A Geek's Life ™

Life in the key of Geek

Life…at 33-1/3 RPM

Somewhere in time

I’m going to take a guess that most people reading this blog post have never bought a vinyl album. I’m not going to say it’s a shame because I can understand how the CD dominated after it became popular around 1984. However, this isn’t going to be a post about how one format is better than another, it’s about the roots of music, why people still listen to vinyl, and whether or not it’s still worth investing in what people consider to be a format that’s been “dying” since 1988.

I grew up with vinyl. The first two albums I had were a Sesame Street album, and the Beatles’ “White Album”. I used to listen to “The White Album” religiously, knowing every sound on it, including where each scratch on pop on the vinyl was. It came with a double-sided poster; one side with pictures of the band, and side two with the complete lyrics, and a complete set of 8×10″ pictures of the band. When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, we found that very album I used to play as a kid in the old stereo she had. I had just assumed it got thrown away long ago, so it was like finding a favorite toy you had as a kid. Everything was inside except the picture of George was missing. The album was so scratched up that I don’t dare to even attempt to play it on a good stereo system. Even though I had a different copy of it on vinyl, finding that copy which I played on my crappy record player at the age of two meant more to me than having it on CD. Albums were something you held onto, not just some 5″ disc you tossed around in the back of your car.

 

That’s one of the reasons why vinyl was so special. Sure, it was stamped out of a machine like CDs are, but there were times when packaging an album meant that you had something valuable. Most of the time you’d get a simple cardboard jacket with a white sleeve, but other times you were treated to fold-out posters, lyrics printed on the sleeve, plastic sleeves to help protect the vinyl, different artwork on different sides, and very rarely you’d get laser etching like on Styx’s “Paradise Theater”. A treat would be a single album that had a gatefold with a nice piece of artwork inside it or the complete lyrics like on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run”. Unless your CD comes in a large box set, the very nature of the size of the CD prevents any kind of special packaging to come with it. Of recent memory, the only interesting thing I’ve seen on a CD is NIN’s “Year Zero” which changed color with the temperature of the CD. Tool does some interesting things with their CDs, too.

It may be that when I was a kid our setup at home was different than most people’s. My dad had a Yamaha CR-2020 receiver and a Yamaha YP-701 turntable with Ohm speakers. For 1978, they were badass and I truly believe that listening to albums on a setup like that made me appreciate the music more than if I had some junky record player and cheap speakers. Friends from school would come over just to listen to albums on that system. Getting music was different back then, too. Where I lived, I had to go five miles to the local mall in order to get the latest album. There weren’t many record stores other than Sam Goody or Record Town where I lived. That means that unless you physically had the album, you weren’t listening to it. Today, everyone with a bit torerent client can grab the album days before it’s officially released if the album leaks onto the internet. That destroys the communal need to gravitate towards someone’s house to listen to the latest big album, and sharing an album with friends the day it’s released is all but gone.

 

Buying albums was a ritual. Almost every Friday night I’d hit the record stores in the mall, checking which one had what I wanted for $1 or so less than the other place. I’d generally get two a week, and by the time I went to college I amassed about 200+ albums which ranged from mostly rock like Journey, Rush, and Maiden, to oddball 12″ EPs and a few soundtracks sprinkled in. I’d get 45s now and then if I didn’t have faith in the album. Even back then there were one-hit wonders and buying 45s for $1.29 was much safer when you wanted one song than buying an entire album for $9 or $10 which would be a large fraction of what your minimum wage got you that week.

Ghosts in the machine

There are a good number of 33′s and 45′s that I still own which were never released on CD. I tried a few times to convert them to digital just to have a copy of them on my iPod, but I always found the procedure to be tedious. I’d have to run the audio into my old receiver, and then into an analog-to-digital converter and then into my Mac. After a while I gave up and lost interest. Also, the Yamana YP-701 turntable I have, handed down to me from my dad, was starting to slow down due to a loose belt which I had no interest in replacing.

Two years ago I heard of a company called ION that started producing turntables with a USB jack in them. This allowed you to plug the turntable directly into your computer with no messy wires or amps, you just plug and play. I grabbed one at the Brookstone in the Menlo Park Mall and the thing ran as advertised. I plugged the turntable into my Macbook Pro, put an album on, GarageBand saw the turntable without drivers, and recorded it just fine.

Although this little experiment didn’t seed my interest in listening to vinyl again, it did inadvertantly allow me to have a turntable that worked well for the time two years later when I would decided to pick vinyl up again.

