Category Archives: Nostalgia

In the ’70s, even Monday Night Football was on drugs

I went to YouTube to seek out the classic opening sequence from ABC’s Monday Night Football that I remember from the late ’70s/early ’80s. Well… I remember the music. I didn’t remember the visuals, which is why I sought it out. I was looking for something akin to this (regrettably, the only clip I could find on YouTube featuring any of the “classic” MNF music in its original context):

And here’s one that I remembered upon seeing it, but hadn’t recalled before:

But what I wasn’t expecting to find was this — the version from 1973:

I’ve always been interested in design and logos, even when I was 6 (1980). So it’s cool, thanks to YouTube, to be able to step back in time and see these gone-but-not-forgotten visuals from television’s past. And once again, I am reminded that as crazy as the things I remember from my early childhood (say, from about 1978 to 1983) are compared to how they are today, just a few years earlier they were immeasurably weirder.

Sure, it’s pointless, but… well… that’s the point

I have a pair of old Macs that have been sitting unused, or almost unused. The “hemisphere” iMac G4, dating back to 2002, has been the kids’ computer, sort of… except for the fact that they don’t really ever use it. And the “toilet seat” iBook G3, from 2000, has been gathering dust in our bedroom closet for the past year or so, since I tried and failed to install Ubuntu 7.10 on it.

Today various factors came together to lead me to bring the iMac, and the desk it was sitting on, down from the kids’ bedroom and into my office. Now that I have it, I might as well do something with it. And that something is installing the PowerPC version of Ubuntu 8.04. And as long as I had set up desk space for antiquated Macs, I lugged out the ol’ toilet seat and decided to, at the very least, get it back up and running with an OS it was more comfortable with, that being Mac OS 9.1. (I’m working on upgrading it to 9.2.2 at the moment, but 9.1 was the most recent “Classic” installer disc I had on hand.)

And all of this leads to the following, most improbable of photographs. What’s the point? Well… I got to take this photo! Is that point enough for you?

iMac G4 running Ubuntu 8.04, and iBook G3 running Mac OS 9.1

What’s next for these two old beasts? Well, I’m going to boot up the Ubuntu Live CD on the iBook, just to see if 8.04 is more friendly to it than 7.10 was. If so, I’m going to install Edubuntu and make it the kids’ new computer. If not, well at least it’s got a stable OS now, and I’ll still make it the kids’ new computer. I can probably round up some pre-OS X kids’ software for them, and they can always use it to watch DVDs.

Meanwhile, the iMac is possibly going to turn into a local file/media/web server, or at least be another system for me to play around with Linux on. I do have Ubuntu 8.10 on my main MacBook, but having to reboot into it is usually more trouble than it’s worth.

Update, a few minutes later: I went for it with the Live CD on the iBook. Good news. After a few fretful minutes watching the display do some very weird things during the boot process, I stepped away to deal with some kid antics. I came back to the iBook to see this:

Ubuntu 8.04 running on a "toilet seat" iBook G3.

Wherefore my Mac malaise?

Mac and PC -- do they both suck?Anyone who knows me well knows what a Mac fanatic I am. I’ve used Macs exclusively since 1994 (except one Dell desktop I stupidly purchased in 2000… but I did still own an iBook at the time), when the LC 475 I purchased as a sophomore in college replaced the pitiful Tandy 1000 EX my parents had bought for me in 1987 when I was in seventh grade.

Over the past 14 years I have owned a number of Macs, specifically:

1994: Macintosh LC 475
Sold three years later to this guy.
1997: Motorola Starmax 3000
Yes, a clone… those were the days; I ended up selling it to my mother-in-law.
1998: PowerBook 1400c
Sold on eBay.
1998: Souped-up Macintosh SE
Purchased second-hand for $50 at a now-defunct Computer Renaissance; I still have it although it doesn’t really work… and I don’t have an ADB keyboard and mouse anymore… but I fired it up last week for the heck of it and at least got to the question mark folder icon.
1999: Power Macintosh G3
Blue-and-white, first generation; sold a couple years later to the singer in a band I was in in Atlanta — which now has only one remaining member from those days, and possibly the worst MySpace page in existence… no offense, guys.
2000: “Toilet seat” “Clamshell”-style iBook, graphite
I still have it but it barely works.
2002: Inspired-by-the-desk-lamp-in-the-Pixar-stinger iMac G4
I still have it, and it still works perfectly, although there’s some weird damage on part of the LCD display.
2004: 12-inch iBook G4
Currently SLP’s main computer.
2006: 13-inch white MacBook
Recently sold to my dad.
2008: 13-inch black MacBook
I am typing on it right now. Also, spare me the comments about paying $150 just for the color.

