On Cultivation Of Musical Tastes Via Old-School Serendipity

One thing my resolution of not buying music for a year has taught me is that music is more than a commodity. It is more than something to be bought, consumed, and collected. Huge digital music libraries, in this day and age, don’t say much about their owners. Yet we continue to define ourselves by what style or artists we listen to. I think this is misguided - personal musical taste, rather than the musical collection, should be the object of curation.

This is somewhat paradoxical, because the primary way we expand and refine our taste is through acquiring new music. We buy new albums, give them a few spins, and, if we like them, keep them. If we don’t like them, we still keep them because A) the album was an investment and we don’t want to suffer the loss of getting rid of it, or B) the music has been ripped on our computer, and it now pads our iTunes song count. The ultimate end result of both reasons is that we accumulate music we don’t necessarily want. I’m dealing with this right now - I have a couple albums I impulsively purchased from Amazon MP3 at the end of last year, and now I never listen to them. I don’t want to delete them because that would effectively mean I lost $10. What should I do?

I don’t have this problem when I buy used CDs. If I buy a CD and end up not liking it, I give it away to a friend who may like it. If I have no interesting interested friends, I just take it to Goodwill; somebody else may enjoy it, and the money goes to support a good cause. I’ve gotten rid of scores of CDs this way. It’s great. Music on physical media is easy for me to get rid of. But could it be easier? What would be the easiest, most cost effective, legal way to discover new music? Let’s look at where the current options are lacking.

The obvious answer is bittorrent, but that is illegal. Internet radio stations like Pandora or Last.fm, or sweet sites like YouTube Disco, are legal, but they’re not very mobile yet. (You know, for the 95% of the market that the iPhone hasn’t penetrated.) And if you do hear something you like on those services, you still have to go out and buy an album. Besides, the key word in play is discovering new music. There is, almost by definition, a huge serendipity quotient here. This is not music that Amazon, iTunes, or Last.fm recommends to you. This is not borrowing a friend’s CD to give it a listen. This is music you may/would never have sought out on your own. This is browsing the “recent arrival” racks at your local record store.

But browsing racks takes a lot of time. You have to stand there and flip for the better part of half an hour. Also, you don’t know if you’re going to get something good; what if the CD is scratched? There are other downsides: record-store CDs are not (relatively) cheap. Most discs are near the $7 mark - a lot to spend on a album you’re not sure you’ll like. And if you don’t like it, you again have to deal with how or if you’ll get rid of it - kind of mentally taxing for what is supposed to be serendipitous.

So it’s clear we need a music format that is:

*Mobile

*Home to a wide range of music

*Cheaper than $7

*Widely available

*Practically disposable, so that there is no separation anxiety if the album is crap

What am I talking about here?

I'm talking about the audio cassette tape, which neatly fits all of the required categories: You can stick them in a Walkman (which never skips!), you can find every type of music on them, you can buy them at any thrift store in the country for pennies, and because of that you feel no guilt about throwing them away should you not fancy whatever you bought. As the saying goes, it’s a win-win(-win).

Cassettes are so cheap that it is no problem to wolf them down, glean any nutritious value from their music, refine your musical tastes accordingly, and toss them. If you like the music, keep the cassette until it wears out, and then legally download it. That’s the great thing about digital music - you can get practically any music from any time period. You don’t have to waste time tracking down another copy of your favorite cassette.

I love cassettes. A few years back I was driving a borrowed Nissan that only had a cassette player. I went to the local Salvation Army and bought three tapes for like a dollar: David Bowie’s Black Tie White Noise, Nirvana’s Bleach, and Primus’ Pork Soda. Those tapes got really heavy rotation because they were all I listened to when I was driving. The Bowie album was awesome; the other two pretty much sucked. So I bought the Bowie record on CD and the others were lost when the car was totaled and towed.

Experiencing music this way was so easy yet so practical. Musical taste: Refined! Cost? Minimized!

A year later I had my own place and kept a tape player in the kitchen. I spent a lot of time in there and consequently was heavily exposed to the only two tapes I had at the time: Living Colour’s Vivid and Poison’s Look What The Cat Dragged In! Hard rock albums on cassette is a glorious thing. For a reason that I have yet to discern, I took the tape player to Goodwill when I moved. I still don’t know what on earth I was thinking. I recently was given some more cassettes (Public Enemy, Frank Zappa (!!), Smashing Pumpkins, Cream) and now I have no player to play them on. Sigh.

