Category: Uncategorized

Well, I finally decided to bite the bullet and bought myself a new computer. The laptop is still “all I need”, but it was beginning to not be “all I want”. On the up side, the laptop is portable, though I never take it anywhere for it is merely life support for a dozen USB and FireWire peripherals because of it’s down side; it’s not very expandable.

What started as a $2000 Celeron 800 with 128megs of PC-100 and a 5Gig HD when I bought it has, over the years, become a 1.4 GHz PIII with a gig of PC-133 and a 20Gig HD. This is still a perfectly acceptable utility computer and I’ve done everything from PhotoShopping illos to serve web sites on it. Now I’ll have a chance to actually take with me on road trips and do actual “laptop” things with it.

All of this “computer upgrade mania” started because of a video game believe it or not. Someone brought a copy of “Shadowbane” into the store and I’ve been itching to try it out ever since. But the video chipset in the laptop, one thing I can’t change, is far too basic for it.

Shadowbane is very similar to “Dark Ages of Camelot”, in which you take an active role in the political landscape of the world by beating the crap out of other player controlled characters. DAoC was a lot of fun, but it quickly got boring for there just wasn’t much to do but hang around outside other realm’s pre-allocated castles and lay siege to them, or hang around inside one of your pre-allocated castles and break sieges. It was fun in that the other army out there was real human beings rather than moron MOBs (Mobile Objects) run by the game server. This, of course, is infinitely preferable to “EverQuest” where you cannot alter the world in any way and are locked into wandering the landscape looking for some MOB that isn’t getting beat up by someone else. EQ is a lot of fun for the first 50th level character, and then it becomes a treadmill of killing MOBs, getting experience, training your skills, buying better gear… There is very little, if any, Roleplay in EQ.

Enter Shadowbane. Much like DAoC you get together with a lot of other folks and try to take over the world, but unlike DAoC, you have to build your own “kingdom” rather than just defend the one that was there when you arrived…

Now I’ve only played this for an evening so far, but it’s been the best 5 hours in a MMORPG I’ve had yet, and I’ve played a lot of them. First off, there are more than the typical Elf, Dwarf, Human races to play; I’ve got a Minotaur warrior and a Centaur cleric right now and am pondering playing an “Aracoix” which is an avian species who can actually fly in the game. Secondly you can actually build your own settlements and cities; anyone can build anything just about anywhere… Unfortunately other folks don’t like to build (it’s expensive) and would rather just take yours, so you also have to defend it which is where guilds come in.

Guilds work almost exactly as they did in feudal Europe where you swear fealty to your guild and, if accepted, get to wear that guild’s coat of arms, which is also player created, and have the backing of several (or many) other folks. Now your guild can swear allegiance to another guild or vice versa and soon you have an entire kingdom. Players can also get involved in trade skills, learning to make something really cool and guarding that secret with their lives… Once you’re into the trade game, you can build your own store and put computer controlled merchants in there that you “employ” and control.

In a kingdom you’ll find everything from building planners, players who oversee the layout of cities to ensure things don’t get too chaotic, to spy masters who oversee groups of rogues and supply vital information to the king in regards to his enemies.

Ok, so Shadowbane is pretty neat and this, along with needing to get on top of the computer technology bell curve, is why I went out and used a little credit muscle to procure my new computer:

The new machine was a Compaq S5000T for about 30 minutes after getting it home. The first thing to go was the “ok” video card which was replaced by an Nvidia 5600 with 256Megs of ram on it, next was the stock “ok” CDRW which was replaced with a new 52x, then I added a new HP dvd300i DVD+RW drive to it. There is an extra 80Gig HD bringing the total to 160Gigs and an extra 512Megs of PC2600 ram which brings the total to 1Gig. Windows XP Home was pretty much instantly removed and the drive repartitioned to get rid of the silly “Compaq” partition, then a fresh load of XP Professional was installed.

So far I’m pretty impressed with the machine. The nice thing about new Compaq computers is that the only thing Compaq about them is the logos on the case. Internally they’re entirely “off the shelf” PC parts including the ATX MB and 300 watt power supply… Compaq computers used to be the epitome of “proprietary”.

Well, I have to get to work. Maybe if I get time tonight between writing and drawing I’ll explore the world of Shadowbane a little more. One thing I don’t do is let these games become a big priority… I learned that lesson from EverQuest. When it first came out I spent the vast majority of my free time playing it for about six months. It’s real easy to become antisocial with these things because they are so social. You just click an icon and have access to dozens of “friends” who you can turn off just as easy.

Aryntha and Rai came up last night. We did the Thai thing then wandered over to the shop where Rai got to fondle some of the firearms we don’t keep out in the gun cases. We then meandered over to Wally World for camera ram. This is where Aryntha found a fairly nice 1.3MP camera that uses SD memory (eg. It doesn’t suck) for $30.

Once we got back we did the hot tub thing, which was nice as much philosophy is always discussed in the Cannibal Special. We followed this up by sitting in the living room, staring at the fire place and listening to Floyd’s “The Final Cut”. At about 1 am the decision to go and lay siege to the local Denny’s was put on the table so we did so and returned to the house at about 3am.

I have to work a few hours today and Aryntha and Rai might have to run back down the mountain, but there is still opportunity for adventure yet today…

The next time I try to be a nice guy and volunteer for something, someone please hit me…

I just lost 2.5 hours of my life while sitting in the USS Lincoln and having a 40+ year old drunken woman alternately tell me about how her life sucks and how she wants to “keep” me… Eeeek!

Ok, this all started earlier today when Larry called the store at 10:30 and mentioned to me that some vital tax paperwork had to be down at the accountant’s office by this evening.

I told Jack, after having had several birthday parties yesterday, to go ahead and come in around noon so he could sleep it off, and I told Larry I’d drive down to Denver once Jack came in and get everything taken care of. Here’s where the volunteer thing comes in…

I asked Jack once he came in, as I always do, if he needed anything from Denver as I was making the trip anyways… He always says no, but today he did ask me to bring something back for him; a friend of his.