So that makes (at least — I don’t think I’ve forgotten any) ten Macintosh computers I’ve owned in a 14-year period. Half of which are still in my house today. I could also regale you with a similar chronology of the various iPods that have lived in my house, but we don’t have all day.

Clearly, I believe the point has been made: I’m a big Apple nut. But lately I just haven’t been feeling the love. I’m trying to figure out why. I still use my MacBook every day and have no desire to switch platforms (even though it is currently configured to triple boot Mac OS X, Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux, so it’s not like I don’t have options). I am rarely more than 10 feet away from my iPhone. I think the new line of MacBooks is fantastic, and I am extremely envious, even though I’ve only owned my current (last-generation) MacBook for about three months.

And yet… for the past few weeks, I just feel like the relationship has lost that spark. But why?

There are a few possible explanations:

XBOX 360. It pains me to have to praise a Microsoft product. It’s like the Fonz admitting he was wrong. I just can’t quite get the words out of my mouth. And yet, what can I really say? In the video game world I’ve been almost as loyal (OK, a rabid fanboy) to Nintendo as I’ve been to Apple with computers. And yet, I’ve still used Windows. I know the experience. And I owned an original XBOX. It was pretty cool, to be sure, but it didn’t really seem to have that much over the GameCube besides a better selection of games. I’ve always been hooked on the Nintendo franchises (Mario, Zelda, Metroid) and I’ve owned both a DS and a Wii for a couple years now. But although the DS has seen some serious action, I have to admit I’ve been disappointed with the Wii, mainly for the mountains of shovelware and dearth of decent games available for it. So when my annual Black Friday ritual came around this year, I went for it and bought an XBOX 360, and it was like stepping out of the cave for the first time. It’s not just the graphics. It’s not just the cool games. Microsoft has really nailed the user experience with this, and the online options with XBOX Live are mind-blowing, especially compared to the anemic efforts Nintendo has put into the Wii’s online services.

Of course, despite their outstanding success with the XBOX 360, Microsoft can never quite make a perfect user interface, as anyone who’s ever had to key in track names when ripping a CD on an XBOX 360 can attest. Neither Apple nor Nintendo would ever stand for the clunky, tedious process Microsoft subjects you to in this regard. But honestly, that’s the only bad thing I can say about the XBOX 360 so far. I love it. It’s a Microsoft product, and I freakin’ love it. I love it so much, I want to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant. (OK, that crossed the line, but Tracy Jordan fans will appreciate it.)

The sucktastic world of iPhone apps. I cannot express how much eagerness was pent up within my being by the day the App Store finally went live. And like many iPhone devotees, I devoured as many apps as I could. Granted, many of the apps are outstanding. But with every passing day the ratio of good-to-crap goes down by an order of magnitude. It’s beyond disheartening to see the potential of this revolutionary platform being squandered on all of the pointless 99-cent apps that have flooded the store. But sadly, Apple’s woefully undercooked interface for the app store seems to encourage cheap, fast and pointless rather than high-quality, useful, well-designed applications. So that’s been a major let down.

Underdogs no more. I’m not sure why, or what it reveals about me, but I am almost always a fervent supporter of the underdog. Maybe it’s the dismal state of American politics over the last eight — no, 14 — years. Maybe it’s the fact that my hometown sports teams are perpetually doomed. (I realized last week that, at some point in the season, the Vikings always choke. Every year, in the history of the franchise. Think about it. The only thing they never fail to do is fail.) Maybe it’s simply due to the fact that I have been a Mac supporter for so long, and I’ve seen the company struggle to reach the high single digits of market share (not that market share matters nearly as much as some would have you believe). Whatever the case, my underdog fetish has been fed well by my devotion to both Apple and Nintendo for the past several years. But now Nintendo is producing the top selling video game systems, both console and handheld, and although Apple still has a long way to go in the battle for the desktop (if that’s even relevant anymore), their market share has surged, they possess unparalleled dominance of the MP3 player and music download markets, and they’re tantalizingly close to the top of the heap for smartphones. But if neither Apple nor Nintendo is an underdog anymore, can I still love them?

