When Reeves Gabrels (who would work with David Bowie through most of the 90s) saw Bowie’s Glass Spider Tour back in 1987, he said that one thing that stood out about the music is that it seemed more “muscular” than their studio counterparts.
That’s exactly how I would describe the music at the Blondie show last night. Every song was superior to the original, given a new power by a band that had clearly been at this for a while. I mean, Blondie was around in the 70s, right, so clearly she’s been performing for nearly 50 years. Not only was she great, but the band too.
Fun night, thank you to our friend who made these tickets available to us!
Our seats were just 13 rows back, just left of center:
The show started in the daylight but it was dark out by the end of the show.
Here we are, before Blondie took the stage, eagerly awaiting the show (the warm-up act was a DJ who played era-relevant music to pump everyone up):
Blondie opened with “One way or another” (first picture below), closed the main set with “Heart of Glass” (second picture below), and played just about every Blondie track I knew over the course of the evening.
Here’s the band, taking their curtain call at the end of the night:
I kind of wish I had more pictures of my first concerts, in the years before camera phones! This was fun to capture little bits of the show in ways you really couldn’t just 20 years ago!
About 20 years after my first one, I took another road trip across the country. Whereas last time I went off alone, and camped most nights, this time I took my daughter, and we stayed in hotels along the way.
Our goal: drive down to Texas to visit my father before putting her on a plane (to visit her maternal grandmother) while I drove home.
My last trip like this, back in 2006, is documented here on this blog, you can start here, as it has the links to each entry if you want to read it.
My goal this time was to show my daughter the western half of the US, parts of the country she’d never really seen in person. Plus, it’s time for us to be together, and just flying (while much, much faster) isn’t fun and a road trip seemed like it was!
Here is our route:
We started in Seattle. Day 1 (blue) was Seattle to Boise, ID. Day 2 (purple) was Boise to Salt Lake City, UT. Day 3 (green) was SLC down to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in AZ. Day 4 (orange) was Grand Canyon to Roswell, NM. Day 5 (blue-ish gray) was Roswell to San Antonio, our destination.
For the trip back, I chose to drive up to Kansas City so I could work from our offices there for a day, so on day 6 (light green) I drove SA to Oklahoma City, OK. Day 7 (gray) was OKC to Kansas City, MO. Day 8 (red) was KC to Omaha, NE. Day 9 (yellow) was Omaha to Billings, MT, and Day 10 (light green again) was Billings back to Seattle.
I tried to target our driving time each day to be about 8 hours. That gave us time to sight-see, take breaks, etc., each day, and once I dropped Alexandria off at the airport (before Day 6), I was more focused on getting to KC and then driving home quickly; the last two days were 12 hour driving days each!
Day 1: Seattle to Boise
Like the 2006 trip, we were driving in a convertible TT. Here we are, just about to set out for the trip:
We fit everything neatly in the car; the trunk of the Mk2 TT is bigger than my old Mk1 TT, so we had room to spare. Bonus: the seats in this version were much more comfortable. Despite sometimes sitting in the car for 12+ hours in a day, they never got uncomfortable.
Sadly, we never saw the “Welcome to Oregon” or “Welcome to Idaho” signs (we tried to capture them each time we saw one), so we only really have one more worthy picture that day: when we were in Boise, with Alexandria in front of the Idaho capitol building. We spent a few hours walking around the city, eating some fine Vegan food and sightseeing before crashing at a hotel for the evening.
Day 2: Boise to Salt Lake City
This day was a little shorter of a drive; only about 5-6 hours driving because we wanted to spend the night in SLC itself rather than drive 2-3 hours past it before stopping. We had three reasons to stop in SLC: to see the lake, to see a friend who moved to SLC that we haven’t’ seen in years, and to visit with Janica’s mother, who lives there too.
