This is not news to me, but it may be to you: New Jersey has around 600 diners, the most in the country.
News to me is that Wikipedia has an awesome page on diners. Worth reading if you’ve ever ordered a taylor ham-egg-and-cheese sandwich after midnight (or if you know someone who has).
Category: Personal (Page 11 of 25)
The Awl: The Golden Age Of Hipper-Than-Thou CD Fetishization Begins Now.
See, I’ve still got my old stereo, and I’ve been hoarding all the CDs I bought or burned between the ages of 13 and 24. Sure, they take up a lot of space. Was a bitch to move them out of the old apartment, too, but it’s worth it. This stuff is gold. … We remember Tower Records, man. We were there.
My son (age two) broke my CD player last month. My gorgeous, wonderful, feature-rich, six-disc Pioneer CD changer, which lasted longer in regular use than any other piece of electronics I’ve ever owned, which I loved so much that I bought a matching car CD changer so I could swap the cartridges, which was such a near-perfect device that I actually had the laser realigned in 1996 rather than buy a new one. The day it broke was almost exactly the 20th anniversary of its purchase.
Twenty years is a long time for a piece of stereo equipment, so I’m not all that saddened that it broke. Its passing has thrown me into something of an existential crisis, though.
Do I buy another one?
I mean, I’m an iPod guy through and through. Had one since they first came out. I carry a 160GB iPod Classic in addition to my iPhone. I rarely pop in CDs to listen to casually, and despite my lifelong love affair with record stores, I’ve only physically bought music two or three times in the past couple of years, and they were point-of-sale impulse buys.
On the other hand, I have a lot of discs. More than a thousand. Most of which I’ve never properly digitized, because of the daunting task of burning a thousand CDs. (I perversely burn the albums I least care about, in order to get them out of my apartment, which means my iTunes collection contains a lot of mediocre music and not enough of my old favorites.) When we moved into our current apartment, I had two wall units custom-built for our living room, one of which just houses CDs.
I have been thinking for awhile about digitizing the whole thing and just moving on. But what to do with all that music? I’m something of a collector and I don’t like the idea of throwing away the tangible jewel boxes and liner notes, especially considering how much money, and time, I invested in acquiring them.
But the reality of progress cannot be ignored. I saved 800 cassette tapes and 200 vinyl records in my parents’ house when I moved out in the ’90s, and to date, I’ve listened to roughly 30 of those cassettes and none of the records. The hoarder in me shouts, “But those thirty! And how much is irreplaceable? And what about the next time you need music and forget your iPod? And the bootlegs, man! And imagine if you had to reassemble your metal collection from scratch…!”
Thing is, I have reassembled a lot of my music collection. No matter how much I deny it, I don’t look back much: all those classic rock albums I have on cassette? I don’t even leave those artists on the radio when the local rock radio station plays their songs. We move on.
In an ideal world, I’d find myself at home with two weeks to kill and no one else in the house, and I’d spend a few days pulling all my music–cassettes and all–into a lossless audio format on a two-terabyte hard drive with dual backups. I don’t know if or when that will ever happen, but in the meantime, I may as well admit to progress.
So we’re not replacing the CD player in the component stereo. We will, instead, pop in an iPod cable, so until we get a music server set up we can play tunes without dealing with the laptop. And my son–who, before breaking it, learned how to turn on the stereo and play CDs in the old Pioneer–will be able to bring his iPod into the living room and play his kids’ tunes on his own volition, once he learns to read, that is. And at some point I’ll even purge the living room of physical CDs.
It’s not that the future has arrived. Heck, the future has been here for years. It just took a toddler’s accident for me to formally let go of the past.
I’ll be in the Caribbean this week doing my best to stay off the grid. No out-of-office email autoresponders and voice mails, just this blog post and a much-anticipated week of nothingness. Back in a week.
After more than a month of neglect–and really, what’s a month or two after three years–I took advantage of Oscar night to work on my home page while the Mrs. watched the Oscars. So my home page is finally new. Whew.
In a fit of abject creativity, my new home page is, well, basically a bunch of links. But that’s sort of the point. In an age where one’s social profile extends to myriad web sites with poorly interlinked commonalities, I like the idea of having a pivot. So no more netwert.com branding, as I did for more than a decade; instead, a little more me branding, or at least, me-gregation, or whatever the word would be. In due time I’ll get the utility of the interior pages of the site to more or less match, and as I play with the site design, I’ll give the new home page some much-needed design flair, too.
I also went about perusing my website archives, and I must say, long before it became a paragon of boredom I had some pretty sweet home page ideas. All hail flatbed scanners and randomizer scripts!
I am once again pleased as punch to report that my talented, hard-working wife has produced a commercial running in the Super Bowl, this time for Snickers.
The spot runs early in the game on Sunday, and there’s a teaser on Facebook for the curious and impatient.
I will go on the record as saying I think the full spot is great: perfect for the Super Bowl. And I think I’m more proud and impressed than she is.
Update: Snickers topped the Ad Meter as best commercial of Super Bowl XLIV. Kickin’.
