G-Fab

Okay, so what's with the nickname?

This blog got started last year during a mixtape challenge some pals had; I enjoyed writing on the blog too much, so I started an overflow blog for my rantings, and ravings. I discovered how much I enjoyed writing about the stupid, silly stuff that I go on about--music, stereo equipment, computers, life in general, etc. So it got to be a habit and it's a kind of digital knitting or crochet for me.

But the nickname? Well, Joshua assigned us all DJ names, and mine was something like "Gangsta Fabulous Razzle Dazzle" and I shortened it to G-Fab. Nobody in real life calls me G-Fab. It's just something to use instead of my real name.

Because you shouldn't use your real name on a blog that's about stupid stuff. There's nothing here that could get me in trouble, but it's not very serious either. So, it's done under a silly nickname, per the recommendation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Sincerely,

~G-Fab

"We are observing your Earth"

I don't usually listen to my iPod with headphones, but tonight I am. I am even using crappy earbuds. It's not bad. So I am writing, blogging, chatting with my boss, and doing a project for Kathy. And I've been listening to one of my favorite records, Every Man and Woman Is A Star by Ultramarine.

So, the track "Gravity" has this great loop where an alien voice goes "we are observing your Earth!" And then a female voice goes "Mother Earth." Great stuff. I wrote about this record almost one year ago in my 5 Secret Albums post.

So, now I know where that sample comes from! A while back, Aaron made a UFO mix on 8tracks, and it rocked, and I found him some other stuff, including a really, really, really bad song by The Carpenters. Well, that song ("Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft") has a strange intro where a DJ gets a call from aliens, and THAT IS THEM TALKING!!!! This Ultramarine record has so many cool samples in it. I really like the Steve Miller samples; there's also a cool Laurie Anderson sample from USLive when a Native American storyteller says "It was up in the mountains / We had this ceremony every year." That phrase kicks off the record, and it comes from one of the more compelling moments of US Live, which was like my most favoriteist record thing back in high school.

I miss my mom a lot tonight.

Not a great transition from missing my mom, but I just came back here to add some links and I was reminded of the whole heaven's gate thing. Remember that? I was still living in Lansing then, still using that first Dell computer then (1997), and I remember hitting their web that night--the night they castrated and killed themselves. That web site is still there--a giant, collaborative, cyber-suicide note. That is like exactly what the web mostly looked like back in 1997.

RED ALERT--Last chance to evacuate Earth before it is recycled.

So I am finally going off to bed I think, after many false starts. This was a hard weekend. But looking back at that 5 Secret Records post made me remember to burn a copy of Towa Tei's Future Listening! for Bill. He really needs to hear this record. This one begins with a sample, soo "I want to relax, please." A YouTuber thinks: "I think the opening vocal sample comes from an English dub of the Italian film "The 10th Victim (La decima vittima)" [when Marcello Mastroianni checks in]."

I'll leave you (as if you are someone specific--how many times did I get after students for this?) with the brilliant video that got me hooked on Towa Tei. I saw it on the MTV show AMP when I couldn't sleep during my comprehensive exams. I just love that little white dog. There are some great NASA samples in there, too.





Oh, and I still want a "Thinking Suit" just like Towa has here. I wonder what the significance of the third arm is. Could be something as simple as the fact that a thinking suit needs permanent Rodin-like chin stroking. Who knows? There was this woman in Sweden who thought she had a third arm, and neurologists agreed. Aren't you glad you read this crap? There I go again with you.

Nostalgia Computing

So dig it: I found someone who has search-able pdf copies of all Radio Shack catalogs, and that's the best place to find my grad school computer. So what I had was a Tandy 1000 TL/2 with a VM-5 12" green screen monitor. I loved that thing! In fact, I only recently parted with the keyboard (it's the one you see in the picture below. I had 3 different adapters for it, and it finally gave up the ghost about 2 years ago (Kathy persuaded me to throw it away). It had substance and felt like a real typewriter. I snapped these images from the 1990 catalog.



I guess it does not surprise me that there appears to be a nostalgia computing community on the Internet. From the time in 1979, while sitting in the passenger seat of my mother's car on the corner of Coolidge and Maple, when I heard an Apple Computer radio ad for the first time, I've been aware of computers in some form or fashion.

The Obsolete Technology Website is pretty cool.

I used my Mom's TRS-80s a bit and have written about them here. She also had a Tandy Color computer, which we hooked to a color television. Then there were the hand-me-down Tandy TX-1000s (I had 2 of these, cast off from my mother's business).

I never could get the hang of Scripsit or SuperScripsit, so I wrote most of my college papers on a SmithCorona word-processing typewriter.