Now I’m not one to turn down a request and Mick, the pro skater from the board shop next door was there and asked if I’d bring back some liquor for him and his wife as it’s a lot cheaper in Denver. I agreed to both requests and after getting a shopping list and an address, off I went.

The trip down was uneventful with the exception of me forgetting that the 5pm rush hour in Denver starts at noon these days. I swung by “Applejack” liquors right off I-70, bought the items on Mick’s shopping list and headed for the accountant’s office. Once the aforementioned papers were safely in the hands of the accountant I headed over to pick up Jack’s friend and that’s when the fun started…

I got to the apartment about 5 minutes before 5 which is when I said I’d be there, knocked on the door and was greeted by a short, fat guy in his underwear who promptly closed the door again. A few moments went by before the person I was there to pick up reopened the door, bags in hand, and we proceeded to the car.

Once on the road I discover that said person is a smoker… A real smoker… We’re talking a half a pack an hour smoker, and she’s in my car which has never had a cigarette anywhere near it. She commences to light up and starts asking me about myself; what kind of hobbies I have, etc. She quickly discovers I’m the ultimate in boring because we have no frame of reference with which to communicate. She’s a television addicted waitress in a downtown bar, who is also a chain smoker, an alcoholic, and a serious motor-mouth while I’m a quiet, anti-TV intellectual who designs networks, writes software, doesn’t smoke, and only drinks stuff that comes from Scotland in $80 bottles.

Well we make it to C-470 before she starts going on about how she “needs a shot” and wants me to stop at the first liquor store I see and buy her a bottle of vodka. I’m also informed that Jack will pay me back… Well, about this time I’m figuring maybe she’ll pass out on the way up the mountain and shut the hell up and don’t really care if Jack pays me back or not.

So it’s back to “Applejack” where she picks up a half liter of cheap vodka ($6.49), I gas up the Lincoln while she ties one on in the passenger seat, and we head for the hills.

At about Idaho Springs, 30 minutes into a 2 hour drive, she’s put away about a quarter liter of cheap vodka and this is when things start to get surrealistic. She starts hitting on me something fierce between bouts of tears in regards to, whom I can only guess, is the guy in the underwear from paragraph 7, and rattling on about everything and everyone she used to do in the Vail valley.

As my speed continued to increase in a vain attempt to shorten the duration of time I was trapped with this woman, she drained the vodka bottle about a third of the way. This occurred as we were going up the east side of Vail pass and is also when she started to get very “touchy”… I *hate* being touched, especially by strange freaky women; makes my skin crawl just thinking about it. Anyways I asked her several times to desist and she finally relented but started with this whole, “I really like you, I’d like to keep you” thing and going on about how she didn’t want to go to Jack’s apartment and would rather spend the night with me.

I nearly stopped the car and dumped her on the roadside right there, but the wise words of Wolf came back to me just then… I told her I had a girlfriend in Denver who would kill me if anything like that happened.

I didn’t get the response I was hoping for as she had apparently heard this one before, so she started asking me about said girlfriend. So, I started to tell her about Wolf; the 5 foot 10 inch ex-Marine Corps Amazon who was very protective of me… I wasn’t lying; Wolf is very protective of me, is a girl, and is a friend. At least that’s how she explained it to me. 🙂

Well, this finally shut her down and the rest of the drive into Avon was fairly uneventful. I was very worried as I didn’t have Jack’s home phone number, didn’t have my shop keys so that I could get said number, and I had never been to Jack’s apartment and didn’t know where he lived. He told me earlier in the day that she knew where he lived and could take me there… I don’t think he was counting on a third of a liter of vodka. So with this, and her earlier desire to come home with me rather than go to Jack’s place, I was starting to get a little worried.

After driving around west Avon for about 20 minutes I finally spotted Jack’s jeep and pulled into the complex where this woman proceeded to walk into the wrong apartment, scaring the bejeezus out of some poor ski bum. I figured she might just be one unit off and went to the same door in the left hand building and knocked… Luckily my hunch was right and Jack opened the door where upon I handed him her, her bags, and ran back to my car.

I’m sure he’ll want to know what was wrong tomorrow at work and I’ll be sure to point out just how much he owes me for this little trip. 😉

Well, it is officially “orange season” here in the high country. Orange season has two meanings; it’s the beginning of the hunting season and it’s also the beginning of the road work season.

The hunting season part isn’t too bad as it usually results in cheap elk and white tail being available, and elk jerky in a few weeks which is very yummy.

The road work part of the season can really ruin your day. Yesterday they had traffic backed up from east Vail all the way to the top of Vail pass in the name of paving.

Here closer to home even my little side street had bucket loaders and backhoes on it, which resulted in a 15 minute delay to get to the traffic light on highway 6. At the light I had another 3 songs on the CD worth of wait as they’re in the middle of widening highway 6 for the new off ramp to the east of here and there were some really big machinery ripping up the westbound lanes; making the busiest road in town one lane for about 5 miles. Then there is the work that is still going on for Wally World which brings traffic to a crawl again so no one hits the landscapers putting in aspen trees and rocks on the roundabout. This is followed by the repaving on Bob the Bridge in Avon which snarls traffic going to/from Beaver Creek…

I’m not one of the billionaire elite who live in Arrowhead or Beaver Creek so I’m blessed with infinitely more patience for things such as this, and it was getting on my nerves… I’m sure some time during the day one of the “Affluenza” up there drew a gun on some poor DOT worker. Seriously, you get in the way of an Audi A8 or BMW X3 when one of these fat cats is getting on the highway in Avon and you’d think you’d killed a member of their family. They’re a scourge up here that was delivered by the promise of million dollar plots of land and twenty million dollar homes…

It’s funny that most of them don’t even really live here and are nothing more than tourists who don’t stay at the lodges, don’t buy anything from the local establishments, and don’t even ski. But whatever you do, don’t piss one off because they suddenly become the most important person in the entire valley.