The longer it sits there, the less I like the post below this one. I’m leaving it there for posterity (and the one on the work blog, too). But I suspect the near future will prove me all wrong—in the priority of my observations, my knee-jerk reactions, my skepticism. I sit here and wonder why I reacted like I did; after all, I was a pleased early adopter of the iPhone and the iPod, limitations and all. If I lived in the suburbs, and I had a room I called an office with an iMac on my desk, I’d probably crave an iPad, a situational divide made all the more striking by the Mac laptops I have at home and work (and, as noted, the iPhone already in my pocket).
So Sippey sounds like he’s right. Gruber is probably right. Pogue is almost certainly right, and he’s full of “don’t listen to me yet” hedges. Which makes me, er, wrong. Or at least noticeably off the mark.
I look forward to playing with an iPad in the real world this spring, where I can make some real, and properly reasoned, conclusions.
I keep coming back to Brad Graham’s passing—three times since I first found out yesterday—and I keep getting a pit in my chest thinking about it.
I know Brad for one lone, random reason: he had a weblog in the 1990s, and so did I. Back then the blogosphere (a term Brad coined, by the way) was small enough that people could track it on a single webpage. Early bloggers were united by spirit: we were exploring a new medium, and we were very comfortably aligned with one another, despite our diverse interests.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how my connections to the old-school crowd are not as strong as they could—should—have been, mostly because I never got around to dining with my crowd at SXSW. I know lots of people from the early days, and they know me, but I see my old friend Anil Dash refer to these same people as his best friends and I realize I missed a moment.
Brad, though? Brad was your friend. Instantly and permanently. Smiles, embraces, forever remembered and fondly recalled. After our first meeting in New York, I became part of his hug-shaped social circle, and would regularly receive invites to meet him for a drink when he found himself in my city. This is how he treated everyone, and why my community is mourning him especially deeply.
Brad embodied the power of social media, long before it had such a name. Consider: brought together by technology and little else (check out the text in that first-meeting link) I became a longtime friend of a man a thousand miles away. His death is giving me recurrent waves of sadness, even though I hadn’t seen him in several years. And I’m sharing my emotions with hundreds of people around the country, some of whom knew him well and others who never even met him in person.
Leave it to Brad Graham to remind us how powerful and touching this medium can be. We’ll miss you, Brad. I know I already do.
One of the more random occurrences in adult life is discovering the company one keeps in one’s office building. Companies rent space, and the neighbors can be all sorts of interesting.
I haven’t had all that many exciting office situations over the years, but a few stand out.
1. Viacom. Specifically, MTV, in the Viacom building when I worked in the Viacom building (also in the music industry). Working for a medium-size company in the headquarters of a huge company was all right, because it meant we could sneak into the huge company’s cafeteria and get subsidized cheeseburgers with curly fries and eat on a swanky roof terrace in the middle of Times Square. And I worked at 1515 Broadway during the height of TRL’s run, so we could hear screaming crowds daily at 3 p.m. For all the noise, though, the MTV crews were surprisingly unintrusive.
2. XM Radio, which had half a floor in The Economist’s headquarters when I worked on Economist.com. Having left Billboard to go to The Economist, I was pleased to find myself down the hall from a radio network, and I even auditioned for a job on their alternative radio station. (The program director called me decent but unpolished.) In 2002, XM was where smart, cool, fringe-of-the-industry types worked, so I got to meet folks like Pat Dinizio from time to time. And, of course, Gene Simmons.
3. Butterfly Salon. My current job is on the same floor as a beauty parlor, which means my colleagues and I are subject to any of the following on a given afternoon: lots of strangers on our floor. Embarrassingly dirty bathrooms, often covered in fresh cut hair. Pretty, standoffish young stylists. Chemical smells from permanent wave treatments. Then again, we have a standing discount at the salon, and they periodically ask us for models who get free haircuts and highlights, so it’s not all bad. Our CCO has a standing offer from me that for the right price I’ll volunteer and dye my hair black, but he hasn’t pulled the trigger yet.
(And by unexpected, I mean no listing stuff like the time I had drinks with The Pursuit of Happiness at the bar at Mercury Lounge after their gig. That’s too easy.)
1. Gene Simmons, in the XM Radio studios in New York. Unexpected not for the location but for how I wound up hanging out with him. I think he had come in to do some promos. I worked down the hall so at the radio tech’s suggestion I stopped by for no particular reason. This was late-period dickwad Gene Simmons, not mid-period cool-as-fuck I-wish-I-were-in-Kiss Gene Simmons, so he was grouchy and bewigged and all sorts of imagination deflating, but still, Gene Simmons.
2. Ira Kaplan, selling his own band’s T-shirts before one of the Yo La Tengo Hanukkah gigs at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. I was all “hey, whoa, you’re Ira! from the band!” and he was all “well, yeah, I am.” We hung out for a minute or two, mostly because he was selling me a T-shirt.
3. My Sister’s Machine, at the Cheesequake rest stop on the Garden State Parkway at 3 in the morning after their gig opening for King’s X at Tradewinds down the Jersey shore, which I had just seen. They never made it, but I still recall the juxtaposition of a band in full metal mode, off stage, buying lukewarm fast food. And milk, if memory serves. We were all “hey, we just saw you! nice gig!” and they were all “yeah, um, we’re not here ok?”
4. Taj Mahal, at a summer camp, hanging out with a bunch of us CITs after he performed for the camp as a favor to the owner, who was a friend of his. This meeting forever changed how I listened to music and was reprised 18 years later, but those are stories for another day.