Everything here is 'spare time' stuff that I do when not otherwise engaged:
Road
Trips!
Tour
Taping!
Computer
Programming
Nothing but Net
Music
TV
Movies
Martial Arts
Books
There's nothing like the feeling of the world moving underneath you, and looking out over it all as it goes by. No matter how it happens; whether you fly, take a boat, a train, a car, whatever, there's a certain peace in the unsettling shifting across the globe.
I enjoy taking flights to faraway places; however, this means sitting passively awash in thick white noise that dulls the senses while the earth rolls by miles below. It's a great experience, and it's always exciting to show up somewhere thousands of miles from home, but it is kind of sterile and impersonal.
If I had the time and money to be a pilot and own a plane or a boat, I'd do it. Piloting a plane would take the passiveness away from the equation. Charting your own course is the only way to go.
Boats are certainly earthier and mellower than planes, and if the ice caps melt, I may yet ditch my car and buy a boat. I might do it sooner, too, of course, but not in the forseeable future.
Trains are ok, but one word: Conrail. They're always ahead of you on the track towing some billion ton load, and out of fuel or having mechanical problems. And your 6 hour train trip lasts 9. *sigh*. Ok, it's not always that bad, but again, you're being passively transported.
What's inevitable is the good old auto-mobile. They're depreciating, hungry money-eaters, but nothing gives you quite as much freedom to go in this world.. even a plane won't usually get you to the local mall, and a boat, well, keep an eye on them polar caps! The car gives you that personal experience of rolling your bones over every nook and cranny that the ground has to offer. But that's just the bootstrap.
The car can be the ultimate listening machine. If you have a good amount of music you want to give a good listen to, it's often hard to concentrate fully at home for hours at a time, or moving around with a portable or whatever.. too many distractions, or at least a good number of options for other things to do in the meantime while the music plays. On the open highway, there is the opportunity to do away with distractions for hours on end, and focus on the music (a mellow 55/60 on the highway works wonders!). Car noise is kind of a bummer, but for the scenery, the freedom, and the opportunity to let music breathe the air, rather than clamp it against my ear with headphones, it's all worth it. And you can always get quieter cars and/or better sound systems..
All this and the 'On the Road' aspect of adventures across the landscape make road trips my favorite way to get around. Although, taking flights to exotic locales with a rental car will always be a verrry close second! ;-)
The logical extension to the Road Trip, combining it with the true 'On the Road' ethic of stopping along the way and enjoying yourself, and just the plain joy of live shows, is Tour.. typically through following the band of your choice on some frenetic schedule across the planet.
For the week of New Years 97-8, I followed Schleigho, and caught some Phish in between. If I had the time, I'd love to catch bands like MMW or Widespread Panic constantly, but, as it goes, I'm just enjoying the emerging smorgasbord of fantastic live music that's emerging all around us. Not commercial, formulaic, market-driven schlock, but real, live, music. The growing discovery of which is being driven by folks who record, collect, and trade the live recordings for others to enjoy (see taping below!) at a later time. Not to mention that the music can be enjoyed by far more folks than could ever have fit in the venues to begin with. It makes musical performances into timeless events.
But really, regardless of the reason for it, travel is a way of life.. so find yourself something, it doesn't even have to be music, but get out there and bond with it. Make it something that you can carry with you, but get out there and Tour!
I saw Phish for the first time on 6/24/95 at the Mann in Philly. It was that show that made me realize what an amazing, memorable event the live show can really be. By the time I saw the Grateful Dead make it rain at Three Rivers Stadium (I'd seen them before on 3/14/93 at Richfield Coliseum, but given the blizzard-cancelled show the day before, and generally crappy conditions, I came away relatively unimpressed.. then came 6/30/95.. wow!), six days later, I was hooked. I began to realize why friends of mine had become obsessed with collecting tapes of live shows, and I decided to become so myself ;-).
I started with a few Grateful Dead tapes, which are probably the easiest to find (they were around for 30 years with a still strong following of traders, what do you expect? :-) ), then I joined the Helping Phriendly Club, which helped to hook me up with my first Phish tapes. Then, it was trade, trade, tree, tree, and I slowly amassed a decent collection of analog tapes. Struck by how amazingly cool it would have been to see Phish, or Led Zeppelin (my dad saw them around '68), or any other band that became popular, back before they played for more than 100 people, I soon started going to see some bands which appeared in small clubs locally.