They’re funny to watch though as money tends to gravitate to money. Someone once figured out that only one out of 18 homes up here is occupied full time and the rest are mere status symbols… I’d call them investment properties, but no one sells them once they’ve got them simply because at your next dinner party you can brag about your “home up in Vail”. I guess that gives you enough popularity-points to be worth the money you spend keeping a second, empty, home up here. So, if Bob has a home in Vail, and you *have* to compete with Bob, you get a more expensive home in Beaver Creek and the cycle perpetuates.

It’s this thinking that has flooded the valley with these folks. There are people still living here who remember when most of Arrowhead was a sheep ranch and Edwards was a gas station… Now the going rate for floor space in Edwards is $35/sqft. and rising.

Anyone reading this will have most likely heard of Cordillera due to the whole Bryant debacle. Well, 10 years ago, Cordillera was a goat path that wound along a ridge rife with bare earth and tumbleweeds and had absolutely no value whatsoever. Now it’s the same dirt and the same weeds, but covered in “cheap” 3-5 million dollar homes. And the locals just laugh… It’s fortunate the folks who own homes up there don’t actually live there because once it snows, that goat path they call a road up there is impassible by anything less than snow cat. I wonder if the houses up there come complete with helipad…

Well, I have to take off for work and slog my way though traffic cones, folks with slow signs, and dodge earth moving machinery.

Well, it’s progress…

Wow. It was nice to sleep in.

I don’t think I started breathing till 11 am today and didn’t actually make it to a standing position till about noon. I’m just not the late-nite party animal that other folks are… Then again, having a job that requires you to get up at 7 am every morning tends to curtail ones evening pursuits.

I did some doodling whilst I ate lunch of a character portrait of an anthro Ki’Rin fem named Benten I’ve needed to do for Wolf for months now. The doodle quickly turned into a full blown sketch and in about another hour was inked on Bristol and on its way to the scanner. The transfer from pad to Bristol presented a problem… I don’t have my light box anymore. So with a little scotch tape and a sunny window I was back in business…

I quickly ran into another issue… I wanted to do this illo in color, but my Wacom turned up missing back when I moved from Connecticut to Colorado and I’ve not dropped the $500 to replace it yet. I haven’t had much need for it as I’ve not been generating all that much artwork over the last year; another thing that work will do to you.

Well, I bit the bullet and used the touchpad on my laptop with *lots* of pressure and brush size tweaking between airbrush strokes. Not something I plan to repeat.

I’m hoping Wolf will be happy with it. I’m pretty impressed for not having drawn much of anything since December and coloring it with a touchpad. This isn’t my best work by any stretch of the imagination, but considering the situation, it’s not bad.

Well, time to stick another CD full of MP3s into the player out in the dining room and see what else I can come up with today…

I just got back from a really killer show over at the Half Moon in west Vail. Roy, the drummer from Little Hercules, told me at the shop that they’d be playing tonight with Carlos Washington, the Hellafunk Allstars, and DJ Dot Com was going to be there too.

What a show.

On top of playing some really great music, the guys from Minturn pulled off a 20 minute jam session between themselves, Carlos, Hellafunk, and DJ Dot Com that was mind-boggling. Imagine two bands and a jazz trumpet master going head-to-head with the absolute latest in beat technology software and not missing a note for over 20 minutes. It was simply amazing. Just goes to show you that good musicians are open genera; a jazz horn playing with two funk bands with a computer controlled techno overtone was made to work, impromptu. Neat!

Anyways, it was neat to see so many people show up, and a lot of them even knew the words to a few songs. I really think the guys from the band might make it here soon. They’ve got air time up here in the valley and some exposure in the south, but the thing that is really propelling them forward is XM. They’re requested quite often on the “unsigned bands” channel, which is cool.

Well, I smell like I’ve been in a bar for the last 4 hours… Probably because I have. As usual I drank a lot of iced tea but did have a shot of scotch with Roy after the show. It’s not the alcohol smell that bugs me; rather it’s the smell of stale cigarettes. Time for a quick shower with emphasis on the hair… With hair like mine it takes some real work to get the cigarette smell out… Then it’s off to bed with me.

I got a call from Jeff last night at about a quarter to 11 asking if I’d like to see a movie as he’d been drinking at a bar near the theatre in Edwards and wanted some time to sober up before driving home… Or have me drive him home if 2 hours wasn’t enough time. So I caught the late-late showing of “Underworld” last night.

It’s ok. It’s a John Woo flick and, as I’d supposed earlier, it’s big on “wire shots” but lacking in “plot”. It was a fun 2 hour romp though the politics of Vampires and Werewolves though, with just enough “Romeo and Juliet” thrown in to give it some semblance of style.

The werewolf transformation scenes seemed to be painful enough, with lots of wet bone sound effects and the vampires are suitably decadent and hung up on themselves. All in all it wasn’t a bad movie as far as action flicks go.

Ultimately I wound up driving Jeff home and will both pick him up today and take him to work, and pick him up after work and take him to his car.

This is the down side to being very much an occasional drinker and really only having a liking for –good- single malt scotch. This makes me almost exclusively an iced tea drinker when “out and about” and also makes me the designated driver or person to call when the blood in your alcohol stream has reached an all time low.

Well, I have to get rolling to ensure folks I know don’t appear to be the folks they really are.

Well, Larry is off to California again laying the groundwork for another consulting job.

It’s nice that he likes to travel so much because I don’t.

This does give me free run of Château D’Isaster for a month or so which is always fun as it lets me play my music as loud as I want and take over the big glass “board room” table in the dining room for art without having to put it all away when I get up to do something else for a while. Hopefully I can get the pieces I started six months ago for Wolf and Lyon finished shortly.

I also have a pen-ink piece with Aryntha, Rai and I in it, in a ‘charlie’s angels’ sort of composition but with cameras in place of guns, not in silhouette, and with a big AT&T stile tower in the background. The sketch is pretty cool so far and I’m holding true to the heavy line weight and cell shading style popular in the 70’s…

Maybe I’ll give Aryntha a big ‘fro or something. 😉

Wow, it’s been a very busy week here. Aryntha, Rai and I have been busily documenting the historic AT&T transcontinental microwave relay route through Colorado at any chance we get. So I guess that means I have a whole week’s worth of posting to do in one big entry.