Pictures at an exhibition

I always had this idea of framing albums. There are some album covers which were works of art on their own like Patty Smith’s “Horses” or The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band”. I only have one framed album which is a rare copy of Journey’s “Dream, After Dream” from Japan and it looks great where it is. I thought I’d just put a few more here and there in the house in frames that you can easily swap the albums out of. The artwork on some albums is completely lost on CDs, used only as a visual guide to what the album is rather than something to appreciate. On the way back from watching football at Champps I decided to stop into Vintage Vinyl on Route 1 in Fords which I used to go to a lot years ago to find indie and industrial CDs that most mainstream stores wouldn’t carry. The store has two main vinyl sections: new releases which are categorized and alphabetized, and the used vinyl which is all thrown together with no order at all. I didn’t even look at the new releases thinking there’d be nothing I’d be interested in and headed straight for the used vinyl. At $2-$4 a pop, buying a few albums to put up on your wall didn’t seem like a bad deal. Since they’re unorganized, you have to flip through all of them in order to find what you want. Even after twenty years, I found that I could still flip through the vinyl like a pro. I found a ton of good covers: Rush’s “2112″, Rolling Stones’ “Tattoo You”, Jean Michel Jarre’s  “Oxygene”, Derek and the Dominoes’ “Layla and Other Love Songs”, Journey’s “Escape”, Meat Loaf’s “Bat out of Hell”, Emerson Lake and Palmer’s self-titled album, Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” (still with the Korvettes sticker on it!), and Blondie’s “Parallel Lines”. I bought some cheap frames at $5 each, went home, and thought “well, before I pop these into the frames, how do these sound?”. I hooked up the ION turntable to my home theater receiver which has a phono input and played “2112″. I expected it to sound flat and scratchy compared to CD. The fact is, it sounded amazing. The vinyl I bought happened to be in very good shape and had very little noise on it. Whoever owned it took very good care of it.

So that got me thinking about trying other albums. I put on “Escape” and although it had some minor noise on it, it also sounded very good. Jonathan Cain’s piano on “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Neil Schon’s riffs on “Escape” came through just as well as Peart/Lee/Lifeson’s sound did on “2112″. I hesitate to use the “w” word that people tend to overuse when describing how vinyl sounds compared to CD, but I will say that it did sound more natural. It’s not to say that there’s something very wrong with how CDs sound, but there’s something about vinyl that seems to bring out a more full sound. Two major advantages that CDs have are the ability to skip tracks instantaneously, and pause when you want. Unless you have a turntable with a level to lift the arm up, you’re either muting the stereo or lifting the needle when you want to pause.

I’m well aware that some people consider CDs to be “low resolution”, but CDs were just more practical to own for a variety of reasons. However, I tend to think that there’s an advantage to how CDs are mastered which brings out different details. I listened to Meat Loaf’s “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” for years on vinyl and I remember listening to the CD for the first time around 1986, hearing these little details I never heard before. Specifically, right after Ellen Foley sings “Though it’s cold and lonely in the deep dark night” there’s this little high pitched tune played, and you hear it again when Meat Loaf sings “I can see paradise by the dashboard light”. I never noticed it on the vinyl version, but you hear it when you play the CD. That brings up the question about whether or not it’s someone making the CD master sound better, or if CDs themselves bring out details. The thing is, without knowing specifically how specific CDs are mastered, there’s no way to know for sure.

I did find one amazing thing happen when I was playing the vinyl I bought. I really can’t say if it was out of habit or not, but I found myself sitting there listening to the album. With CDs, I can’t remember the last time I sat and listened to one because the norm now is to listen to them in the car after you buy them, or rip them to your iPod and listen at the gym, or listen to them on your computer with less-than-good quality speakers. Not so with vinyl. Buying a new album meant taking the time to sit yourself down next to the stereo and listen to what you bought there because you couldn’t bring it with you. That first time you dropped the needle you sat there, read the liner notes, looked at the artwork, and read the lyrics. You studied it. I’m curious if anyone does that today with CDs. You can’t even do that with music you buy online because most of the time the lyrics aren’t embedded in the tracks like they should be. If you pirate music, you’re missing a lot of the experience of buying the music, but I suppose nobody really cares about that anymore. Does anyone even know who sang background on Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing”?

Over the last few months I’ve been going to Vintage Vinyl on and off and even made a trek to Princeton Record Exchange. At PRE I found two rare NIN albums, a copy of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, B52′s self-titled album from 1979, and an oddly shaped Police promo album. I’ve also found out that many bands are re-releasing their albums on vinyl. Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, Rush’s “Permanent Waves”, Led Zeppelin IV, NIN’s “The Downward Spiral” (which had some controversy surrounding it), and Queen has re-released their first few albums. I picked up “A Night At The Opera” which sounds amazing. U2 re-released some of their catalog but I haven’t found “The Joshua Tree” yet. Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” comes with a download code to download the album in a digital format when you buy the vinyl and does Guns And Roses’ “Chinese Democracy”.  Just today I was listening to the radio and heard that the new AC/DC album is available on CD “and vinyl”. I can’t even remember the last time I heard vinyl advertized on the radio.

