Category: musings

I’ve been seeing a lot of these compact Dodge A100 vans from the 1960s around town and increasingly I’ve been finding myself staring at them as I pass. There’s something just so… beautiful… about the way they sit there. The round headlights and taillights. The way the body hangs over the tires just a bit. The large windshield and steering wheel… mmmmm.

This is weird because I’m not really an old car kinda guy. I appreciate the beauty of the machinery but I usually ultimately prefer the modern convenience and technology, and even the aesthetics, of newer cars. I also am very definitely not a car fixit person. I don’t like to get dirty.

So, just what is it about this icon of the American past? Is it just that I always wanted to be able to ride along in the Mystery Machine with Scooby and the Gang? I just don’t know. For now I’ll just have to be content ogling them as I pass in the street. Maybe someday I’ll have one of my own, though!

I did it. I beat Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland. And I did it with only a couple of small gamefaqs.com checks. This sort of event might be commonplace for you but this is a pretty unique happening in my life. I believe this is only the second game I’ve ever beaten in my lifetime, and the other one was Tony Hawk’s Underground (the first of the two).

From this bit of information you may have surmised that I’m a fan of the Tony Hawk series of games and that would be a correct surmission. (Note that I know surmission is not a word, but ‘a surmising’ seems to be the correct phrase and that just sounds dumb.) Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was one of the first two games I bought for my playstation 2 and based on that game and how much I played it and thought about it, I was worried I might waste my life away. That did not happen, thankfully, and my interest did eventually wane. I have continued to follow the series ever since but with a more normal level of enthusiasm.

So, with that useless information in your brain, I leave you with yet more useless information… With a single combo score of nearly 1.7 million points, I have also now reached the levels of the crazy pre-teens on the Internet who used to always kick my butt when I briefly played online That’s basically just craziness. I’ve only done that once but I also had another of about 1.1 million points so it’s not just a flash in the pan. I’m here to stay!

I sometimes think back to a moment in my early life that has likely had a dramatic impact on the person I have become today. I think it was probably the first day of 7th grade. I attended Lakenheath American Middle School (LAMS, for short) in England as an Air Force brat and on that first day of school I was greeted by an acquaintance who said something to the effect of, “You haven’t changed at all. You look exactly the same.”

At that moment I didn’t know how to take that or what it should mean to me. I wasn’t sure then why I cared so much about what that one person said, or even why it mattered that I hadn’t changed at all over the course of the summer break. I did decide, however, that I didn’t want to ever hear that again.

I don’t know if I have some sort of ‘desire to be unique’ gene in me that was triggered by that moment, or if my current desire to be unique in the world is a reaction to that moment. I do know that said desire to be unique has influenced many of my choices so far. In middle school I began listening to music that was different from what most of my peers listened to. That choice largely pushed me into specific social groups and behaviors that continued through much of High School, and probably resonates in my life still today. When picking a college, I was probably drawn into Harvey Mudd College by the literature describing the uniqueness of the college and its curriculum. While in college, my desire to not just follow the traditional road to working for somebody else may have pushed me into wanting to start a company and that decision has pretty much molded my life ever since then.

As of late, though, I’ve been starting to wonder if right now I’m really pursuing a path through life that’s much different at all. How is being an entrepreneur and making money in America really ‘different’ in any significant way? What sort of real impact am I having on the world around me? Am I really making the world a better place?

I guess it probably has to come down to the sum of your individual actions, how you live your life, and how you interact with the people around you. And really, even trying to be ‘different’ implies that there’s some sort of way that everyone else is behaving when the reality is just a lot of different people each making their own sets of choices. Sometimes a choice you make may match up with someone else and sometimes a choice may not match up with anyone you know. You can try to intentionally not match up with as many other people as possible but then ultimately are you really living the life you truly want to be living? Or are you just riding through reacting to the world around you?

Submodern is starting the process of recording a new full-length album tomorrow and we’ll be blogging about the whole thing. The blog is one-part self-promotion, one-part self-motivator, and one-part just for fun. Hopefully it will provide some insight into the thought process of our work methods (aka the ‘method to our madness’) and maybe you’ll get something useful or entertaining out of it!