I’ve got the OMFUXS web site up and running now on server space donated to us for this and other similar endeavors. For the morbidly curious, or those with a higher than normal geek quotient, go see http://www.badpixels.com/~omfuxs.

Yesterday we all took the day off to go tour one of these sites with a fellow who owns several of them. My day yesterday started at 6am and went to 2am, and today I was off and running at 7am so I’m feeling kinda spongy right now… What better time to write in ones journal, no?

I’m happy to report that Wolf and Lyon are getting along better now. They were really falling apart at the seams there for a week or two a few weeks ago. I didn’t want to write about it all then as it was a really touchy situation, but now things seem to be getting better and I feel I can at least make a passing mention of it.

Larry is back here at the château for a few days before returning to California for a few more weeks. He’s in a pretty chipper mood considering we’ve pretty much decided to not renew the lease on the space the shop is currently in. They want to up the rent per square foot from $21 to $26 a month and we collectively think that sucks. So we’re looking at other venues right now.

One plan is to open another storefront up here, though smaller than the current 5500 sqft monster we have now, and open one or two small store fronts in a Den-burb. Larry will operate the store here while I move back down to Denver to run the operation there. This gives us an advantage of being able to shuffle the inventory around to make the best use of the demographic. Denver is much more “tech” than Vail and that should allow the computer store side of things to really take off. Conversely there isn’t much skiing or snowboarding in Denver and anyone wanting to offload gear they no longer want will do so cheaply… Send that gear up to Vail where it’s worth considerably more and you have what we like to call a business model. The inverse of that is the seasonal kids up here tend to buy a laptop or a small desktop computer for the season and dump it cheap right before flying back home… Send that gear down to Denver where it’s got an intrinsic value and, again, that’s a good thing.

The down side to this is I’m not crazy about moving back down to Denver. Perhaps I’ll secure a place in Conifer or Morrison which is a mere 30 minutes southwest, but that makes all the difference. That will also enable me to help Aryntha and Rai out of the hell-hole they live in right now…

Speaking of that; I guess it’s about a week and a half ago now, but Rai got to see a simultaneous car theft and break-in at their complex. Two 15 year olds and a 16 year old who live around there decided to boost a car from the complex and then, on the way out, they stopped to swipe a stereo out of a second car. Well, the person owning car number two caught them in the act and started raising hell so they tried to do a “gone in 60 seconds”, hit a speed bump wrong, and ended up bending the car over a curb.

The beauty here is they were all underage and after spending a few hours reading books to old people, will be right back at it again.

In other news my “stalker” seems to have finally decided that I’m not going to be interested in her… Wolf’s suggestion to tell her I’m seeing someone in Denver seems to have cooled her fire and she hasn’t been seen in over a week. *pets the wise wolf*

For those who haven’t been on the real-time end of this, what was going on was that a single mom who works over at Walmart had decided that I would be a good “catch” and was spending an inordinate amount of time in the shop just talking at me… Yes, at me.

See, I’m a busy person, and I have a lot of things I’d like to accomplish in this life, so I’m just not the world’s biggest Casanova. Finding the right person for a worthwhile and complimentary relationship takes a lot of time, effort and energy that I’m just not willing to expend right now. That and I can’t take the risk right now of opening my self up for the kind of beating I got last time…

The view from my deck this morning is ‘damp’.

I had to run down to Denver tonight to drop off some paperwork to the accountant. I got there at about 8pm, dropped off the stuff, then met up with Aryntha to have some Chinese before heading back up the mountain. I left Aryntha’s place at about 10pm…

That’s when the fun began…

I left Aryntha’s place and went down the street to top off the gas tank as gas is $0.40 cheaper in Denver than in Vail. It started to get really windy as I pulled out of the gas station and headed west on Morrison road. By the time I got to C-470 the wind was gusting hard enough to pick up golf ball sized rocks and toss them at the traffic on the highway. I got hit by one of these rocks just above the windshield on the trim and as I watched it come at me I thought for sure I’d be buying a new windshield tonight. I guess I got lucky.

Onward I went, getting onto I-70 and heading west again as 70+ mph winds threw semis around like toys. It started raining at the top of Floyd Hill and it became a full fledged deluge from Idaho Springs to Georgetown. Once past Georgetown two state cops had closed down one lane for a car that was firmly embedded in the mountain side near Silverplume. The torrential rains turned into sleet, then snow on the East side of Loveland Pass and on the west side of the Eisenhower Tunnel it was a full blown blizzard with 10 foot visibility and icy roads all the way down to Dillon.

Then on the East side of Vail Pass it got *real* foggy, followed by a boulder the size of a small car sitting in the right lane (in the fog) at mile marker 186 on the West side. Once in Vail the trip got easy and the lightning was neat to watch… It took about 2.5 hours to get home and I think I’m gonna go to bed now. 🙂

Well, as of closing tonight we will no longer be writing loans. State law says we have to have a 30 day period before the close of business where all money-lending operations have ceased. As the lease is up the end of October, it’s been decided to stop operations now.

So, for the next month or so, we’re just a curiosity shop…

We’ve been looking for store front space up here that isn’t unbelievably expensive, without much luck. The place we are in is going up to $27 a square foot now that Gart Sports, Office Depot, and Pier 1 are going in. So it’s looking like plan “A” still, which is the move everything to Denver and sell out of the warehouse for a while before starting things up again in March-April in the Littleton area.

Jack isn’t taking this very well as he refuses to move to Denver and hasn’t done much more than run this place for the last seven years. He’s not sure what he’s going to do when the doors close.

I’m kind of looking forward to moving the store as we’ll finally have a chance to make some real money. The area up here is thick with “GenNext” folks who’ll drop $1000 in a heartbeat on some new gizmo that lets them break bones on the mountain faster, but couldn’t care less about computers and stuff. “Geeks” and “X-ers” don’t mix well so there just isn’t a market up here for what I do.