So this idea of buying albums for their covers has turned into wanting to buy them not only for the possibility of getting a different sound out of my favorite albums, but for a bit of nostalgia as well. I noticed that Best Buy is starting to carry vinyl now. I find that to be a strange turn of events when retail space is closely scrutinized, especially in today’s economy. When music has become a digital commodity I find it strange that Best Buy would even bother carrying vinyl, but there it is: Metallica, The Who, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin.

 

 Look into the future

Is vinyl coming back? I’ve heard that on and off for years but it wasn’t until I saw vinyl in Best Buy that I thought there may be a small resurgence. In fact, this year it was announced that vinyl was the only medium in music that had growth in 2008. Who’s buying vinyl? At first I didn’t think it was the younger crowd until I read this article from the New York Times which stated that vinyl’s coming back as a fashion statement. The HDMI receiver I bought recently doesn’t have a phono jack on it so I’m guessing that receiver manufacturers don’t believe it’s worth putting them in anymore. Perhaps vinyl will be seen as a niche, “high end” market. It’s tough to tell at this point, but it will be interesting to see how things are a year from now.

When I first drafted this blog a few weeks ago, I was convinced that this was a passing hobby. Since then, I bought a new belt for my dad’s Yamaha turntable and I have to say that listening to vinyl on a high quality turntable like that really makes vinyl worth listening to and going out of your way for. I find myself appreciating the quality of the audio you get from vinyl. There are caveats though. I bought two copies of NIN’s “Ghosts I-IV” from two different places and both copies’ discs three and four were warped in exactly the same way. I have a feeling that there were some bad pressings of that title. Discs one and two are perfect. Over time I’ve found that some albums have pressing problems, but it’s rare. I remember that my friend and I both bought Dire Straits’ “Brothers In Arms” from two completely different stores and had skips in the exact same spot.

What I like about this resurgence of vinyl is that I find myself really getting absorbed by the music. It’s no longer a filename on my hard drive or my iPod, it’s a piece of work that someone took time to create.

And no, I will not be making a blog post about 8-tracks.

See more pictures of my vinyl collection on flickr.

 

 

 

 

Do not buy Gears of War 2

This morning, Maximum PC posted an article saying that Epic will not be releasing Gears of War 2 for the PC. The reason why? Frontman Cliffy B. said,

“Here’s the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know Bittorrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC.”

Cliffy, here’s the problem with your statement: not all of us with high end rigs are pirates. Was there a time when I pirated games? Yeah, when I was 16 years old and was lucky to be making $3.35 an hour. That was back in 1984. Once I got a real job I started buying games and haven’t pirated a game since they were distributed on floppy discs.

I’m well aware of the rampant and easy piracy problem. I object to piracy because I’ve had something of mine blatantly stolen once many years ago and I can understand how it feels to have something copied for free. However, Cliff’s assumption that the people that can afford a high end gaming rig are the cause of piracy in the first place is a terrible insult to those of us that are honest and spent all this money on a rig just to have a game taken away from us because we’re guilty by association.

So here’s my solution to the problem: don’t buy Gears of War 2. Let these developers know that instead of working hard making a game for people, they’re instead NOT making a game for those of us that are appalled at what decisions are being made about the game’s distribution. Oh sure, it’ll sell well on the Xbox 360, but it won’t sell to an entire market because of some silly belief that high end gaming rig owners are all a bunch of pirates.

I’ll speak directly to Cliffy here: take the time and effort that you put into innovating your graphics engine and put it towards a system where you can sell the game to PC owners with little or no piracy issues. Innovate. Do something the industry as a whole can benefit from. Give the game away for $1 and sell a subscription model so that people are forced to log in. You can’t pirate World Of Warcraft because you need an account to play, so why not charge people to access a login server? This way there’s little-to-none DRM because without a login you can’t play the game.

What does the new Comcast bandwidth cap mean for HD downloads?

On October 1, 2008, Comcast will implement their new 250GB/month bandwidth cap. They say that this won’t affect most users. This is true….today. However, there are so many things chaninging online that people may not realize their 250GB have been eaten up as fast as they think.

One aspect in particular is the online rental of streaming HD movies. Many services offer this now such as Netflix and Xbox Live, but what does that mean for the bandwidth cap?

Comcast has this to say about their cap:

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 – 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

Note that they don’t mention HD movies at all. If you were to stream an HD movie at 720p, it would take up approximately 4-6GB. That means you could watch roughly 40 movies a month (taking into account other miscellaneous items that would add to your bandwidth). That’s acceptable for most people.