Some might raise the objection that I’m being sentimental. If I was being sentimental, I’d advocate records, which, oops, I already did like two years ago. Records are great for establishing a music collection, not for trying new music out. Try the cassette out, then, if you like it, buy the record. The cassette even mirrors the double-sidedness of a record! Seems perfectly acceptable to me!

Another objection might be in your minds: But cassette’s are only available for old music!

So? The object here is to refine musical taste cheaply. Was there no good music available on cassette? Or have you heard it all? Yes, cassettes are old. So is Hysteria, Aja, London Calling, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, and like a bajillion other albums that weren’t released in the last twenty years. If you’re going to be that elitist, feel free to stick with the Popular Songs Right This Second list on the iTunes Store.

I really do believe that cassettes are the best way to develop a great taste in music - they are the cheapest, easiest way to expose yourself to any and every artist and style of music. It excludes new releases, but who cares? If I want new releases, I can go to Amazon, Ping, iLike, or one of the other dozens of services who want to define my musical taste for me. With cassette tapes, I’m being exposed to music history serendipitously. And much of the music that makes up music history is really, really good. Cassettes deliver that to me. But even if they don’t, that’s OK - in the same motion I can toss it into the trash and pop something else in the Walkman. (As soon as I get one!)

Dann writes from his home in Minnesota, which can be rearranged to spell "Aeon Mints," which, you gotta admit, is a pretty great name for a band.

_DZ

Throw Down a Yo-Yo and Memories Come Back Up

It isn’t often that you are reminded of your yo-yoing past. Playing with a yo-yo is one of those things that you easily forgot you did until you are reminded that, yes, you too once practiced a completely useless skill for hours until you could look cool for your elementary school peers. Reminding me of all of that was this video, posted on the page of a Facebook friend.

The guy is obviously a sham who has no skills in yo-yoing whatsoever, but at least he tries. And he got on TV, which is more than my yo-yoing ever got me.

I bought my first yo-yo when I was in third grade, a scrawny little white kid in a suburban Japanese elementary school. Yo-yos were the hot new toy in Japanese youth culture, with the accompanying TV shows and manga series and how-to books that come with every new marketing scheme. Mine was a purple and black Yomega Steal

th Fire, a wing-shaped yo-yo good for doing string tricks but lame if you wanted to do any serious looping. Soon I added a glow-in-the-dark Duncan and a Yomega Stealth Brain (the type that automatically retracts after a certain time) to the stable. These were all pretty cheap yo-yos, with solid bodies and plastic bearings. With lots of practice I could soon do all of the beginner tricks, almost all of the intermediate tricks, and a few advanced tricks. I was still behind my best friend, though, who could ‘yo’ like nobody’s business.

Despite my relative ineptitude I kept up yo-yoing until seventh grade, when it was just not cool to do that kinda stuff anymore. The year before I had bought a Yomega RB2 that had a metallic ball-bearing axle - a huge step up from the plastic ones. I could throw that yo-yo down like a crazy man and have it spinning harder than a cordless drill in the hands of Michael J. Fox. It unlocked a few more advanced tricks for me, but soon ended up in a box in the closet.

I still have that yo-yo and know where it is, now ten years later. I can still do some of the tricks - tricks that I couldn’t teach anyone else but can still do because my hands move automatically from the countless hours of practice. I pick the RB2 up once in a while because it’s a fun reminder of childhood. Playing with a yo-yo was something I genuinely enjoyed doing, regardless of how useless a skill it was. That’s still all it is - a fun diversion - and certainly not a way to get infamous on Wisconsin local television.

_DZ

A Tribute to The Missionary Van

Jesus tells his apostles in John 13 that, “the world will know you are my disciples by your love.” In the case of missionaries, the world will also know who you are by what you drive. Every mission field has its own missionary car - in African countries it may be a jeep, in Europe perhaps a pickup truck, but, in Japan, it is the missionary van.

When you’re a missionary kid in Japan, your family drives a van. There is no getting around this. And it’s not one of those cool vans, like the dubbers have in which they cruise the downtown. No, it’s one step away from a painters van. It’s like a grey metal bucket with seats. It will get you no girls. It is a Missionary Van.




We really couldn’t complain, though, because the vans were provided, insured and maintained by our respective missions. Plus, when you’re a missionary you’re always transporting people, a purpose at which such vans excel.