We make very ‘electronic’ music in general terms but for this project we’re shooting for an extra ‘live’ quality and to that end we’ll be using a lot of standalone gear with wires galore hooking everything together. The more knobs, switches, levers, sliders, buttons, and blinking lights, the better.

Read along with us… recording an album of ambient electronic music.

I went to Macworld today and spent an hour in the expo hall watching a live demonstration/presentation of the iPhone. I also checked out the cool rotating display case you’ve maybe seen bad video of online already. It’s smaller than I expected in person.

Here’s some miscellaneous thoughts I formed during or shortly after the presentation…

• The web browser looks pretty awesome. Sites load slower than on a computer (the iPhone in the demo was using wifi).
• The SMS application looks good but functionally not significantly better than what Treos have had for a few years now.
• It has a notes application I hadn’t previously noticed.
• It doesn’t look easy to use one-handed for anything more than calling people on your short favorites list. It’s really designed to be held in one hand and controlled with the other hand.
• Being able to quickly navigate a music library by tapping letters of the alphabet is pretty awesome, but would be much more useful on a ‘full size’ iPod with much larger libraries.
• I think I might actually use the coverflow mode to browse through album covers.
• The email application shows attached images inline in the message itself. That’s pretty darn cool.
• Typing on the on-screen keyboard does not look anywhere near as easy or fast as a real thumb keyboard. It might be worth it for the awesome huge screen.
• People in the audience around me were so impressed with some of the cool, but not mind-blowing, features that I suspect they may not know how powerful smartphones of today already are.
• A visual interface with that much pizazz on a handheld device of any kind is pretty freaking cool. I’m excited for the future of all handheld devices.
• The Google Maps application is neat but isn’t much more useful than the one I have on my Treo now. The interface is slicker and there’s some cool graphical tricks that are fun to watch. The satellite images are neat, but I almost never use those on the web anyway.
• Current CDMA/EVDO networks (Sprint/Verizon) cannot handle data and voice simultaneously so some of the features of the iPhone would not work at all on those networks, if Apple had chosen to release iPhone with those carriers. They demoed sending an email out with an attached photo while talking on the phone with someone at the same time, for instance. EVDO Rev A does support this, and I think Sprint and Verizon are both rolling out Rev A upgrades currently.

I’ll add more thoughts as I come up with them.

My wife was watching Beauty and the Geek on tv the other day and I wandered into the room to see what the fuss was about. It’s actually kinda funny. It’s a reality show where they pair up some hot chicks and some dorky dudes and make them do things they would stereotypically not be very good at. The episode I saw the end of was the first of the season and there was a trivia segment. Each team would pick one of the two (the beauty or the geek) to answer a question. If the beauty answered the question would be something sorta technical or ‘real news’ related, and if the geek answered it would be something pop culture related.

My favorite question was when they showed one of the beauties a picture of a screwdriver and asked her was kind it was. She said, “There’s kinds of screwdrivers?”, and then answered “hand-held”, which I thought was a pretty good guess. The correct answer was “phillips”.

I love Guitar Hero. It is so insanely fun. I’m getting pretty close to a video game guitar virtuoso now. The makers of the game included some of the best guitar rock songs of all time and it totally makes the game. You actually kinda feel like you’re Ozzy’s right-hand man playing “Bark at the Moon”, and I’m always tempted to start growing out my beard when playing “Sharp Dressed Man”. Ok, not really. Also included in the game is one of the greats of guitar rock, “More Than a Feeling” by Boston. That one is Vida’s favorite song to play and I was shocked to find out she had never actually heard the song as played by Boston, or any Boston at all for that matter! How could she have missed out on such a major part of American culture?

Well, Sonos to the rescue. I have a Sonos music network at my house, and I love it very much like I love Guitar Hero. Maybe more, even. With said Sonos system I was able to dial up Boston’s first album and fire the first song, More Than a Feeling, to the stereo where it could be heard in all of its 70’s over the top stadium rock band glory. And glorious it was.

She hasn’t become a fan of Boston, though. She thinks the real version of the song sounds weird since she’s become so accustomed to the cover version that appears on the Guitar Hero game. Well, I guess you can lead a horse to water…