If you want to go for a 1080p download or stream, it’s going to be roughly 16-20GB for each movie if it’s packaged the same way it is on a Blu-Ray disc, minus the extras. Doing the math, that’s only going to allow you to watch 10-14 movies a month! If you’re a movie nut like I am, 10-14 movies a month isn’t very many (again, adjusted for other items you may use your bandwidth for). Also, streaming movies isn’t practical if you have favorites like I do and you want to watch them again. Most streaming services only allow you to watch the movies for a certain period of time before they expire.

While I believe that in fact most people will never reach that cap, I think more people will than Comcast believes. Currently, I haven’t been able to find any tools on Comcast’s site that monitors your bandwidth, and even if there were any, how do we know how accurate they are?

The next few months will be interesting. Will we see avid movie watchers start getting “shame on you” letters from Comcast? Will there be a jump to other services like Verizon FIOS? Time will tell.

If anyone would like to see a direct comparison between DVD and HD on “Fellowship Of The Ring”, click here.

After all the G1's hype, it's just like every other phone

I have to admit that I was looking forward to the G1. The idea of an open source phone that allowed you to write any app you wanted really appealed to me. As time went on, many people speculated about what carrier would get the phone, and what features the phone would have.

Today, Google and T-Mobile unveiled the G1 running Andriod, Google’s open source operating system for the G1. Did they score a home run with the G1? Maybe the ‘G1′ stands for ‘got to first base’.

The first order of selling something is that you need someone with just a touch of charisma to be on stage. You want people to be pumped for this device. If you’re going up against Apple, you need something more than a bunch of suits to sell it. I’m sure everone that gets up on stage reads from a script, but these guys looked way too stiff and I was not inspired enough to listen to what they had to say, but I really had no choice but to get through it.

The demo video for the G1 wasn’t very good at all. It showed zero innovation. Apple has done amazing things with the iPhone and the G1 looks like nothing more than a bad copycat. It has a desktop and a drawer for your apps. You can drag apps to the desktop so that the desktop looks like the drawer you just opened. I really don’t see the point there. The video also showed a version of Pac-Man running. Anyone who’s ever played Pac-Man knows that once you get to the Peach level, all hell breaks loose and I’d be surprised if someone can get to the Key level on this thing.

They showed a video of developers talking about how awesome open source is, that your unbound by its freedom, and you can download whatever you want without having to “fill out paperwork”. PAPERWORK? What is this guy talking about? With all the malware and viruses out now, I’m very curious as to what restrictions will be placed on the apps written for this device. Will they require the source code to all apps to be available? Will they restrict apps like Apple does with the iPhone Store? If so, what is this “freedom” these open source developers are talking about?

Taking questions from the audience showed how many more flaws the G1 has. First off, the device will be SIMlocked to T-Mobile. This is an open source device that will be SIMlocked. It seems like a contradiction to call a device open source while locking it to a certain network. Apple took a lot of heat for doing this with AT&T, and now it’s happening with the G1. Apparently, business is more important than the open source community. The G1 should be able to work on any network in the United States and abroad, or it’s simply another generic cell phone device.

When asked if there is Exchange support, the answer was no. This is a serious problem for the device when other devices like the Blackberry and iPhone already have Exchange support built-in. The lack of Exchange support automatically kills any hope of wooing Blackberry and iPhone users that depend on Exchange.

Not surprisingly, there’s support for Gmail and all other Google technologies. While I have nothing against Google and their technologies, I think it’s rather arrogant of them to not support other technolgies that people depend on like Outlook. When asked, there’s no desktop application to sync the G1 with, but you can do it over the internet to sync with Google’s technologies. To me this is a blind decision in which the Google people don’t seem to understand that there’s an entire market of people out there that don’t use Google technologies, and won’t either. Let’s try and remember that it’s almost impossible nowadays to get the name you want for Gmail after the scramble for invites a few years back. By the time I got my invite, every single iteration of my real name was taken. New users will probably face the same situation and instead of getting “John Doe”, they’ll probably have to get “johndoe98904594″. That’s not a very appealing situation to be in.

So if you look at the mobile market as a whole, and what other competing devices are out there have to offer, does the G1 really matter? Right now, I don’t see a single thing that appeals to me except perhaps the ability to write apps for the phone. However, writing apps for a phone isn’t new, you could do that for years on Symbian and other platforms. You can write apps for the iPhone as well, so until we find out what kind of restrictions there will be in getting apps to the phone, I’m not going to drop what I’m doing and write apps for a device that doesn’t show a scrap of innovation.

The addition of a keyboard that slides out is appealing, but I’m not going to ditch my iPhone which I’ve loved using for the last 15 months for this device. It’s not sexy, it’s not innovative, and I’m not convinced it will live up to its promise of being the awesome open source device Google said it would.