Nonetheless, we kids in the mid-‘nineties were dedicated to promoting our vans like they were our pets. We were always comparing vans, highlighting their features, praising their virtues, and trash-talking each others rides. Things could get crazy and kind of heated.

Kid A: “Dudes, my van is so cool. It seats eight and can fit three suitcases in the back!”

Kid B: “Man, but yours has a jumpseat. That’s so lame. My van has a full front bench seat and can fit seven comfortably. Plus it has sliding doors on both sides.”

Kid A: “Dual doors may be cool, but a jumpseat means that you can like flip the front seat around and face each other and play games and stuff!”

Kid B: “Yeah, and be riding backwards and barf! Your family has a barfmobile! Hah! PLUS my van has leather.”

Kid A: “Nuh-uh! No one barfs in my car! And leather is stupid. It gets too hot.”

Kid C: “Guys, both your vans are lame because they run on gas. My family’s runs on diesel, and diesel is awesome.

Kid A: “What’s diesel?”

Kid C: “It’s cheaper.”

Kid A: “Why is it cheaper?”

Kid C: “Because it’s BETTER.”

Kid B: “Really? What does it do?”

Kid C: “I don’t know, but my dad says that it is better. My van also has an automatic transmission.”

Kid A: “Man, your dad doesn’t know anything. And your van is a dumb color and seats six.”

Kid C: “Well at least my van doesn’t have stupid STRIPES all along the side of it! Hah!”

Kid A & B: “Stripes are dope.”

Kid C: “Oh, and two words. Sun. Roof.”

Kid A: “Sunroof is one word.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Yah-huh!”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Yah-huh!”

Sunroof or no sunroof, these vans had very few worthwhile features to highlight. Like I said before though, they were functional - they moved people and cargo efficiently. Now that we’re older, missionary kids still have fond memories of their vans growing up, and it’s one of many points of solidarity that they can share with other missionary kids. My family went through (I think) three vans while I was growing up, each one a little better than the one before it. This influence may even be part of why my current vehicle is a van. I have a soft spot for vans, even if mine never did have dual sliding doors.




Dann writes from his home in Minnesota, where, in a nearby parking lot, sits his van that can seat three legally and (at least) ten illegally.

I Listened to Eminem?? Perhaps.

If you lived through 2001, I think that a time should come in your life when you realize and can recount the effect that Eminem, that white rapper dude (whose name is really easy to type), had on your life. I’ve decided that now is that time for me, so here is an unabashedly personal essay about Eminem’s influence on me, at the time in the eighth grade.



I was thirteen - a short, skinny white kid with a buzz cut and crooked front teeth. It was second hour algebra and a girl named Ashley, possibly the most popular girl in my grade, bounded up to me and asked, “Hey, do you like Eminem?”

Now, I had no idea who M&M was, nor did I have the slightest clue as to why she wanted my opinion on him, but I did know two things: Ashley was very excited about him, and Ashley was very cute.

“Of course! He’s pretty cool.”

“I know, right!”

Thus ended our conversation - a conversation, I might add, that pretty much embodied and format and duration of every other junior high coed conversation. I actually continued to be pretty clueless as to who Eminem actually was, but I soon gathered that he was a white rapper whose name could be pronounced as “M&M” without one’s classmates being the wiser.

Because the near-universal consensus among the adults that I knew was that Eminem was not appropriate listening for a Christian of any age, I listened to him at every chance I got. I did not have the guts to sneak the whole Marshall Mathers LP into my house, so I taped the radio edit of his single “The Real Slim Shady” off of Armed Forces Radio and memorized it to make up for my cowardice. Not having the album, though, didn’t stop me from contributing my opinion, solicited or not, about how awesome it was whenever the opportunity to do so presented itself.

If I had been a sly, conniving middle-schooler, I would have gone to great lengths to find a copy of Eminem’s first release, the Slim Shady LP, and listen to that for hours on end. That way, whenever the topic of Eminem surfaced, I could always play the universal trump card of, “Yeah, Marshall Mathers LP is ok I guess, but have you heard his older stuff? I actually think it’s way better than any of the stuff that they play on the radio these days.”

It’s funny how the object of music critique is to be elitist about “better” music than “they” play.