One of first of these bands, Grinch, from Newark, DE, was excellent! I really wanted to get some decent tapes of them live. Of course, for bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish, getting tapes is easy, since the community is already there, all fed from a growing number of tapers. For smaller bands, the community hardly exists yet.. so I decided to become a part of it as a taper.. analog is ok, but with analog tape, the master is always imperfect with tape hiss (or worse), and loses clarity with every generation.. the net supplied me with all the information I needed for a superior alternative.. so, in February 1996, I bought my first DAT recorder, a Sony D7. This enabled me to get some great soundboard recordings of Grinch (thanks Stacy!). I set out to find other local bands who were truly good, but were lacking that large community. A few of these include Psoas (kind of a blend of Rusted Root and Jethro Tull (well, instrument-wise, anyway, and rich vocals, mellow tunes, etc.), only better than both) and the now-defunct Blindsight (get down with the get down of a cosmic funky groove!), both local Pittsburgh bands, and my favorite band: Schleigho (absolutely amazing jazz jam funk!), from the Boston area.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, it became apparent that not every band has a flashy soundboard, or allows access to it, so microphones are necessary. I rented some mics from a local music store, Pianos n' Stuff, to try out, and continued to trade tapes, listening to recordings made from different mics, and finally settled on the AKG460B as a mic with a good sound/price ratio. I wanted good crowd rejection, without the clammy sound of many shotgun mics, so I settled on the CK63 (hypercardioid) capsule. I upgraded my rig to AKG480B's, but the CK63's remain! Crisp sound, and I've had excellent results, even in noisy clubs!
I finally got a chance to tape Phish myself on 8/4-7,10/96, which was incredible! Four nights in the beautiful Red Rocks Amphitheatre (overlooking Denver and everything to the East), then on to the pastoral Alpine Valley in Wisconsin. It made me realize, however, what a truly special experience the small club show is. At smaller shows, there are no masses of fans to get through, no outrageous ticket prices from legal (and otherwise) scalpers like TicketBastArD, no driving in endless traffic to get to a parking lot full of cars where you then trek through yet more crowds and lines through uncomfortable and intrusive security checks. At a small club, there's less attitude, and the show is more fulfilling. In most cases, you can meet or hang out with the band, without any hard-to-get passes or pushing and prodding.
Not that I won't see a big show ever again, but my heart lies in the small appearance. So for now, taping for me is a fun and rewarding hobby, and kind of a surrogate for playing in my own band. But hey, I am young, and life is long, and there is time to kill today. So maybe I'll get my act together with my own music (Also see my music section below.), but if not, I'll be happy to be a part of one of the few things left that's truly worth doing: feeling and spreading peace through music.
Feel free to monitor my progress: check my tape list at http://www.geocities.com/mikesterpa/tapetrade.html for my current collection of live tapes.
Chung Moo Doe is a line of martial arts founded in the U.S. by Chung Su Nim 'Iron' Kim. I passed toward fifth section in November '95. Then I found this, which named some of my teachers' immediate superiors as being involved in fraud. Given my existing wariness of the school's tendency toward almost requiring attendance at rather expensive special lessons (taught by one of the indicted teachers), or you were made to feel 'out of the game', I shortly thereafter stopped attending the school. I did learn many excellent movements from teachers who I am sure have the best intentions for the students' well-being, and for that I am grateful. I will continue to practice martial arts, and may someday return to another school.
Well, it may not sound like your idea of a good time, but then you're not me! In his new tome (decree to the peasants?), Bill Gates writes about what got him into the software business in the first place: the amazing feeling one gets from telling a machine what to do, and having it do it with blazing speed, efficiency, and accuracy.
Ditto! There's nothing better than putting together a cryptic series of bits, and have something cool coming out the other end. But furthur, the machine is just about to take over, folks. Computers will be everywhere soon, and everyone will be using them. If you're not telling them what to do, they'll be telling you what to do. Get in the game!
I wrote the shareware program Windows Command back in '92 or so, which is still available at http://www.coast.net/cgi-bin/coast/dwn?win3/shell/wcmd110.zip. It's a command-line interface, originally for Windows 3.0. I began to neglect it once Windows NT shipped with a command-line interface that allowed executing windows commands from the command-line, and now Windows 95 has the same. Still, it's a pretty cool program, with a really cheesy shareware beg screen.
I occasionally work on a mail client for Windows 95, which I'm calling Mail Explorer because it uses the VFAT file system as a mail folder system, which means you can read your mail with the Windows Explorer. Read more about it by clicking the link above.
I was reading newspapers at age 2 or so.. (so the story goes.. I asked my mom what 'rape' meant, and showed her an article I was reading) then I sort of burnt out on the whole thing around age 12. Theseadays, I read books whenever I have the chance.. some of my more recent books:
As for what kind of music I listen to, I like almost anything. I'm not big on country, although every once in a while I'll catch a tune I can tolerate (*verrry* rare). Although Bluegrass (which in some ways is country without the truck-and-dog lyrics) is usually pretty cool.. I'm not big on rap, although I like the more interesting forms thereof (Beastie Boys' Ill Communication (more jazz than rap) comes to mind here). I love electronic music (raves are occasionally fun!), and am slowly becoming a total jazzhead. I have been known to listen to a lot of Phish, Medeski, Martin, and Wood, Schleigho, Grateful Dead, Orb, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, nine inch nails, Skinny Puppy, and more obscure bands, such as The Legendary Pink Dots, Tear Garden, Psychic TV, Doubting Thomas, or Coil. I generally hate the radio, since I can't stand the commercials, and almost always have tapes with me in my car. Although the WDVE morning show is a common exception.. go Paulsen and Krenn!
