the car’s a no brainer.

As you can tell by the ambiguity of my post, I’m on the fence about the Smart. On one hand, if you’re looking for a small car that sips on gas, the Smart delivers. The problem I have with it is you have to give up a LOT for that, including cargo space and performance. The Smart fortwo Passion (the model Johnny owns) stickers at $13,590, but you’ll most likely be adding to that (extras include an alarm and power steering — no cruise control is available).

One thing’s for sure — if you drive a Smart car, you had better enjoy talking to people about it. During our brief outing we were constantly being stared at and waved to. When we stopped at a gas station a lady pulled up and asked if her and her daughter could sit in it. Smart included a handful of information pamphlets with the car and now I understand why. Like the Scion XB and a few other quirky cars out there, people seem to either love the Smart car or hate it.

August, 1988
It’s the first day of tenth grade and I’m riding my motorcycle to school. Last year (at the age of 14) I was one of the only kids riding a bike to school, but this year my friend Lewis has one too, and we’re riding to school together. Strapped to the back of our motorcycles are our skateboards, in case we discover any good skate spots along the way to or from school.

August, 1998
Susan and I just celebrated our third wedding anniversary. It’s been two years since we moved to Spokane, Washington, and four months since we moved back to Oklahoma. After crashing a month at my dad’s house, we’ve purchased our first “real” house together back in Yukon, the town both Susan and I grew up in. To celebrate our return to Yukon (and my birthday) we throw “Robbika,” a giant birthday celebration.

August, 2008
Susan and I just celebrated our 13th anniversary. Susan was just promoted to Supervisor of her branch at the FAA, and I celebrated my fifth anniversary with LMIT earlier this year. Earlier this month at the Oklahoma Videogame Expo I debuted my second book, Invading Spaces. Susan’s out of town this week, so it was my job to drop Mason off at first grade this morning and take Morgan to daycare.

My heart skipped a beat. Had I done something wrong? I published Commodork over two years ago. Had it really taken this long for a problem to arise?

I visited Lulu’s Support Forums and found a giant picture of a padlock next to them. All of Lulu’s Support Forums have been closed. I was informed via the page that for more assistance, I should use the 24/7 Live Help service. That’s where I went next.

The first person I talked to (on 8/22), Barry R, told me that he would escalate my problem to a supervisor and that someone should contact me within 24 hours. Nobody did. Oddly enough, shortly after talking to Barry R, Commodork became available via Lulu.com again. Had they realized their error and re-enabled sales of my book?

I guess not. On 8/25, my book again disappeared from Lulu’s virtual shelves. I contacted their online help again; this time, I got Ben C. Ben C told me that there was nothing he could do and that I should reply to the e-mail I received. When I mentioned that the e-mail came from “do-not-reply@lulu.com,” he just shrugged.

As a last resort, I’ve posted an SOS message on the Lulu forums. Maybe something will come of it, or maybe that’s the end of Commodork — at least, as printed by Lulu. If things can’t be worked out … well, I’ve been meaning to get into the PDF Publishing business anyway, and Commodork might just be a good place to start.

My co-workers who were stuck out of town with me in KCMO last week took me out multiple times for my birthday last week. “Let’s go to the casino … for Rob’s birthday!” “Let’s stop by the bar … for Rob’s birthday!” “Let’s go out to dinner … for Rob’s birthday!” Normally I would eschew such attention, but among our group “for your birthday” generally translates to “we’re buying you drinks!”, so my protests were intentionally inaudible. For what it’s worth, the Embassy Suites in Overland Park, Kansas has a fantastic open bar for a couple of hours every afternoon. In theory there was supposed to be some sort of system requiring patrons to show their room keys and exchange tickets for free drinks, but we never experienced any of that; instead, we simply received a steady stream of free drinks for two hours every night. For my birthday, of course.