ANYWAY, this whole tale of eighth grade music appreciation would be moot if Eminem hadn’t been controversial. The Christian press hated him, denouncing this “vile” white rapper and his musical style on every street corner. It is pretty easy to boil the distaste down to a racial issue. The Christian media, largely white, had always cast a critical eye on rap music, but I think had largely brushed it off as music for black people - for the youth who didn’t browse their websites or read their magazines. Rap was a problem, yes, but for the most part it was not a problem that endangered “our” kids, they said. And then Eminem showed up.

You can attribute his success to quite a few factors (he’s a white fish in a black pond, he’s obscene, he had friends in high places, he made fun of celebrities, etc.), but I side with rock critic Chuck Klosterman and his reasoning. From page 175 of his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, “To me the biggest reason [for his success] is obvious: He enunciates better than any rapper who ever lived. He’s literally good at talking.”

Here was a rapper whose lyrics conservative and Christian white people could understand at first listen, and they weren’t used to that. All of a sudden they heard a white person being immature, obscene, and misogynistic and making bank because of it, and they didn’t like that.

Because our parents hated him, we kids loved him. We called his style “fresh”, his lyrics “funny” and “socially relevant” and his image “relatable”. We embraced him because he looked like us, talked like us, and, most importantly to an eighth grade boy, because he was really, really good at making fun of people.

But now this is 2009, and it seems very unlikely that Eminem will come out with any new material that will come close to topping his records that were released seven or eight years earlier. He no longer makes media headlines or angers Christian media watchdog groups. And while the Marshall Mathers LP didn’t drastically alter my musical preferences or listening habits, it was an album that had a great influence on how I saw music in relation to the social values and norms of society. Eminem, at least in my book, joins the ranks of other musicians, like U2, Bruce Springsteen, or Billy Joel, who have the unique ability to relate to a person on an individual level as well as to society as a whole. It doesn’t matter that a song of theirs goes multi-platinum - it can still be a story about specific events on your life. Eminem did that for me, and I am a different person because of it.



_DZ

I Miss You, Paul Harvey

I’ve been slow to write about it, but radio commentator Paul Harvey died a little over a month ago. Known for his morning news segment on NPR, Paul was a real character who knew not only how to entertain but also how to make issues that seemed not to matter to the forefront of discussion.

NPR and Paul Harvey were, quite literally, the soundtrack to my childhood mornings. That alone probably tells you more about my parents than a full page of text ever could, but whatever. Every day I would wake up at 7am and go downstairs for breakfast, plunking myself down with my bowl of Cheerios and fruit as NPR (Camille Bohannon and Robert Siegel) streamed over the airwaves of Armed Forces Radio. Paul Harvey came on at 7:15, and his Rest Of The Story played around 7:30. After that came the Letterman Top Ten List. Programming like that tells you all you need to know about Armed Forces Radio.

Paul Harvey was a comfort for me - a security blanket. A sense that everything was OK in the world, sometimes. He was also in a way my link to America, and I took cues from him and the news he delivered as representative of the country that with I (at the time) most strongly identified. I heard his voice so much over the course of my elementary years that whenever I read the news now, I can hear Paul’s voice in my head, reading it to me if I so choose.

I will miss him.



_DZ

My Love For the PowerMac G4

While I’ve mentioned my possession of PowerMac G4s in several previous posts throughout the months, I think it’s time I went into the history of them in a little bit more detail. These are machines that I have bought mainly for nostalgic purposes; machines that I idolized when they were released and wanted so badly but could never afford. After high school, however, I decided that I was a big boy and could buy them if I so chose. So I did.

My first G4, a 450MHz single core AGP machine with a DVD drive, 512MB RAM and a 40GB HD running OS 10.4 Tiger, was purchased when I was at Messiah College in February of 2007. I won it on eBay for $75+$20 shipping, which was not a bad deal by any means. It had been a design machine at a studio in New York, and had been retired and put up for sale. The auction mentioned that shipping would be slow, and indeed it was - nearly a month after I won the auction the machine showed up at my campus post office. Included was the tower, an ethernet cable and a Dell keyboard and mouse, which was more than I was expecting. My friend Isaac gave me a 15 inch Dell monitor that had been sitting in his attic, and I soon had my very own G4 up and running in my dorm room. Now, what was I going to do with it?