Yesterday turned out to be very cool, as I had figured it would. It had all the elements for a great adventure starting as soon as the Lincoln cleared the garage…

First off, remember all those people with the RVs and motor homes I mentioned in my last installment? Well, this time they were going down the mountain at 10 MPH rather than up. I left Château D’Isaster at roughly noon and made what is normally a 90 minute trip in a barrier-breaking 3 hours! Woot!

I would probably still be somewhere near Idaho Springs if I didn’t research old telephone stuff… Odd sounding yes? Well, it’s true; see, to research the old telephone infrastructure one has to get off the relatively new highway and onto relatively old roads, side streets and fire paths. Well, when you do this you tend to discover routes that normal people wouldn’t even guess, and I used this knowledge to get to Denver relatively quick while people were having cookouts on I-70.

The trip started with my reaching Dillon at roughly 1pm… That means it took an hour to go 35 miles over Vail Pass. So from Dillon I got on Highway 6, took the back route over Loveland Pass (beautiful views BTW), back onto 6 at Georgetown down to Idaho Springs. There I took County 134 around the Idaho Springs tunnel and over the ridge to Highway 40 at Golden which leads south to Morrison. It was a great drive.

Some interesting side notes; old Highway 6 used to be the longest highway in the US until segments of it were decommissioned in 1964 and before I-70 was completed, the drive to Vail from Denver used to take about 5 hours.

Another thing I noticed this weekend was the profusion of cars flying american flags. Far, far more than normal. It makes me wonder if folks have “Labor”day confused with “Memorial”day. Probably…

Ok, so I made it to Aryntha and Rai’s place again and we promptly took off to locate some old telephone infrastructure we hadn’t been to in over seven years. We skirted the “sprawl” via C-470 and headed south on Highway 85, then south again on 105.

Highway 105 is the “magic road” for old phone stuff as the road itself was a maintenance road for the Transcontinental Cable between Colorado Springs and Denver. At a fire station on 105 one can find two old Mountain Bell era “huts” with their 1970’s CO signs still pointing to “zuni” in Denver.

In the middle of the route is an ESS5E switch center, which is quite active still. We figure most of Douglas County routes calls though the old TransCon easement to Denver based on what we’ve seen.

A little further south we found an even older amplifier station with a very old “Bell Systems” logo on it from the mid 1960’s. A very amazing find actually.

We followed the TransCon poles down into Colorado Springs before the sun went down and it became impossible to continue. After a little deliberation we decided to head back to Denver so we could all be ready for today. I have to work, Rai has to work the morning shift today and Aryntha had homework to do before classes today.

I will be assembling a web site to detail the old TransCon system in Colorado in the coming weeks. It’s really an interesting page in the history of the US which is very much overlooked.

Well, I should go fix breakfast and head for the store. Later…

It’s another one of those rare “long weekends” and here it is Monday and I’m not at work. How odd… I mean, I’m not really sure what to –do- with the down time. I got up at 7am as usual and went through my morning routine which gets me to about 8:30. I have an hour before I leave at 9:30-9:45 so I can be at the store and get it turned on, organized, and open by 10am.

So, from about 8:30 on today I’ve had this odd feeling that something is wrong…

I went down to Denver Friday evening to hang out with Aryntha and Rai for the weekend. The trip down was an adventure; I was one of about ten people going east while the rest of the world was going west. There was a line of RVs going up the mountain, in the slow lane, at about 10 MPH, all the way from the Eisenhower tunnel down to Georgetown. Seriously. The Arapahoe Basin, the area that comprises this area, was shrouded in a blue haze of pollution well past Georgetown on the downhill side.

They were probably all going “camping” with their color TVs, hot water heaters, and microwaves.

I got down to Aryntha and Rai’s place at about 9pm. Cracker, from the muck, was in town and stopped in to shack up for the night. So Arythna and I spent the evening in his room, fiddling with a 2kva pure sine UPS I managed to score a while back while Rai was at work.

Rai works at a coffee shop in southwest Denver and her hours are abysmal. During the weekends she usually works closing and doesn’t get out till midnight.

I’m not the vampire I used to be and Rai was exhausted so we called it a night and with Cracker on the couch I trundled off to get a room for the night…

Big mistake.

It’s a holiday and every hotel room in town it seemed was taken. I eventually found a room at a Quality Suites; which at $110 a night it was obvious why they had rooms.

Saturday, after dropping Rai off at work and sending Cracker off with Raven to the dump, Aryntha and I headed down town-ish to check out the ARC, Savers and VA second hand stores. It’s amazing what one can find, computer wise, at these places for cheap. We did find a 3com “near online” SCSI storage controller at the first place we went, but otherwise the stores looked like they’d already been hit by another group of geeks.

So, we went towards Golden to check out the microwave relay on the north table mesa there. We drove by my parent’s old house on East Avenue while we were there… The place is identical right down to the tower in the back yard and the POP Box that was put in for my BBS stuff when I was in High School.

We were about to head down highway 93 to scope out the autovon huts that litter the route due to Rocky Flats being out there when Otto called. So we headed down 93 with two purposes; to check out autovon and the GWEN system at Rocky Flats, and to get to Boulder to ‘hang’ with Otto at his apartment on the CU campus.

Got to his place at about 5pm and hung out while we waited for Korn to show up. Once everyone was there we sat around discussing human psychology and how it is affected by causality for a few hours before deciding to take a hike, as a group, down to the Pearl Street Mall.

So, with Otto and Bethany with their son Aldus in tow, Keyler, Korn, Aryntha, a fellow they knew but I just met, and I, we formed a “gang” and marched on Pearl Street. The whole way we were still on the causality kick and, even for a college town, we got odd stares. One of the highlights was when we, a group of folks in “nail bunny” or apple t-shirts, trenchcoats, and combat boots got approached by a fellow who wanted to show off his poetry-prowess… Talk about not choosing your audience…

He started off with “Name a poet, any poet” so Bethany did and, to his credit, he did know a few verses. Then Bethany rounded on him and, in good gothic form, quoted something *very* obscure from someone probably dead for a few hundred years, with perfect meter. So this fellow tried to up the ante and was smacked down by the new guy who did some Dr. Seuss in 180bpm with perfect enunciation and inflection the whole time… Poor guy; he had one talent and was victimized by us right there in front of god and everyone.