In Kansas City we ended up with two rental cars for eight of us, which meant confusion during each departure as to whom was riding with whom. On the way to dinner Thursday night (after the two-hour Happy Hour had ended) I ended up a car with Curlen (an Atlanta native), Earl (an Atlanta transplant from Michigan) and Thuan (Los Angeles). I had threatened to bring my MP3 player (full of heavy metal, rock, and old school rap) along with me, and during this particular trip, I had. (Curlen’s car came equipped with an iPod jack.) Since all four of us are roughly the same age and the other three are all hip hop fans, I broke out some old school rap and, with the windows down and the radio cranked all the way up, the four of us cruised through downtown Kansas City, singing and rapping at the top of our lungs. I haven’t had that much fun in a long time and I really felt something — although by that point I had downed six or seven Rum and Cokes, many of them doubles and triples, so maybe that’s what I was feeling. Either way, I had a blast last week hanging out with everybody and really getting to know some of them. It never fails that things like technology and music can cross pretty much any social barriers.

I spent the first five hours of my birthday driving back home. Upon arriving in town I met dad, and the two of us went out to lunch at the Elephant Bar. What was kind of funny was I ate dinner at the Elephant Bar in KCMO the night before, but I couldn’t make up my mind between two dinners and so I finally just picked one. So anyway, I got to have the other one Friday for lunch! The Elephant Bar is far enough away and expensive enough that any time I go there is a treat.

Myspace, cell phone text messages and e-mail has really lowered the bar when it comes to birthday wishes — I probably got over 50! Hallmark had better get into the e-card business, quick.

Birthday celebrations were short-lived. Upon my return to the city I discovered not one but two broken computers belonging to other people waiting for me to fix. First up was Stephen’s, which had so many viruses that you could literally see other people connecting to his computer and doing things. I worked on his machine Saturday night from 7:30pm - Midnight and left it in worse condition than I had found it in. The other machine belongs to Morgan’s daycare. The hard drive crashed on it and I’m supposed to see what I can recover off of it. Currently it’s hooked up on our kitchen counter, and I’m supposed to fix it before Monday morning.

Like an old Midsouth Wrestling Tag Team event, I arrived back just in time to “tag” Susan on her way out of the ring … er, house. We said our “hellos” and “goodbyes” quickly as she grabbed her bags and headed to the airport on her way to DC for a week. I think the kids’ heads are still spinning, but they’ll get used to it.

No rest for the wicked. Back to microwaving TV dinners and loading the dishwasher.

For reference, here is the picture she took last year:

One year is a nice gesture; two years running is a tradition.

The body of a supposed ape-man found in the North Georgia mountains was nothing but an empty rubber monkey suit embedded in ice, according to California Bigfoot enthusiasts who finally got a chance to examine it last weekend. The two Atlanta men who stood up at a news conference in California last week and tried to convince the world they had found Bigfoot now apparently can’t be located — just like the real Bigfoot.

Searching for Bigfoot Inc., the California outfit that paid $50,000 to Whitton and Dyer for rights to their story and their find, says the pair checked out of the hotel where they had been put up over the weekend. According to a news release on Searching for Bigfoot’s Web site, the whole scam unraveled when a block of ice containing the “body” melted over the weekend. Whitton and Dyer later confessed that it was just a costume, according to the release.

After hours of waiting for the block of ice to thaw, a dark patch of hair emerged. Steve Kulls, executive director of Squatchdetective.com, told Fox that he extracted a hair sample and burned it. It was apparently made of synthetic fibers and “melted into a ball uncharacteristic of hair,” Kulls said. An hour later, the group’s fears were confirmed when further melting revealed a rubber foot.

What is certain is that Whitton, 28, on medical leave after being shot in the wrist by a robbery suspect earlier this year, won’t be going back to work at the Clayton County Police Department. As soon as he heard Whitton’s Bigfoot was a big fake, “I terminated him,” said Police Chief Jeffrey Turner said Tuesday. “He’s disgraced himself, he’s an embarrassment to the Clayton County Police Department, his credibility and integrity as an officer is gone, and I have no use for him,” Turner said. “His behavior is unbecoming of that of a police officer.”

Not everyone is upset about the news of the hoax. The Bigfoot “body” is thought to be a $450 Sasquatch costume from online costume retailer TheHorrorDome.com. Owner Jerry Parrino declined to release any numbers, but said business has been good. “Sales of our Sasquatch costume have gone up,” he said.