Here’s our obligatory “Welcome to Utah” picture:
You’ll notice that this is not a great picture; in fact it was taken as we were leaving Utah the next morning through the rear window, because we (of course) missed the sign on the way in the day before. Kudos to Alexandria for creatively finding a way to get a picture of the sign. This is, sadly, the only picture we took in Utah – we got no pictures of my friend or family who moved there. Well, that’s not entirely true, we took this picture of Janica’s restored Model A that’s in her mother’s garage:
Isn’t it beautiful!? Janica took part in restoring it when she was a kid, and we are trying to come up with a plan for how to bring this car back to Seattle (and how do we care for it and where do we store it when it’s here)? Weirdly, this means that between Janica and I, we own 4 cars, and 3 of them are convertibles 🤷♂️
Day 3: SLC to the Grand Canyon
This was the first day of driving that we went off of major Interstates, which was very nice. Driving through lesser roads is a great way to see the sites and the countryside, and find crazy little places like this store in the middle of nowhere in southern UT:
Yes, it wouldn’t be a real road trip if you didn’t take a picture in front of a fake dinosaur (note what they sell: they also sell knives, guns and “2nd Amendment Premium Quality Hats”. Yes, if you wanted a baseball hat that promotes guns, they’ve got them here).
Then, our first actual “Welcome to” sign spotted!
A few hours later, we were on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon. It was as great as I remembered it, and it was amazing to share the experience with my daughter:
We stayed right near the National Park for the evening, enjoyed some quality local Mexican food, and did all the touristy things you are supposed to do.
Day 4: Grand Canyon to Roswell
Like the previous day, this was an 8-hour driving day. We had been experiencing 100+ degree weather every day so far, and being in AZ and NM was no exception. We would alternate between short stints with the top down, and long stints with the top up, to avoid getting too hot or sunburnt.
We managed to catch the “New Mexico” sign:
Here’s a picture of the kind of countryside we saw while driving:
Day 5: Roswell to San Antonio
Another 8-hour driving day. We arrived in San Antonio right around dinner time, which was our intention. I didn’t take a lot of pictures that day, just this one recording the 104 degree temperature we were in (not the hottest, we got up to 110 at least once and 109 several times over the course of the trip).
We spent a few days in San Antonio with family, doing things like walking around the River Walk, visiting the Alamo and riding water slides at Schlitterbahn Water Park. I won’t bore you with pictures of everything we did, but I did take this cute one of Alexandria in front of one of those painted Wings walls:
Sadly, after a few days I had to put Alexandria on a plane to visit her maternal grandmother, so from that point on I was on my own. Instead of driving back the way we came, I looped up north first, per the map I shared at the top of this post:
After dropping Alexandria off at the airport in the morning, I drove to OK City (about an 8 hour drive), and spent the day wandering about the downtown core. The next day, OKC to Kansas City, was a shorter drive so I took the time to drive over to and through Tulsa, and got my required stop at a Waffle House for a bite to eat.
I spent a day (a Monday) working from our corporate offices in Overland Park before driving a few hours at the end of that day up to Omaha for the night. I actually really liked Omaha. It was clean, felt modern and wasn’t too crwoded. I ate some fine vegan food and saw a gay couple kissing on the lawn, so you know it’s not a backwards kind of place!
The next two days were 12-hour driving days each: Omaha to Billings and Billings to Seattle. The worst part of the trip was the traffic in Spokane. Otherwise, uneventful but fun to drive. Yes, I stopped at Wall Drug.
All told, I drove through 14 states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Montana. Just over 5500 miles of driving in 10 days of driving.
I made one unexpected stop in South Dakota: Mt. Rushmore. I actually thought it was in North Dakota, so it wasn’t on my itinerary, but once I saw the signs I took the detour to go see it:
Overall, the trip went really well! We had no car issues, Alexandria and I had a lot of fun, nothing was broken, lost or stolen… A father-daughter vacation well worth the time.
In a nutshell, if I’m reading this right, I’ll be able to text via my iPhone from my Windows PC. I can’t tell you how often I get a text and I think, “ugh, it’s such a pain to text via my phone,” and put off replying until I can stomach the process.
Now, I can sit at my PC and write replies – I am so much faster on a keyboard than anything else – and it takes all the pain of texting away. It really is fantastic.
A small thing, but the kind of geeky joy I haven’t had for a tech feature on Windows in a long, long time!