After that we decided to lay siege to a pizza place on the mall where Bethany got jalapeno juice in her eye. This resulted in the discussion of the perception of pain the whole way back to Otto’s place.

When we got back it was time for Aryntha and me to head back to Denver so he could pick up Rai from work. We did so then watched the Wall for a while before I decided to head back up the mountain for the night. I got home at 4am and spent Sunday doing laundry and cleaning up the house.

I’m getting ready to head back down the mountain here in a bit to spend the rest of the day with Aryntha and Rai. Who knows what we’ll do, but it’ll be an adventure… It always is.

Today’s rant is about our disposable society and how it is ultimately affecting everything around us.

“It’s good enough”… God how I hate that term.

Those three little words can do so much damage to the development of something and, unfortunately, it’s become a pervasive concept in our modern civilization. Take audio for example…

CDs are ubiquitous these days; everyone has several of the shiny 5 inch plastic coasters lying about, but the sound quality of these things isn’t as good as an “old school” record. Sure, you don’t get the pops and clicks associated with a cheap turntable running a cheap needle on a poorly cared for album, but you also pay the price in sound quality.

CD’s are compressed, believe it or not, because they are sampled from sounds which are inherently analog. Sampling, by its very nature, misses something in the translation which is why they call it “sampling” rather than “recording”.

The CD format does have some nice features though. They’re smaller and more portable than records and they used to be more rugged before the pressing companies figured out that using softer plastic surfaces resulted in more repeat sales. They essentially switched to a plastic that was “good enough”, but not too good because you don’t want something that lasts too long.

The record companies also, via *much* advertising, pulled a fast one by convincing everyone that CDs sounded better. They like CDs because it costs one tenth the money per unit than a record and, besides, CD sound is definitely “good enough” for the average consumer right?

Ok, time for a little lesson in audio. Up there I mentioned that CDs were sampled right? Well the sampling has a resolution of 16 bits which compresses any point on an infinitely variable analog wave form into one of 65536 possible numbers. Ok, so there is some compression going on there right? Ok. You’re still with me.

Now you have to capture the whole wave form and that is achieved by sampling. CDs are sampled at 44.1Khz and this is where a fellow named Nyquist comes in. Nyquist states in his theory that the highest frequency which can be accurately represented is less than one-half of the sampling rate. So if we want a full 20 kHz audio bandwidth which, by the way, comprises everything a human ear can hear we must sample at least twice that fast; i.e. over 40 kHz.

If we don’t, bad things happen.

44.1Khz gives us that 20Khz of bandwidth plus some fudge factor. This is great right? The record companies want you to think it is. But it’s not…

There’s this little thing called harmonics which can be additive or subtractive of the base sound you are recording. Things like the room the performance is in, the types of instruments played, the location of the instruments relative to each other, and a zillion other things all add harmonics to the sound and that is what makes it “alive”. Well, unfortunately for CDs, most harmonics fall above the 20Khz cutoff of their sampling scheme. There is another little issue with the fact that CDs are two channel and it is virtually impossible to recreate the imagery of a live performance with two speakers.

This is where we get a new CD recording scheme called SACD, or Super Audio CD, which is a new product by some very bright folks at Sony.

SACD is completely different in the fact that it samples one bit 2,822,400 times a second. Yes Virginia, that’s 2.8Ghz. So rather than chopping up the incoming wave form into 65536 possible numbers 44,100 times a second, it takes one number and counts how many times it saw it 2.8 million times a second… The more times it sees the number, the more “pulses” it gets and the more pulses, the higher the frequency, up to about 1.4Ghz… WAY beyond the pitiful 20Khz of a mortal CD.

This gives SACD the ability to accurately reproduce an almost pure analog wave form in a digital format including all of the accompanying harmonics. Plus, the format understands 5.1 surround sound and can really put you “in” the room where the music was recorded.

Pretty nifty huh?

Well, unfortunately it’ll probably never see true market penetration because CDs are “good enough”.

I actually blame a lot of this on MP3s. Today’s listener has grown accustomed to getting his or her music simply off the internet. Sure, it sounds like ass, but they don’t care because it was easy to get and didn’t cost anything. This means that when they –do- decide to actually go and spend some money on an actual CD, it in comparison to the ass-sounding MP3 is GREAT!… So who needs a new CD format? Especially one you can’t pirate…

I realize this was probably a lot more about CDs than you would ever care to know, but “good enough” works the same with all sorts of things…

My store sells lots of things, not just computers. We’re kind of a “mom and pop” supermarket of stuff including sporting goods like snowboards, skis, bikes and golf stuff as well as cameras, high end stereo stuff and firearms.

Well, we’ll be getting a “Gart Sports” store in about 100 yards from the store before Christmas and you know what will happen? The same thing that’s happening with our new Super Wal-World… We’re going to have a hard time competing.

See, Gart’s sells crap. They saw the “good enough” trend coming a few years back and started selling junk real cheap. Gart’s won’t carry something like this year’s Unity snowboard which is the absolute best thing you can buy. We have four in different sizes though… The sad thing is, no one will buy the Unity’s off of us because they cost about $150 more than a crap, mass produced Burton over at Gart’s. The same holds true with bikes…

My store has a huge collection of high-end downhill and trail bikes made by companies like Kona, KHS, and Giant. These bikes cost as much as a used car, but will absolutely last longer… Garts sells Schwinn, Mongoose, and low end Gary Fisher. Crap by any other name that will need to be replaced at year’s end. But it’s all $300 cheaper than anything we have and will, therefore, sell like hotcakes.