Twitter needs a mute button

During this historical time of our next presidential election, I found that people I like are more than enthusiastic about their candidates. That’s fine, people have the right to say what they want, but unfortunately some spew more than others and I found my Twitter stream was filled with more about Obama, McCain, Hillary, and Palin than anything I’m actually interested in reading.

I follow politics, but I avoid the topic online. There are too many people out there who seem meek that will pounce like a tiger on you the instant you say something negative about their candidate or their party. This is not a fight I want to provoke or be a part of.

The way Twitter works is that you either follow or unfollow someone. I propose a mute button; something you can press that will remove them from your stream without actually unfollowing them. The reason why unfollowing can be seen as an unfriendly thing to do is that refollowing sends an email to the person, showing that you in fact unfollowed them at some point. Although it’s happened to me, I shrug it off. Not everyone can like my stream and that’s OK. However, some people’s egos bruise more easily and I think it would be better for the community if Twitter just put in a mechanism that quieted someone while they rant and rave about whatever it is they’re passionate about at the moment.

I realize there are third party apps like Tweetdeck, but not everyone uses it. It would be better if Twitter put this feature in at the source of their APIs rather than depending on your favorite third party app to implement it.

Is this political race showing the ugly side of Twitter?

When Twitter first started becoming popular, everyone rejoiced. For the first time, we all knew what we were doing in real time, and it brought a sense of community to the internet. We could all feel as if we were connected to everyone in some way, in real time.

This past year however, I’ve noticed a trend in how people react to political views on Twitter. Every time Obama gave a speech, I saw a flood of Tweets about how awesome the guy is. Almost every sentence he uttered on TV was regurgitated on Twitter along with comments and comments about comments. I had to ignore Twitter for a few hours because of all the noise.

Now with the Republican National Convention underway, there’s a lot of scrutiny over Sarah Palin. Again, I’ve been ignoring Twitter because of the noise. I do not talk about politics on Twitter at all because it’s just something I don’t want get into with people. However, the other day I saw someone on another forum make a quip about Sarah Palin and it was quite funny to me. I wanted to post it on Twitter but I had second thoughts. Who would I offend? Would people understand that it’s a joke? Would I lose every follower that’s a Republican?

And then I asked myself: “Do I give a shit?”

And I answered myself: “No”

So I posted on Twitter:

“GILF?”

It was ballzy for me to do it, but I saw it this way: my friends, my REAL friends, the people that know me and my sense of humor (I’m looking at you, Sarah and Chris) would get it and understand I’m just being a goofball. People that know me peripherally would probably snicker at it. Other people wouldn’t get it at all, and I knew that there were people that would unfollow because of it. So I did something before I posted that, I checked the number of followers I had before I posted it. Then I checked how many followers I had after. I lost 4 people because of that remark two hours after I made it. Four isn’t a lot, but it shows that there were four people out there that were so disgusted with my little joke that they unfollowed me altogether. It made me laugh, but a part of me wondered why people care at all about what I write. Are people on Twitter so completely polarized to one party or the other that they’d unfollow someone they thought was interesting enough to follow in the first place because of THAT?

In the last few days I’ve seen battles break out on Twitter over political views. I’ve seen a lot of arguing back and forth and if I can lose 4 people over a little joke, how many other people are losing followers? I would bet a lot more since I’m pretty much a D-list person on Twitter.

This is what I learned this week. I am not posting on Twitter to make anyone else happy. If you don’t like what I have to say, there’s an unfollow option on Twitter. Press it. If you find that political arguments get you upset, ignore Twitter for a little while. I still believe that these apps need to build in filters so that you could remove posts that have “Obama” or “Palin” or “McCain” in them. The only person I unfollowed due to politics was not because of his views, but because he was practically transcribing one of Obama’s speeches and the NOISE was getting to me. I had to filter out that person just to read what other people were saying. TweetDeck is an application that allows you to filter people into different panes, but it’s bulky and takes up a ton of real estate on your screen, but it may help you filter people out, at least until this election is over.

So do yourself a favor and think before you unfollow. Doing so may be a knee-jerk reaction and there are better ways to filter people out. I generally ignore what certain people say if I know their avatar’s associated with one party or the other. Just remember, at some point you may want to refollow them and they’ll get an email saying ‘so-and-so is follwing you”, and they’ll know you removed them at some point.