After 2020 (and most of 2021), it was finally time to get away for a vacation. We went somewhere sunny: Mexico. Down near Puerto Vallarta, here’s a picture looking out north into the Pacific Ocean from the deck of our room:
We booked this trip back in March when the vaccine first was available, and we naively assumed that things would be normal by late August. We are both vaccinated, and wore masks when out in public. The US requires a negative COVID test to return (which we both got), but Mexico doesn’t require anything except an attestation to get in. Most places we felt safe, and masks were common everywhere except for on the beach, of course.
Our first day was not as nice as pictured: gray skies and rain dominated as we discovered that we were arriving the day before Hurricane Nora! Apparently, Nora was the first hurricane to hit the region in about 10 years (according to our driver), so we were just victims of poor timing.
The hurricane knocked out power to the entire town we were in for over 24 hours. This also knocked out the water. Being in 100% humidity, when it’s 80+ degrees out, with no A/C and no running toilets or showers was tough! But fortunately, within 2 days, normalcy was restored.
We were definitely there on the off-season (word is, January is the best time to go). We may return! Here are some pictures of our trip!
The Pacific Ocean when there are no hurricanesUnder the colorful flags of the town square (pre-hurricane, so we were a bit soggy)One of many margaritas consumed this particular weekSalsa and chips, some of the excellent food we had while we were thereOne of the local residents
Back in 2009(!) I started migrating my digital library away from WMA format to MP3, and I started tracking my music collection metrics (# of MP3s vs WMAs, size, etc.) on a semi-regular basis. My first data snapshot was from October 2009, and my latest is from today, July 29 2021, so I’ve been doing this for nearly 12 years. Even today, I prefer to own my music, and I rarely rely on streaming services except as a way to discover new music (when I hear songs I like, I go and buy them).
Part of the reason for the slow/long migration is that I had a large number of rare/unique songs in my collection (obscure live versions or remixes) from artists that aren’t easy to find anymore. I wasn’t just about to convert my WMA files to MP3, I wanted lossless sources to convert to MP3. One might wonder if I should just stick with a lossless format like FLAC, but honestly even with today’s disk sizes regularly being in the TB, that’s probably too big for me to consider. Never mind that my iPhone 12 still has < 1 TB space on it.
The last time I blogged about this was back in June of 2010. Funnily enough, in that blog post, I figured I might be done with the migration by Christmas of that year. Not even close! But never fear, the transition continued unabated. I would regularly prune tracks that I had no interest in, as well as buy new music of course. My favorite source of music is Amazon, since I can download high-bitrate MP3s directly to my devices, and from there I can push those to my car or my phone.
According to my blog post, in June 2010, I had “3372 MP3s (taking up 23.7GB) and I’m down to only 2559 WMAs (taking up 10.4GB)”. Here in 2021, I have 5596 MP3s (37.2 GB) and a mere 17(!) WMAs, taking up just over 70 MB. Truth be told, I’ve had < 100 WMAs in my collection since early 2018, so basically, the work is done. So, yeah… those last 17 WMA files might stick around for a long time. “The long tail,” they call it.
Here’s a view of the total count of files over the years:
Number of songs over time, regardless of type (MP3 or WMA)
Clearly I was doing a big purge in late 2009, when the file count dropped from ~6400 down to around 5700. There was another purge in 2014, and another in late 2017. And another in 2019. Apparently I’m not shy about removing songs that I don’t listen to.
Conversely, as I’ve gone from low-bitrate WMA and MP3 files to high-bitrate MP3s, the size of the collection has grown:
Number of songs vs size in GB. Right now my collection is just under 37.5 GB in size.