Just like how we haven’t been able to sell a single camera since WallyWorld moved in. I carry nothing but top of the line real photography stuff like Nikon, Olympus, Mamiya and Leica. WallyWorld sells plastic cameras for half my price and they fly off the shelves.

So, what causes this? Is it the fact people are incapable of saving these days (they really want you to dispose of your income as fast as you can) and so can’t save up for something nice? Is it simply that no one perceives the intrinsic value of better equipment anymore? Or is it just the whole “disposable society” thing again, covering the world in $50 plastic crap that was designed to break in a year?

I wish I knew…

Today was slow; real slow. Well, ok, there was about an hour of sheer terror as this lady who drops in every now and then dropped in again and wanted to talk to me… For an hour.

Jack says he thinks she’s waiting for me to ask her to dinner or something. I suppose that could be the case, but you pretty much have to hit me with something that says, “I’m interested in you!” Trust me, this has been done before.

Anyways she talked –at- me for over an hour which, in that time, I said exactly five words and nodded several times. When she left to get her computer so she could have me take a look at it, I told Jack that I was going out back to fake my death and I’d see him later… He just laughed.

Geoff was bored silly so I showed him this newfangled internet thing including IRC… He spent the next six hours scaring the crap out of himself by way of talking with all the other conspiracy nuts out there. I think it was beneficial for him, or at least it will be when he runs out of ammo…

The talking lady came back about an hour later and continued right where she left off earlier as I installed a new CDRW into her computer. The install took all of about 4 minutes but getting rid of her took another hour. When she left again I told Jack I needed a better place to hide… He just laughed again.

I guess the day wasn’t a complete waste of time though. I did get to talk to the Secret Service fellow who drops by on occasion to discuss his home made UAV. He’s a pretty cool guy even if he can kill 4 people simultaneously with his shoe… He’s part of the Ford Protectorate. Apparently once you score high enough to be El Presidente, you get a permanent detachment of SS guys for the rest of your life.

He says it’s a lot of fun as he spends the summers at the Beaver Creek Ford Compound and spends the winters in southern California or something at the other Ford Compound.

Other than that, it was a day. I’m off to fire up the fireplace, cook some dinner, and read the rest of this really bad Dragon Lance novel; “Night of Blood”.

Later..

Have you seen all these oval stickers on people’s cars lately? You know the ones I’m referring to: They’re usually used for identifying the nationality of a car in Europe as you can change countries and languages there as easily as we change states here in the US.

You see these things everywhere now, almost as if we were all living in Luxembourg or something and for me it’s almost become a game to decipher these things while I’m on the road: VT for Vermont or Pb for Leadville, Colorado…

Obviously there are some drivers out there who aren’t very good at the game and now “zip code” ovals are becoming all the rage… I saw a car yesterday from Washington State with an 80443 oval plastered on the rear window… 80443 is the zip code for Frisco Colorado.

But why? Why are these things popping up *everywhere* now? What is it that drives people with Ohio plates to put a Leadville “nationality” sticker on their car?

Maybe it’s because of things like mega-malls and clone stores like McDonalds. Every home town is suffering right now; local mom and pop record stores replaced with “Sam Goody”, the local farmer’s coop hardware store with the really friendly old guy who gives you free sodas in the summer is now a 200,000 square foot “Home Depot”, and the gas station your buddies used to work at for next to nothing just so they could tune their cars on the lifts is now a computer controlled junk food store with 28 pumps… Hell, even your bank that used to sponsor a community picnic in the summer is now a massive multinational conglomerate owned by folks who don’t even live in your town, let alone your state or even the US.

The simple fact of the matter is that you can go *anywhere* and get the same McBurger, the same brand of ice-cream from the same chain grocer, and buy gas from the same gas station you saw a few miles back… There just isn’t any adventure out there anymore. Everything is safety caped, warning labeled, and cloned for our ease of consumption.

Chances are, even your house is a clone of your neighbor’s house, and his neighbor’s house… Sure, you might have a different color of paint, but even that was agreed upon by the housing community you live in.

I think this is why these ID stickers are popping up everywhere. For example, Leadville is still an authentic human civilization with authentic humans living there… No clone-homes, no “Super Wal-Mart”… Even the gas station has a real human being who will happily talk to you about the weather as you fill up on $2.00 per gallon gas, not a sterile LCD screen wishing you a nice day as long as you come inside and buy a hot-dog.

People want to connect to that sort of feeling; a human feeling of community. These stickers mark one as being connected either by visiting or even living there. They are a statement that the owner has seen what life should be like, that the owner has seen the sunset in a clear sky, the sound of wind in the trees, had the pleasure of human contact. The sticker is a badge of an ideal, a symbol of a place that exists outside the glass and steel monotony of day to day living. A place free from glaring high rises, house sized billboards, and eight lane side streets…

Maybe, just maybe, the fact that people are so enamored with these stickers is a good thing. Maybe we intrinsically, deep down inside, all desire the things these stickers stand for. That alone gives me hope for us as a people.

Wolf and Lyon came up late Saturday night to spend an evening here, away from it all. Unfortunately they got here very late and, after handing me a Tupperware container full of home made red beans and rice (Wolf is an excellent cook), we called it a night. Sunday we had a good breakfast over at the Route6 Café then came back to the house and spent several hours talking about philosophical things and gaming stuff.

Wolf and Lyon are the folks I do most of my sit-down role playing with and are my two play testers for both my high fantasy world and its associated game system. Unfortunately I’ve been out of sorts and Lyon has been very busy on the weekends this last month and a half and we’ve not gotten much done.

Sunday we spent a little time discussing one of Wolf’s story lines that we’re all involved with which pertains to a secret society of mythical creatures who are alive and well in the modern world. These “Mythagos” have assumed human forms and are just one sect in a secret war between the Unseelie Court, human mages, extra planar monsters, and many others who seek to gather enough power to rule this little rock we call Earth. The Mythagos are the only real group on the side of the “sapes” who, as usual, have no idea this is going on… The rest see humans as either “Batteries”, “Food”, “Slaves”, or “Vermin”…

Sometimes the Mythago even fall into one of those categories above… After all, humans really do suck most of the time and it gets really tough to save some football watching, beer swilling, trailer-trash meathead from the grasping claws of something who’d literally like to have him for dinner.