I’m not sure I can yet say definitively what it is that has caused me to lose some of my enthusiasm for Cupertino. But it’s provided some much needed self-reflection (most of which, I am sure, could not be less interesting to anyone else, but here it is for your disinterest nonetheless), and I think the effort of cataloging my long history of Apple computers has actually helped to remind me a little of what has made me so loyal to them for all of these years.

A blast from (my) past

Tonight I made some updates to my portfolio page, and it got me thinking back to all of the projects I’ve worked on over the years, going back to my first professional web design gig right out of college in 1996.

Wowee-zowee. I really can’t believe this is still up. It was one of the last websites I designed at that first job out of college. The site went up in the fall of 1998, just before I left California to move back to Minnesota (the first time). It’s kind of shocking to see that the site doesn’t seem to have changed one bit… even the poor-quality digital photos I took with a then-state-of-the-art Apple QuickTake 100, the first digital camera I had ever seen, at the opening day of the Los Angeles County Fair in 1998 are still there (and promoted on the home page as if they’re hot news).

I remember that day as if it were yesterday. First off, let’s get some perspective. There are just shy of 10 million people living in Los Angeles county. That’s almost twice as many people as in the entire state of Minnesota. I wouldn’t necessarily say that that means the LA County Fair is twice the size of the Minnesota State Fair, because the Minnesota State Fair is disproportionately huge. But the LA County Fair is friggin’ huge in its own right, especially for a county fair. I recall standing in line for 2 hours in sweltering late summer heat just to get through the ticket booth, and I was wearing long pants because I had come straight from work and hadn’t really anticipated this turning into an all-day affair. Once inside, I squeezed my way through the teeming throngs to the appropriate exhibition hall, only to discover that it, too, was friggin’ huge, and I had no idea which booth CDW was in. Eventually I did find the booth, but Lenny (wonderful, wonderful Lenny) was nowhere to be seen. So I took my pictures and left.

OK, I guess that’s kind of a lame story. But that’s what I was up to ten years ago.

But wait… that’s not the only decade-old site I built that’s still essentially intact. There are many, many, many, many, many, many, many more.

Quite a legacy I left behind in California, no?

Shatner puts the “ham” in “Hamlet,” and yet…

I assume you’re already familiar with The Transformed Man. If not (or even if so), read on.

Tonight I did something I don’t do very often… certainly, not often enough. I put my entire iTunes library on shuffle: over 13,000 songs from which the computer will select the evening’s soundtrack. After a few real dogs (seriously, don’t bother listening to the 2002 Yes shit sandwich known as Magnification), it unearthed a track I haven’t listened to in ages, William Shatner’s dramatic reading (with even more dramatic musical accompaniment) of the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy from Hamlet, juxtaposed with “It Was a Very Good Year.”

The reading of Hamlet is as overwrought as it gets — vintage Shatner. And yet, the truth must be told: Shakespeare’s words were never imbued with such clear and resonant meaning in my brain as they are with Captain Kirk’s over-the-top performance. I’m not well-versed in the theater, and as much as I’ve enjoyed the various Shakespeare productions I’ve seen over the years (mostly at the Guthrie back in high school and college), I find the language, while melodically poetic, often bewilderingly oblique in meaning. In other words, it sounds nice, but I just don’t get it. And this was just such a case. “To be or not to be…” etc. It never made much sense to me until I heard The Transformed Man, but suddenly I understood what it really meant. Thanks, Bill!

And now, thanks as well to the limitless wonders of YouTube, you can see a live performance of the piece from The Mike Douglas Show. How friggin’ awesome is that? Well, it could be a little more awesome — the sound is way off in this video clip, and it’s not because he’s lip-syncing. He’s not. And I think the performance on the album is much better. Still, it’s worth watching, if for no other reason than the groovy title cards and stage set, which I vaguely remember from the very earliest days of my youth.

And finally, in case you’re scratching your head over my enthusiasm here, you may want to consider my judgment in entertainment options by the fact that I also enjoy this. And for anyone who is not terrified by it within 10 seconds (in other words, you’re also a Magma fan), I have to ask: do you also think the “Da Zeuhl Wortz Mekanik” part that starts at 4:46 sounds like some of the incidental music that used to be in the Road Runner cartoons? I’ve always thought that.

Even I have limits though. This Magma-inspired Japanese band goes too far (but I do own one of their albums) and even Christian Vander himself can go too far, especially when he steps out from behind the kit.

P.S. What’s up with the collar?