Remember, originally I was using WMA files because I felt that their smaller size compared to an MP3 was a boon (back when device storage was measured in MB and I was lugging a portable MP3 player around). Even when I started moving to MP3s, I’d compress them using low-bitrates, also with an eye towards storage, but over time, as storage became less of a problem, I migrated to higher-bitrate MP3s. It’s not uncommon to see 320 kbps MP3 files. A 5-minute 320kbps MP3 takes up about 11MB. Its equivalent FLAC is about 100MB. That 10x size difference isn’t something I’m ready to move to yet. But… who knows? Maybe in another 12 years I’ll still be migrating my collection…
I have been waiting for a nice, kid-free weekend to go on a little scenic drive in the new car. Well, this weekend was just that. Not much to say except that I started at 7am to avoid traffic, and that worked well, for the most part. Took a few hours to get to Diablo Lake, but the bicyclists were out in force along the road nonetheless. Fortunately car traffic was light and I was able to enjoy the curvy roads. Here’s a panoramic picture I took up at the lake:
And here’s a picture of the car:
I only spent about 30 minutes up at the lake, as it was surprisingly cold: at one point I was driving with the top down, but the temperature dropped to 40˚ and so I had to put it back up. It was a cold but beautiful day.
I also didn’t realize how many bicyclists flocked up to this area at this point in the season. Apparently Highway 20 is a very popular road to bike on right now, because it’s closed just past the lake to traffic (due to snow/slides). So, until it’s opened back up, the bikers get the whole road to themselves. It’s not a flat road (going through the mountains), but I appreciate why they must love it so much. Hopefully later this year, after Highway 20 is opened back up to cars, I’ll take it out to Winthrop for a weekend trip.
Can you believe it, nearly 15 years after my last road trip, I did another mini-one, and rather unexpectedly. Basically, a portion of my old road trip, but in reverse.
A few years ago, I sold my beautiful little Audi TT roadster – the one I took the road trip on in 2006. I regretted selling it ever since. So, I’ve been looking, now and then, for a good replacement. Audi TT roadsters are not cheap, even used, so I was biding my time. Then, a week or so ago, the perfect car popped up – in Utah. Well, the price was right, and I had a free weekend, so I flew down to SLC on Saturday morning, and was in the dealership by lunchtime. I drove away with the car in the early afternoon, and then – had to drive home!
So, while my initial road trip out of Seattle in 2006 took me SE through Oregon, Idaho and Utah (and beyond), this trip was the reverse: SLC to Boise to Seattle via I15, I84, I82 and then I90. All told the whole trip took about 12 hours, split over two days. I was home in Seattle by noon on Sunday (about 900 miles).
Surprisingly, I only took one picture during the trip, and here it is:
This picture was taken on I84 in northern Utah, just shy of the border with Idaho.
I did, of course, take a picture of the car prior to the beginning of the trip. The car is now safe in my garage, waiting for the warmth of the summer sun to go out with its top down:
I will miss you, silver 2001 Audi TT, but I’m more than happy with its replacement!
Moab is known as a Mecca for outdoor enthusiasts: bikers, hikers, and any other sport you can do in the middle of the desert. Moab was my trip’s first destination; I had never been there before and wanted to see what it was like.
However, I started about a half a day away from Moab, so I had some driving to do. These pictures show how the scenery was slowly changing, with the greenery slowly giving way to the warm, red rocks of the region:
I love the 3rd picture, it reminds me of the mountain in Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. When I arrived in Moab, it was a little underwhelming. I was hoping for a cute, quaint country town with people out and about. Instead I arrived upon a dirty town lined with cheap motels and a main street that was torn up for some kind of construction. I had arrived mid-day, which of course meant it was well over 100 degrees, so nobody was ‘out and about’ – they had all found A/C cooled rooms to hide in.
I found a motel that didn’t look too sketchy and checked in, and then quickly got out of town to find a hike. Yes, a mid-day hike in the middle of the desert doesn’t sound like the wisest idea, but I figured that I didn’t come all that way to hide indoors, and I knew I’d be well-hydrated. My GPS pointed out a few good nearby hiking trails, so I took a short ride (maybe 15 minutes) out of town and arrived at this trailhead: well, I didn’t actually get a picture of the trailhead itself, but you can see the parking lot where I had parked with the trailhead sign next to it. The family in the van were just leaving, and I never saw another person on the hike again.