It wasn’t nearly as powerful as my MacBook, and it didn’t come with any software other than Microsoft Office X. I didn’t have Office at the time, so I transferred that over to my Macbook. I had bought the machine for nostalgia purposes, but now I had a machine that ran the same OS as my Macbook (10.4.9 Tiger), only slower, and had less programs. Crap. The DVD drive was very nice, since I had Japanese region DVDs that required my MacBook to switch the DVD region of its drive. Since the number of switches was limited to five, the G4's first role was as a Japanese DVD-watching machine.

But I didn’t watch Japanese DVDs that often, so I had to find another way to justify this machine that hung out under my desk. Games, I thought, I can run games on it.

So I did!



For the remainder of the college semester, my G4 ran a copy of MacMAME. MacMAME allowed me to play shmups (my first video game love), and I poured hours into playing classic games such as Progear no Arashi, DodonPachi, DonPachi, E.S.P. Rade, Guwange, Battle Garrega and Armed Police Batrider. A regular keyboard was no good for these games and I didn’t have a gamepad, so I bought a USB<=>PS2 cable and borrowed a friend’s idle DualShock to rock MacMAME. It was glorious, I assure you.

I stored the machine over the summer, as I was in Japan making money, and by the time I returned in September I was itching to actually use the G4 for classic, nostalgic purposes. A quick search on eBay and a few strategic bids netted me a copy of Mac OS 9.2 and a copy of Unreal Tournament (I see Unreal Tournament 2004 as pretty much the zenith of computer gaming, but classic UT is almost as good). Not only was I granted access to hours of fragging goodness, but being able to boot into OS 9 allowed me to download and play abandonware games for the Mac as well. These are classic games that have been abandoned by their publishers and are available for free download. The most notable of these games, of course, was SimCity 2000, Original Oregon Trail, and Civilization 2, all of which had incredibly high nostalgic value for me. I was now swimming in nostalgia goodness!

But, believe it or not, that got old. I never imagined it getting old, but it did. And soon I decided that the computer wasn’t worth the space it took up, so I decided to sell it. I bundled it with OS 9, a pair of Roland speakers, the monitor, keyboard and mouse, and the copy of Unreal Tournament and put it up on CraigsList for $150. It wasn’t exactly a flip because all of the stuff DID cost me more than that, but I certainly didn’t lose a lot of money. A guy who lived in Philadelphia came and picked it up, only to call me two days later to complain that “[he] plugged it in and it started smoking.” I expected to be out a full $150, but for some reason he never called me again. I sometimes wonder what ever happened to the machine.

Well, one G4 had come and gone, but how long would it be before I wanted another, better one?

-------


That was in the spring of 2008, after which I went for half a year without another G4. Upon moving to Minnesota, however, I decided that it would be nice to have one again, so to Craigslist I faithfully turned once again.

I sold the first G4 because I didn’t need it, so "what made me decide I needed another one?", you may ask. This time I did actually have a goal in mind. This time I wanted to use it to set up an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server. An FTP server, for those who don’t know, is a machine that hosts files online that can be accessed from anywhere that has an Internet connection. I saw my future G4 as a machine that would sit in the corner, run 24/7, serve up media files at my request and also backup any data I might want backed up.

My media is actually pretty limited - just 207 episodes of the anime BLEACH (though at 175MB an episode, that’s a lot of data) and a few seasons of House M.D. These I figured would go on a slave hard drive, while the OS and backed-up files would be stored on the primary drive.

But wait, I haven’t actually found a machine yet.


Though I decided I wanted to step up and buy a faster, better machine than the last G4 I owned, price was still a factor, and I set myself a price range of $120-$180. After a few days of browsing I happened upon a listing for a Quicksilver G4 with a 867MHz processor, 384MB RAM, 40GB HD, Zip drive(!), and running an unknown version of OS X. Apparently the lister (the same guy who had no idea how to use Pro Tools) had forgotten the admin logon password and hadn’t used the machine in ages. The machine, priced at $150, came with an Apple Pro keyboard and mouse, and the cute round Apple speakers. I looked at the listing and grinned. I could haggle that down. I called the guy up at 9:45 on a Friday night, asking if the machine was still available. It was, and he wanted it gone that night, so I hopped in my van and drove over to his house. We had a quick meeting at his apartment, he showed me the machine, and I successfully haggled the price down to $120, citing that the machine effectively had no operating system - that alone was worth the $30. The keyboard was extremely dusty, but everything looked good overall, and I drove back home eager to set up my new machine.