Sensors detect another quarter in your pocket

I grew up with arcades. The one I used to go to the most was “Space Port” in the Woodbridge Center Mall. The mall was split into 4 wings and “Space Port” was downstairs from “The Game Room” which had all the D&D and roleplaying merchandise. TGR is still there, but Space Port closed soon after the Playstation was released. Any time I’d be in a mall or at the shore, I’d ask (beg?) for as many quarters as I could get my hands on. Today, very few good arcades exist. The only one I know of in NJ that’s left is in Seaside Heights. There are other smaller ones, but they don’t have many old videogames. I know there was one in Hershey Park but I don’t know if it exists anymore. There was even a small one in an old Italian Ice store called Maglione’s on Rt. 27 in Iselin, NJ which is long gone.

If you had $5, you could play 20 games which could last you several hours which included the time it took to wait for games to become available. If you wanted to be next, you placed a quarter on the machine stating that you’re next in line. Some games had a few quarters lined up.

My suggestion is to fire up whatever Journey songs you have before reading the rest of this blog post. If you want to read more about these games and others, check out Arcade History or Digitpress.

I posted on Twitter today:

“If you had ONE classic arcade game to buy, what would it be? No cheating and saying MAME . Me: Star Wars vector.”

I picked Star Wars vector because the game was by far the most fun for me. What was great about it was that although parts of the gameplay started off scripted, as the game went on, things became more dynamic. TIE Fighters’ flight paths changed, lasers were shot from random points at random times. There was a little-known trick at the end of the trench run where if you did the entire trench run without firing a shot until you fired your torpedoes at the end, you got bonus points when you blew up the Death Star (100,000 on level 5 I think).

The responses I got were awesome, and shows just how much influence arcades (and Journey) had on some of our lives.

@isheepthings said “Gauntlet”. I remember the day I saw this for the first time. The game was MASSIVE because it needed space for 4 players. There was a LONG waiting time for this game because people were pretty damn good at it, even right off the bat. I may be wrong, but I think it was the first game I saw that asked for 50 cents for a play. The computerized narrator’s voice chastised us for making mistakes such as “Someone shot the food“, or “Valkyrie is about to die”.

@Pancho88 said “Galaga”. I was never a huge fan of this game, although it was fun.

@JeffHinz said “Donkey Kong”. This would probably make my top 5 classic videogames of all time. It’s what launched the then-unknown Mario into stardom. Everyone should know this game. Donkey Kong steals Mario’s girlfriend (was it officially Peach at the time?) and you need to climb towers to save her. What made this game addicting was how there was no pattern to the game and you needed quick reflexes to dodge and jump over the barrels.

@extralife said “Joust”. This was one of the games that really made you work a button. Flapping around while trying to make sure you’re at least a pixel above where you needed to be to knock your opponents off was a lot of fun. I never liked playng against another person, though.

@echuta said “Sit-down Spy Hunter”. Ok, I absolutely LOVED this game. The computerized “Peter Gunn” theme in the background while shooting bad guys while avoiding their tire spikes was one of the few games that got your adrenaline running. During the game you had to drive into a semi’s cargo area and upgrade your car. You could do oil slicks against cars that are following you which was always fun. Watch out for the cars that aren’t spies, though! I always loved changing to a boat also.

@shawncoons said “Depending on what “classic” is I’m going with Major Havoc, Gauntlet, or 720 (Skate or die!).” Major Havoc I don’t remember ever playing. 720 was fun to try but I never really got the hang of it.

@hossimo said “Dragon’s Lair”. This was an interesting beast. Animator Don Bluth did an interactive videogame with a CAV (constant angular velocity) laserdisc to provide what’s seen on the screen. You’re Dirk who needs to save a princess in a castle. As you progress through it, the game gives you visual clues as to where you should move or swing at. As you do each maneuver, the laserdisc player moves to the specific frame number (not possible on CLV laserdiscs) and plays that sequence. It was a great idea and although I was never a big Don Bluth fan, it was a respectable undertaking. My issue with the game was that it would hint for you to move left, which you’d do, but OH NOES! it was a trick and you’d die. That really annoyed me because you really didn’t know what was a trick and what wasn’t. I think I saw one person ever finish that game.

@new5thpants said “Space Harrier”. I don’t think I ever played it

@banannie said “Asteroids”. Who could forget this classic? The premise was simple: you’re stuck in an asteroid field and you need to shoot your way out. The catch is that the rocks get smaller as you shoot them, and pesky aliens try to shoot you down (how do THEY not get killed by the asteroids??) As you progressed, the alien ships got smaller and shoot directly at you as they emerge, making life in the asteroid field rather hectic. Your hyperdrive can save or kill you as it could randomly destroy you.

@tedkulp said “Paperboy”. An interesting game which I could never master. The game had the handlebars of a bicycle and you had to use them to move your Paperboy around the neighborhood, pressing a button on the side of one of the handlebars to deliver a paper. If you delivered it to the right house, you were granted a point for that route. If you missed, you lost a customer. There were “mean people” houses you could throw papers at and get points for. The downside to this game was that it was nearly impossible to line up your throw because of the angle you were throwing the papers at. If you were off just a little bit, the paper went in a customer’s window and you lose a point for that route. After a while I just gave up playing it. I also didn’t like the sounds and music the company made for those games.