I had specifically avoided Arches National Park, known for its incredible natural stone arches. I wanted to avoid crowds, plus my hike had natural arches, and no entry fee. It was free to park & hike. Sounded good to me. It was very picturesque. The trail immediately crossed some train tracks. I love these tracks. First off, they carved through solid rock to lay these tracks. Impressive. Secondly, this was a back-country crossing with no signs, guards, or automatic gates to protect you in case a train came through. Since there was a bend to the tracks, you couldn’t even see very far – you had to listen to see if you heard one approaching. Sadly, no trains came through while I was there. You can see that I tried to get all artistic with my little point ‘n click camera in the two of the shots.
This hike was very exposed, through some very rough terrain that made it hard to pick out the trail. I remember that someone had left trail markers along the route – basically whenever the trail went over rocks, you’d look for a little pile of rocks to indicate the path. These pictures give you some idea of the exposure and variety of views that the trail offered:
And, as I mentioned, there were arches. There were baby arches (read: holes not yet arches) and fully matured arches. I found it hard to take pictures that did the natural beauty of the area any justice, but I tried. I also took one shot of me in front of the arch; check out my awesome hat, which actually did a lot to keep the heat off my head:
This was a great hike – it was only an hour or two long, yet I was completely alone in some amazing wilderness & terrain. I never heard or saw any other people or animals during this hike, though I was fully expecting to see or hear some rattlesnakes along the way. I was happy when I finally returned back to the parking lot: I was still the only one there. Of course my car had been baking in the sun, but that’s easily remedied by dropping the top.
By the way, the roads were a joy to drive. They tended to be flat & curvy with nobody else on them, perfect for a little roadster. I like this picture, I think it conveys the warmth of the air, the light breeze, and has a little motion blur from my driving:
After I returned to town, I took a much-needed shower and headed out to find a cute place to get some dinner, and maybe socialize with the locals. I figured that they’d all be out after a day of enjoying the local countryside as I had. As it turns out, there really wasn’t anyone out. Moab just didn’t have a college town feel like I was hoping. If you’ve been to Banff Canada, you’ll know the kind of feeling I expecting, and Moab just didn’t have it. It was dry & dusty, and all the construction didn’t help. I didn’t really get to see or talk to anyone except for the waiter at the local Billy McHale’s-done-cheap restaurant. Can you tell I wasn’t a fan of Moab? Other than the fact that it’s surrounded by beauty, it’s basically a crappy little town.
Based on Google Maps, I was 1074 miles (by highway) from Seattle. So far, so good. The only downside of my trip so far was that it was on this day that I finished Carter Beats the Devil, an excellent book that a friend had recommended to me. My other book was The Last Samurai, no, not from the Tom Cruise movie, but something completely different – and so different that I had a really, really hard time reading it. In fact, I don’t think I ever finished it, but I remember trying every night by the light of my headlamp.
I spent the rest of the evening trying to find something fun & cool in Moab, but couldn’t find anyplace that had attracted any crowds. Wherever everyone was, I couldn’t find them. I eventually went to bed after mapping out the next day or two of my trip: my plan was to drive through Colorado, hit some highlights there, and then make my way into Kansas, all the while leaving Moab far, far behind me.
I use Firefox (current version: 85) and plug-in (sorry, extension) Feedbro to load RSS feeds from Reddit. Sometimes, for no reason, Firefox won’t load a link when I try and load it from Feedbro.
I’ll click on a story, a new tab will open, and Firefox will just spin. Stop/Refresh won’t fix it. Before I figured out this fix, I learned just to ‘wait a while’ and then try again. But this was frustrating, and sometimes I’ll open many tabs (a dozen?) so they’ll all load, which means I have a bunch of tabs just waiting for Firefox to finally be ready to load them.
I looked online but didn’t find much guidance. Feedbro doesn’t list anything like this issue, and Firefox itself doesn’t either because it’s an extension that’s doing some of the work.
Fortunately, I found the solution, and thought I’d share it here:
First, stop any tabs that are in this hung state (click on the tab and then ‘ESC’ or hit the stop button)
Open a new tab and go to about:serviceworkers
Find the ‘Reddit’ service worker and click the ‘Unregister’ button
Go back to the stuck tabs and reload them
That’s it! I have to do this every once in a while (every week or so?) but it’s pretty painless once you know the solution.
The Strange Attractor 