I got home and realized that not only did I not have a monitor, but no one in my house even had a monitor that I could borrow. After a bit of thinking, I remembered that the basement had a projector which accepted VGA input, so I hauled my new purchase down the stairs and set it up in the basement at 11 o’clock at night.

First on the agenda was obviously to get an OS loaded onto the machine. It didn’t have a DVD drive (grr!), which meant that not only could I not (illegally) load my copy of Leopard onto it, but also that I couldn’t load my copy of OS 10.4 Tiger on it either. Luckily, a Grape iMac that I had purchased a month before had come with a copy of OS 10.3 Panther, so I grabbed the discs for that and went to work.

It is worth noting that I wanted to keep things legal here. My 333MHz iMac was at the time dual-booting OS 9.2.2 and Panther, so to keep things square I deleted Panther from the iMac before installing it on the G4. The iMac ran it slowly anyway.

So now that the OS was loaded on, I needed to install a plethora of networking utilities. I set up Panther to for file-sharing and FTP hosting, (following this website) configured a DNS account using DynDNS, downloaded and installed Eavesdrop, and loaded up a VNC client. At this point I only had the one 40GB hard drive, so loading my media would have to wait.

Time to connect from my MacBook! I loaded up Cyberduck, typed in the G4’s DynDNS address, and BAM, I was FTP-ing. It was sweet. I could, like, transfer files back and forth between the G4 in the basement and my laptop in my room.

Now it was time to upgrade my system to make it a worthwhile FTP system and deal with all the technical difficulties and disappointments that went along with that!

---


So my Quicksilver G4 was humming in my basement, FTPing inside my house to my MacBook. But I couldn’t leave it set up that way - I needed to move everything into my room. That meant that before I started upgrading anything else, I needed a monitor. I thought about trying Craigslist since it is, after all, the answer to any material need, but before I could hop on there I ran across a nice 15-incher at my local Axman Surplus. The monitor, a CRT of course, was attractively priced at $1.97. They couldn’t guarantee that it worked, buy for that kind of price, I was willing to risk it.

It turned out that the monitor worked beautifully and fulfilled all of my viewing needs quite well. I then turned my attention to the RAM and hard drive upgrades. First the RAM.

The G4, as stated before, had a paltry 384MB of RAM - one slot with a 128MB stick and another with 256MB. Despite rampant claims that 16k should be enough for anybody, I ignored the advice of yesteryear and sought to procure more RAM. My first stop, oddly enough, was eBay.

I had $22 idly sitting in my PayPal account that I wanted to use, so I looked around eBay for some good RAM for about that amount. I found a listing for 1GB (2x512) of high-density RAM for $19, so I took it. It arrived, only to not work in my machine, because, unbeknownst to me, my machine needs low-density RAM (which is considerably more expensive). I flipped the useless high-density stuff on Craigslist and this time stayed there to try and find some more. I eventually, after a couple weeks, found a guy who was selling two 256MB sticks for $20, so I went for that. A quick install and my G4 was purring with 768MBs of RAM goodness, its three slots holding 256MB each.

The second hard drive posed a much bigger headache. I’ve already admitted to being kind of a sad n00bcakes when it comes to computer parts, and my choice of hard drive will demonstrate that once again. I hopped on Craigslist once more, hoping to find something around 120GB-160GB that I could partition into two parts - allowing me to keep my OS and other files on the master and organize all of the media to host on the second drive. I found a nice 160GB SATA drive for about $20, and I met the guy in a McDonalds marking lot and made the swap. I took it home only to find that my machine needs an IDE drive - a completely different type of interface. Still full of vigor, I hopped on Amazon to find a converter bridge, something that would allow a IDE machine to take a SATA drive. That part turned out to be about $15, so, ever the stickler for FREE SuperSaver Shipping, I tacked on a internal four port USB card to the order. A computer can never have too many USB ports!

Both items arrived in a timely fashion and I installed them in an afternoon. The USB card worked flawlessly. The bridge did not. I tried every combination of master/slave drive set up that I could think of, but nothing worked. I took the IDE drive out of my external back-up drive and plugged the bridge into that, and that worked, so I knew that the bridge wasn’t bad. I just couldn’t get my machine to recognize that stupid second drive!