@roadhacker on Plurk said “Defender”. Another one of my “top 5″. Your job was to save 10 humanoids from getting captured by aliens. If they grab an humanoid and make it to the top of the screen, it turns into a mutant which fired at you faster and had a more erratic flight path. If you took too long to run the level, a special ship would come at you to take you down. If all 10 humanoids were destroyed before every 5th level, you’d lose the planet and play levels against all mutants until you reached a 5th level again where you’d start over on a new planet. This game had a ton of controls on it. The stick, hyperdrive, smart bombs, and reverse. It was complicated and fun. I’d love to have one of these at home.

@robusdin on Plurk said “Dig Dug”. I liked this game, but it was too cute and easy. You could theoretically stay on the top of the garden and kill the little monsters.

Some others I’ll make quick notes about:

Tekken – I was never a big fan of fighting games until this came out. This also came out just as arcades were dying. I beat a guy using Michelle Chang. He was so pissed off he puched the side of the cabinet. I ruled with her back then. I even made a book for the Newton with all her moves so I could reference it while I was out.

Tempest – You had two controls: a knob and a firing button. You moved your cannon along (or around) geometric shapes and shot what was coming at you from the opposite end.

Robotron – THAT SOUND when you reached level 5 and all the brain mutants beamed in. Awesome game.

Space Wars – A very simple game where you put a Star Destroyer up against the Enterprise. The fun part of the game was that you could change the dynamics of the playfield. Black holes, boundaries, and other options made the game a lot of fun.

Arkanoid – A hyperactive “Breakout”. The surprised capsules that fell to the bottom of the screen were always fun to catch. My favorite was the lasers one.

Battle Zone – This was a tank game of the future where you SLOWLY moved across a landscape and shot at other tanks. It’s fun when you start, but then tanks shoot at you from behind and kill you with no way to shoot at them first. I never got the hang of that game.

Pac-Man – Everyone has to know this game. You moved a yellow circle with a “mouth” that eats up dots in a maze while four ghosts try to eat you. I pumped a lot of quarters into this game and its later sibling Ms. Pac Man. It had a pattern and I learned the first few levels until I found that there were different ROM versions which killed the pattern I knew. After that I kept playing for fun, learning how the game worked. Did you know that ghosts never attack you from above if you’re tucked in the corner above their pen?

Marble Madness – I. Loved. This. Game. The whole game was you trying to maneuver around a maze using a trackball. You had to have PERFECT precision with this game or you’d fall off the sides and die. I made it to the end of the game once, but it was always fun to try. The music on level 2 was just awesome. I think I’d have to put this in a Top 10.

Space Invaders – Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. That was all the background noise you needed to understand the unrelenting march of the aliens as they try to destroy you. This was such a fun game because it was so simple, but as you killed more of them, the game got harder and faster. You had to have a method to how you killed them or they’d be all over the place. There was a pattern to the game which I read in an old issue of New Jersey Magazine which I still have. I don’t remember it, but there was a certain number of lasers you would fire which would cause the next ship to be 300 points. I used to try to get an alien on the bottom row to be the last. It worked sometimes.

Sinistar – At first it looks like an Asteroids clone, but then you realize that the aliens you’re fighting are building this….thing. You shoot asteroids to mine Sinibombs which are the only weapons useful against the Sinistar. When it’s built, the game screams at you in a demonic voice “BEWARE I LIVE“. That was damn scary when you first heard it. The thing would come at you full speed and you had to deploy your Sinebombs while fighting off little aliens. If you had enough bombs, you took Sinistar out. It would taunt you too. “RUN, COWARD!“. “RUN! RUN! RUN!”.

Tron – One of the few tie-ins to a movie that worked well. You had two controls: a flight stick and a knob. When you start the game, you have 4 directions to go in and each direction brought you to a different game: tank maze, light cycles, bugs, or the MCP. Each game used the flight stick, but not all games used the knob. When you won all 4 games, you went up a level where you’d play the same 4 games, but at a higher difficulty. The music matched what was in the movie also. Such an awesome game and definitely a “Top 5″.

Starship I – Basically you flew around space shooting ships that came out of Star Trek. When the game was over it would say “Sensors detect another quarter in your pocket”. I loved that.

Why I'm anxiously awaiting Google's Chrome browser

I have no loyalty to a browser. On Windows I use Firefox because it doesn’t screw up like IE does, and on the Mac I use Safari because I like how it works on the Mac vs. Firefox which seems clumsy on the Mac.