At first brush the whole shebang sounds a lot like the “World of Darkness” setting from White Wolf, but in turn the “World of Darkness” sounds a lot like old European mythology and stories given a decided American edge. Of course *anything* that deals with unknowing masses and secret wars is automatically labeled “World of Darkness” even though DC Comics really started the genera. Basically one could view Wolf’s idea as “World of Darkness – Pro”… There’s also the rumor that White Wolf will be killing off the “World of Darkness” lines in favor of the Next Big Thing, so we’ll see how it goes.

Anyways, after hammering on all of this for a while, as usual, their daughter called right as things were taking off and brought the whole thing crashing down around us. Once that happened it was decided we’d get a late-lunch / early-dinner over at Paddy’s Tavern then they’d have to run back home to deal with the young one. So we did, and they did, and I spent the remainder of the evening reading.

Thus ended Sunday.

Sometimes you just need a good adventure to work the cobwebs out of your day-to-day existence… Yesterday was quite the adventure.

While we discussed the day’s plans Aryntha demonstrated his grill-mastery once again by whipping up some really good veggie-burgers. See, Rai’s a vegetarian and probably the healthiest of us; so while Aryntha and I chow down on all kinds of thing things that would clog the arteries of the DC metro system, Rai does stuff like salad and veggie burgers. Yesterday was my first meatless meat puck but with Aryntha at the helm of the grill it was actually quite good.

After some debate we decided to do a little telephone system spelunking and, after consulting the circa 1976 bellcorp facilities map we have at our disposal and Aryntha’s amazing Phozone detection abilities, our target was originally going to be a few ancient sites near Craig Colorado. Of course, as with any group of hardcore geeks like us, this determination took quite a while with the mapping, internet lookup, route planning, GPS verification, and battery charging…

Well, by the time we were ready to depart we determined that it was just too late in the day to trek though the mountains and halfway across Colorado so we settled for something a bit closer, Leadville.

The telephone infrastructure is mostly based in the “front range” of Colorado which, oddly enough, is where all the people are. Most of the towns here in the high country didn’t have, or probably want, telephone service till the resort expansions of the late 60’s and early 70’s. By then cable and later optical high capacity systems were in play which allowed the central office to be located quite a ways from the customer. Leadville was a terminus on the southern Colorado microwave carrier route which, as I-70 didn’t exist back then, was routed south along highway 50 though places like Salida. So this makes the Leadville switch a real piece of history and off we went…

The drive south along Highway 24 from Minturn to Leadville takes one through some of the best scenery in Colorado.

It’s a steep, deep canyon called “Dark Territory” that was carved by the Eagle and Homestake Rivers and takes you past such notable things as Red Cliff which is a picturesque little mountain town virtually unchanged since the mining era of Colorado, Notch Peak which rises up above the canyon to a height of 14,307 feet, and the truly odd “modern” ghost town of Gilman which sits at 11,000 feet.

The drive from Minturn to Leadville normally takes about 45 minutes and is 33 miles; we did the distance in a record 1 hour, 28 minutes as we stopped at every turn out on the road so Aryntha could take lots of pictures. Here’s one of the “USS Lincoln”, my car and the vehicle we generally take on road trips.

By far the longest stop was at Gilman which is a ghost town that supported the Eagle Mine and was founded in 1886.

At its high point had over 2000 residents and in 1950 the output from the mine, which was primarily zinc, was valued at 13 million annually. Giman was populated until the EPA closed the town in 1984 due to heavy metals contamination, such as arsenic (commonly found with lead and zinc), of the upper Eagle River. As of 1996 the EPA has assessed that there is no further risk to humans or wildlife by this site and recently they issued their 5 year review which showed yet more improvement thanks in part to the heroic work that the owning company, Viacom, has done over the years by plugging and flooding the mine and installing a heavy metals extraction plant at the site.

The reason we were so interested in photographing Gilman is because the current rumor has it that Vail Associates (the multi-national octopus organization that runs the Colorado high country these days) plans to buy Giman to make yet another resort town… Gilman is located on the back side of Vail’s ski runs and with the addition of a chairlift up through the valley to the north east of Gilman, could take folks to the top of the runs in minutes. So it’s entirely possible that this long standing testament to what people shouldn’t do to the environment, will be converted into hotels and stores in a few years.

Anyways we eventually made it to Leadville and with Aryntha’s amazing Phozone detection abilities he put us on the only road in town where you can see the microwave tower for the old central office. The central office for Leadville is quite a bit smaller than one would expect and we summize that it probably still contains the original ESS1A switch that was popular on the Colorado routes. What was truely odd, and something that will require further investigation, is the fact that the microwave horn faces north east to a passive repeater on a peak near the highway 24 and 91 merge. The microwave horn should have been, according to the facilities map, pointing south towards Twin Lakes as the route back in 1976 came from there and ended in Leadville. This usually means they’ve “turned down” Twin Lakes in favor of a route towards Copper Mountain. This isn’t on our map, so of course we *must* annotate this new route for posterity and go find out what happened to Twin Lakes. We took lots of pictures for archival then headed back to Minturn to have dinner at Chilly Willy’s.

We briefly returned home to gather radios, lights and other equipment of the trade before heading back to highway 24 so we could get a “better view” of an odd antenna bearing hut we found on the way to Leadville. The trip was a bust as it turned out to be nothing but we chalked it up to practice.

Once we returned to the château here we called it a night as it was about midnight.

Thus ended Thursday, which was a most excellent adventure.

Aryntha just called and said they were awake and would be around shortly.

Technology is amazing really. The guest room Aryntha and Rai use is on the other side of the wall from my room, yet Aryntha called from his cell phone, though the cell network to my phone, to tell me something he could have just opened the door and said.

That’s like getting on the MUCK to talk to your roommate in the same room, which most people I know have done, including me.