I abandoned that SATA drive (the drive and bridge are still stuffed in a drawer, four months later) and trudged back to CL to find another drive. I found one and arranged to meet the guy at the Oakdale Best Buy parking lot on Black Friday. In hindsight, this was a terrible idea. Don’t ever do this. I ended up walking around the parking lot for an hour, only to never find the guy and return home. He emailed me later, apologizing for not showing up and claiming that it, “just wasn’t a good day.” Whatever, guy. I gave you my cell number - you could’ve called me.

I soon found another listing, and arranged to meet this guy at a local record store called the Electric Fetus, a popular offbeat Minneapolis joint. Again, I was left browsing rows and rows of CDs waiting for a guy who never showed up. I got home only to find an email from him, claiming that he never saw me. I had told him earlier to look for a guy in shades and a leather biker jacket, and I reminded him that that was what I was wearing.

“Oh,” he replied, “that tall guy? I didn’t know. I asked the guy at the counter if anyone was waiting for me, and he said ‘no’.”

Oh, of course. I’m totally going to walk up to a clerk and be all like, “Hey, if a some guy comes in asking if someone is waiting for him, send him over to me.” What am I, nuts? So that swap didn’t work out either.

Turns out the third one was the charm. I found a guy selling a 160GB IDE drive for $20, so I agreed to meet him at a gas station about 4 miles or so away from my house. It was cold, but I decided that I was tough and that I could bike there. I did, only to soon receive a call saying that he was running late. The gas station was in a part of town that, while not “bad”, was not exactly full of moms-driving-minivans (I’m sure you are all familiar with the M-D-M parts of town in your areas). So, because of this, the gas station wouldn’t let me wait inside, and I had to try and keep warm at 9:30AM in ten-degree weather and wait for twenty minutes until this guy showed up with my hard drive.

My hands froze on the ride home (I WAS wearing ski gloves, but I guess that doesn’t help against cold wind and bare metal handlebars), and I had to stop in at my work to warm them up before I could continue. Standing there holding my hands inside of a metal hotcase was one of the most painful experiences of my life, second only perhaps to having my nipple pierced when I was 15.

I eventually made it home, threw the drive into the G4, and booted it up.

Success! Not only did it work, but this guy had left 20GB of MP3 files on it. I didn’t want any of them, and I had to partition the drive anyway, so they all got deleted. The partition went smoothly, and soon I was loading all sorts of media onto the machine, fulfilling my dream that I had set out to achieve for it.

But is that it? Is that what the machine is doing now? Shockingly, no!


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Now that my Quicksilver G4 is fully upgraded, I should be able to put it to use as an FTP server, right? Well, things weren’t that simple. It turns out that I don’t know how to assign a static IP address to the Quicksilver machine, which is kind of important if you want to FTP. My options are actually to A) open all the ports on the router to allow FTP, or B) assign a static (unchanging, as opposed to dynamic, or variable) IP address to the machine. I know how to do neither of these things. (If you know how, by all means let me know!)

So because I can’t FTP, the machine just sits there as a media storage unit. But, thankfully, I can put it to use in other ways as well.

In late November I bought a grape G3 iMac off of Craigslist for $25 that had OS 9 as well as Photoshop 5.5 and Illustrator 9. Since the G4 can run programs in the Classic environment, I copied the whole system folder and both Adobe programs over to it. It now servers as my graphics machine, and I use it to make these comics. Actually just about any image editing that I do is done on that machine. (I have since reinstalled OS 8.6 on the iMac and given it away).

I also tried using the G4 as a music jukebox, because my laptop is portable and my speakers are not. I like to listen to music as I drift off to sleep, but the G4 generated too much fan noise to be of any use while I am trying to sleep. It’s just too loud and disconcerting. Bleh!

The keyboard that came with the G4 was super dusty, so one week I decided to clean it. While all of the keys were strewn about my desk, I got the wild idea that I wanted to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. So I re-assembled the keyboard in that layout, and now I am teaching myself Dvorak. One annoying part of this is that every time I restart the computer, the logon window still operates in QWERTY, so I have to try and picture the QWERTY setup in my head in order to input my password correctly. Consequently, I don’t restart very often.

So, dear reader, our journey has come to an end. You have followed me from basement monitor setup to Dvorak layout, and suffered with me through parts upgrades, missed appointments, incompatible hardware, and other frustrations. But now you know the whole story behind my Quicksilver G4, and why I love it so much. It’s become a permanent fixture in my room, humming away a bit too loudly, and providing my with good classic software that lets me get done what I want to do.

Hooray!



_DZ