However, as good as these browsers are, they have a few common problems which annoy me to no end. For one thing, if something in one of my Firefox tabs screws up, the entire browser goes down. Most of the time Firefox will restore my session, but there are times when it doesn’t and I find myself trying to remember which sites I had open before the app crashed. I don’t like how I have to cripple new sites with the NoScript plugin for Firefox because I’m worried about malware.

Google seems to be changing that with their Chrome browser. Every tab will have self-contained processes. If the process of one tab crashes, it doesn’t take the entire browser with it, it will just close out the one tab. This also means that malware won’t be able to affect other tabs. Google also dealt with malware by not allowing it to write to the hard drive!

Chrome is also supposed to be faster. I wrote an HTML parser/browser a few years back for work just before CSS became popular and I can tell you that although object placement for a web site can be tricky, it can be done if you work it out on a whiteboard. Adding in all of today’s CSS, XHTML, and other items are far beyond what I did a few years back and I hope that they optimized their object placement code.

The entire project is open source. That’s classy on Google’s part because rather than keep all their code to themselves, they give it away so people can learn from it and hopefully improve it over time.

As of the time I’m writing this, they haven’t released it yet, but I’m anxiously awaiting in. In the meantime, you can click here to read Google’s comic book about how they came to build Chrome and how it works inside.

Should Twitter change their tagline?

I wasn’t around when Twitter first started. If I was, I’d have the username “starman” instead of missing out on it by four hours.

From what people tell me, it was supposed to be a service where you could tell people what you’re up to. Hence, “what are you doing?”. The tagline worked at first, but Twitter has evolved beyond the humdrum answers like “having cold pizza for breakfast”.

Instead now we post thoughts, have conversations (small ones, I hope), tell jokes, ask questions. “What are you doing?” no longer seems to fit. The tagline of identi.ca is “what’s up, <nickname>?” which is better, but even that doesn’t fit when your micropost is a question itself.

My proposal is that Twitter change its tagline to something all encompassing:

“what do you have to say?”

It works better than “what’s up?”. It works for questions, comments, replies. It fits for anything someone wants to write to a microblog.

Dear Disney, please don't screw up TR2N

Tron was one of those revolutionary films that was really pushing what movie makers could do back in the early 1980′s. The bluescreen process that Star Wars used had been invented decades before, but was really put to the test by Lucasfilm. Even though computer graphics (CGI) had been used in vector form in the movies before (again, with Star Wars), it was never used to fully render a frame of film and move the plot of a story along on the big screen. Tron was also one of the few films I owned on 35mm back in the days before DVD.

Apart from the CGI, Tron also pushed the envelope of what a Disney film was. The Black Hole was Disney’s first PG-rated film and depite what people think of the film, I personally believe it had a wonderful atmosphere about it. Even though one line of dialog needed to be fixed (“we’re looking for habiatable life”), I think the movie really worked.

Tron also had a subtle subtext of religion. “If I don’t have a user than who wrote me?”, asks captured program RAM. It was never really expounded upon because it wasn’t necessary, but it gave the programs a much needed feeling of being human and not some robotized character running around with a monotone robotic voice saying “You..must…not…take…data”.

Last, but not least, Tron’s music was impressive as well. Written by Wendy Carlos, it wasn’t the first electronic score (I believe that goes to Forbidden Planet), but it was very unique in how it was written and performed.

It’s been 26 years since Tron was released and ComiCon showed a surprise teaser for the sequel, Tr2n. What worries me is that moviemaking has lost a lot of its humanity, especially in effect-driven films. Movies like Star Wars, Aliens, and Predator worked because although there were effects in the films, there was good story as well. I personally blame Top Gun, and moreso Armageddon for th fall of modern cinema. There are too many fast MTV-style cuts nowadays. Effects-driven stories have their actors phone in their performances. Watching Batman Begins last week really made me feel that there are people out there that still understand what makes a good film.

And that brings us back to Disney. If you look at Disney’s track record of late, the stories are good, but revolve around a central theme: some poor character is somehow lost and needs to find their way home. Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo, Wall-E. I pray that Tr2n doesn’t turn into some poor program getting bit-shifted outside his CPU and needs to find his way back to his home address (pun intended). I would hope that the creative team at Disney isn’t looking to make an eye-candy film, but one that pushed the envelope of movie making like the original movie did in 1982. No, I don’t mean with respect to CGI, I mean the experience of the film as a whole, just like the first film was. Push the film to challenge the audience about what lives inside a computer, don’t just run arond with lightcycles for the hell of it.

End of line

If you want to see the concept trailer, it shows up from time to time on youtube; just do a search for “tr2n”. Filmstalker has also been keeping tabs on it.

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