I tape, and collect tapes of live shows. My tape list is here.
I play guitar, piano, drums, and just about any other instrument that's put in front of me. I've written music on and off since 1991 or so, and I've occasionally been working on getting the music in a presentable form, then maybe I'll work on getting a band together.
I jam with my brother Jon when I get the chance.. he's got a drum kit, and a bass, which is all we usually end up playing, but it's pretty cool.
The music I write tends to be simple rock with strange lyrics. Some example titles: Doctrine (about television and brainwashing), Love Song (about relationships and slavery), I want to be insane (about insanity being a better alternative to modern sanity).
I especially like playing my guitar, a black Charvel with double active humbuckers through a 150 watt Crate amp with four 12" Celestions, and my keyboard, a Roland PC-200 keyboard controller played (for the moment) through my pc with a Turtle Beach Multisound Monterey synth. I enjoy working with MIDI sequencers and synthesizers. I'm hoping to be getting more into recording in the future..
Ahh, America's most addictive drug. The television. I try to avoid commercial television at all costs.. however, with cable TV, there are certain channels where the commercials are almost always tolerable, due to the extreme coolness of their programming. Some examples of this include:
Any of these channels beat the big networks any time of the day or night.
I generally view commercial television in adversarial mode, treating the images bombarding me with suspicion and criticism.. pointing out the formulaic exploitation of stereotype used to portray 'normality', the general assumption of male dominance, and other such cultural malarkey. I analyze commercials for what they seem to say, what they're really saying, and of course, most importantly, what they're not saying. The end result is that I probably try to avoid buying anything I've seen on television, just to assure myself that no subliminal brainwave-molding is at work, and, of course, to make sure that the folks who can't afford a flashy ad (for more than $19.95) get a fair chance.
In spite of all this, (and in some ways, because of it.. hey, picking nits is fun!), I catch a few 'network' programs occasionally. For example:
The Twilight Zone is the latest in a series of cool television shows I've made a full 6 hour tape of for later viewing. I've got tapes with about 6 hours of:
I currently have a library of 400ish movie titles on tape. My favorites include:
I've got all the James Bonds, classics like Superfly, Condorman, A Clockwork Orange, you name it!
I'm a 10-year net.vet, and generally live on or near the net.
I feel totally connected when I'm running directly on the net via Ethernet (ahhh! well, ya know, a connection at T1 speeds at home would be nice, but you see how well monopoly breeds progress in the utility industries) but a plain old dialup works as well. I always enjoy a nice SparcStation running Xwin, and I'd certainly take a serial connection to a unix system running screen (a virtual terminal multiplexer) over nothing any day. My current Internet platforms are my Windows 95 home computers running on a PPP dialup.
Unix was once my preferred environment, for its overall elegance, but Windows 95's Explorer shell, and its interoperability with the 'net has changed this. I certainly feel at home with DOS (after 18 years of using it), and while the ideal of open software is a nice step toward computing freedom for all, the overall abundant variety and usability of commercial, shareware, and freeware Windows software far surpasses that of the actually affordable commercial, or freeware software available to users of Unix, and the Macintosh is an increasingly niche-marketed rarity.. Microsoft is a marketing menace! :-)
Java is an exciting development; the same 'machine code' on a mainframe, a PC, a PDA, and a can opener would be a beautiful thing. Performance is improving, but a virtual machine piggybacking on an OS will always run slower than 'native' OS programs. I'd love to see someone package a Java-based, windowed OS environment for Intel machines and truly challenge Microsoft.. but no one's stepping forward quickly with even a just-enough pass at a package that could truly sell Java as a complete preinstalled-mail-order-computer applications platform alternative. I realize that this might be long in coming, but it's becoming almost irrelevant.
As long as Wintel is overwhelmingly the most popular computing platform, software developers will tend to gravitate toward a Win32 application that will generally have better performance for a larger number of users than a Java equivalent. Those new software applications will then sell more of the machines that run them. That's simply where the market is going. Yeah, Microsoft could be broken up, or regulated, but you'd still end up with Ma Windows. Timing is everything, ya know?
Regardless of platform, I think that the quality of software in general will improve drastically now that the world has discovered the 'net, and interactive debugging with the millions on the net becomes the norm!
And, as always, I can deal with Macintoys, but please.. leave the VM/CMS/MVS and VMS to the monkeys.
Mike's Home Pages have gotten hits since
February 25, 1996!