The first computer that was legitimately MINE was a Tandy 1000TL. I specifically did not want a color monitor--the ones they were selling at the time were really ugly in my view--they had HUGE type and awful colors. Check out the user's manual below:



So, I walked into a RadioShack and asked for one of the monitors they had hooked to the cash register. It was a small, green screen affair, with limited graphics. All I used it for was writing and e-mail, so what did I care. These little monitors came in gray screen, orange screen, and green screen. Mine was green. The 1000TL was a 286 IBM clone that ran MD-DOS. Through graduate school, I ran WordPerfect 5.1 and EndNote on this machine. The only other thing I did with it was telnet to the MSU mainframe for my Pilot e-mail, connect to the MSU library server, or do some MOO, MUD, or MUSH things (oh and a BBS or two). This is similar to the monitor I had (this one is a little bigger: I actually LOVED my little green screen monitor):



In 1994, after working at my first professional job for a year, I took out a loan from the college and dropped $3,500 on a Dell running Windows 3.1 and I purchased a CTX 17" monitor. The CRT in that thing was HUGE! I kept the 286 w/ green screen as a second computer and used it for plain-old writing (including a hunk of my dissertation proposal) until the mid-late 1990s. I ditched it in 1999 when I realized I no longer had a computer that it could accept input from, the old 286 having died a few years previously.

There was something romantic, dare I say sexy, about the plain flicker of those old monitors. Couple that with the "newness" of getting online back in the day. Pretty thrilling, actually.

From there, I got back on the mom's castaway computer bandwagon; my buddy Todd helped me hack and build many computers based on the husks my mom had given me (most of them the mini-tower design that is popular now in PCs). Todd did most of that stuff--it was fun to watch him work on them. I still have (right here in fact) the Inca Computers mousepad we bought one day in Flint at the now-defunct Inca Computer store.

Right now I am going down to throw junk out in the basement.

Tandy TX-1000

When I first started teaching full time back in 1993, none of the faculty had computers on their desks (with the exception of a couple of computer science teachers). So I brought in this TX 1000 that my mom had cast off.

Below is mom's first computer, one of a couple of TRS-80 machines she had in the house circa 1981-82 for her word processing business:

There's one of these currently for sale on eBay for $29 (it's in Michigan, too!). There's also a unit that someone has modified to incorporate a new Pentium computer, keyboard, and monitor. I can't claim that I haven't thought about doing this myself. It looks like way too much work!

You've got to admire the dedication! Or, maybe you don't. Anyhow, my introduction to computers was from my Mom, who had a couple of these babies in the house. In the photo above, you also see a daisy wheel printer, which was loud as f@*k. That thing would shake, rattle, and roll anything it was on. It was a lot nicer than the dot matrix printers of the day.

Wireless is overrated

Back in the Diatribe days, I used to sign out a wireless unit for my bass rig every once in a while. It was cool to walk to the back of the room for soundchecks, but that was it's only real feature. I never remember it fritzing out on me, but I never felt tethered with a regular cord. And I moved around a lot as a player.

Today, my colleague Terrence sang at our commencement exercises. The dude has a great voice, and about 2 bars into "God Bless America" the dang wireless mic started cutting out on him. It was cutting out on the readers, too. Funny thing: they were about 2 meters away from the mixing board. Nothing wrong with that picture that a 50' xlr mic cable wouldn't fix!

"I don't need the microphone..."

This phrase is one of my pet peeves at conferences, and I say this as a former offender. Like many people with loud voices (and some theatre training about speaking from the diaphragm), I have in the past proclaimed boastfully that I can address the room without a mic. This is a pretention I picked up from years of speaking in union halls. So, I think I don't need the mic. Fine. For me. What most loud-voiced people fail to realize is that it's not about them. Many people in standard-sized conference halls have a difficult time hearing under the best of circumstances. More than a couple of my friends are completely deaf in one ear. Many people lose hearing acuity starting as early as their mid 40s.

It's not about you! You might not need the mic, but some people in the audience do!

A sub-component of this pet peeve is the way most people use lapel mics. They hold them with their thumb and forefinger as though the mic is a little piece of tea cake or a disgusting bug. Then they put the mic directly in front of their mouths to ensure that every percussive sound they make with their lips--linguists call these bilabial plosives--crackles and pops in a most annoying way (that is to say nothing of the silly tea-cake/bug-holding look that accompanies this sound).

The best thing to do with that lapel mic is to PUT IT ON YOUR LAPEL! You might not be able to hear it, but it was designed to pick up your voice from down there. If you can't hear it, don't worry. Someone can adjust the sound at the mixing console for the rest of the room. And if it still bothers you, remember... you don't need a mic! Right?

Der BachPod

So, Hanssler is just getting around to doing this. I've had a BachPod since 2005; now my Mom's old iPod is the BachPod, with all 172 discs of the Rilling Bach loaded up. Right now I am listening to some gorgeous chorale settings as I write.

Ah, Bach.