MadMup.com

Earlier this year I bought an iPod. At the time seemed like the best solution to my music-playing and –holding needs. And, really, the iPod’s a good device. The things I don’t like about the iPod are endemic to me:

• I don’t like the scroll-y wheel. It’s touch-sensitive and that’s cool and all, I just never liked it. I don’t like the “feel” of it and I don’t like using it.
• I don’t like that I have to change a setting in the main menu to randomize my music, and that my music is either randomized or not.
• I really, really don’t like that I have to use iTunes to manage the music that goes on the iPod. I know that I am in a very small minority here, because any time I mention that I don’t like iTunes people look at me like I have a hand growing out of my scalp and they say, “Really? I love iTunes!” I’m aware that people use it and like it. I’ve used it and know how to use it, I just don’t like it. I don’t like how it organizes my music, I don’t like how hard it is to get the correct album cover picture for individual songs, and I don’t like its layout. (As an aside, I’ve also had iTunes completely mess up two separate Windows installs, to the point where I had to reinstall Windows completely. For my iPod I actually used my G4 Mac and its iTunes so it would stay happy in its own environment.)

But, really, the iPod is a fine piece of equipment and I have no problem recommending it to people.

A couple of months ago a friend at work started talking up the Microsoft Zune, a soon-to-be-released MP3 player. I had heard about it, of course, but he was pretty fired up about it. I liked what I was reading about it, but already had an iPod, so what was I going to do about it?

As it happened, some of us techs met for lunch on November 14, the day the Zune was released. Ryan (the aforementioned friend) and I were talking about going to Best Buy after work to play around with one and the question came up, “Are you going to buy one?” At this point I must say I was interested in getting one, but I didn’t really see how I was going to work it. Ryan was planning to get one for Christmas, and even had his wife talked into it already. I said, “If I could find someone to sell my iPod to I’d probably get one.” Ryan’s answer: “eBay!!!” (This isn’t just his answer to this, it’s pretty much his answer to just about anything. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he had stock in the company.) I, of course, don’t trust eBay and don’t want to mess around with it, and that doesn’t help me get a Zune that very day.

At this point another tech spoke up and said, “I’ll buy your iPod from you.” Sweet! We worked it out that he’d get me the cash after work, and after his cash and the nice little Best Buy Rewards discount coupon I had, I didn’t end up having to spend any of my own money on the Zune. Super sweet!

The Zune comes in three colors: white, black, and brown. I had no interest in white and was planning to get the black. My iPod was black and it seemed to make the most sense to me. Enter Ryan:

“No, dawg! You gotta get the brown! That’s the distinctive color! It’s what all the cool kids’ll have!”

I’ll never be exactly sure why, but I let him bully me into the brown. The salesguy said there was only one brown left, a bunch of black had sold, and that NObody had bought a white one. Okay, fine. Brown it is. Done & done.

I’ve had my Zune for almost a month, now, and I have to say: I love it.

• I like the bigger screen. Yes, it’s the same resolution as the iPod screen, but it’s bigger. Album art takes up the upper two-thirds of the screen when the song is playing, and it’s easily visible. I don’t know if it’s exactly a golden rectangle, but it’s in that direction and I wonder if that’s part of why it’s so pleasing to me. Pictures and videos are actually shown in widescreen (you hold it so the controls are on the right), and look really, really good.
• I like the simple menu interface. When you go into an album or an artist list, you are giving the option at the top of the list to “Play all” or “Play shuffled.” I really, REALLY like that. (For some reason, though, it doesn’t give you the “Play shuffled” option when you look at a playlist. If I want to play a playlist shuffled, I have to do the same thing I did on the iPod – change a setting in the main menu. I hope this gets changed in a future software update.)
• The click wheel is just that: clicky. I like that, too. I must respond to tactile interfaces, as The radio dial in my car has a “click” feel when I turn the knob and I like that as well. The Zune “wheel” actually functions more like the arrow keys on a keyboard, and its specificity is right up my alley.
• While it’s not a big deal, I also like that I can set any picture I have as a background for the main menus.
• The software used to manage content is basically a slightly different version of Windows Media Player, so it’s familiar and easy (for me) to use. It seems to me that it would have been easy to just use WMP for the content management – in fact, I would have preferred it. Oh, well. I still much prefer the Zune software to iTunes.

One of the big selling points for the Zune is that it has wireless capabilities. Right now that means you can send pictures or songs to other Zunes, but there’s hope for more functionality later. The music transfers have a 3-day/3-play policy – after one of those milestones is hit, the receiver can’t listen to it any more and would need to get their own licensed version. There’s been a lot of griping that it’s only 3-days or 3-plays, but I think it’s a neat feature for introducing someone to new music. Pictures don’t have the time limit on them. This transferring is the basis for Microsoft’s adline for the Zune: “Welcome to the social.”

I have yet to play with the wireless transfer, but have seen real-time videos of it working and it’s speedy and easy to use. “Oh!” you say. “You can test the wireless transfer when Ryan gets his at Christmas!” A fantastic idea, certainly. What better way to put the player through its paces than by testing it with another tech? There’s only one problem: it’s hard to test things with someone who’s a welsher. Ryan’s decided he’s not getting a Zune and instead has ordered a Creative Zen. Hoser.

I don’t really care, though, because I really do like my Zune. I might never transfer music to anyone from it and I might only use the FM radio feature to show other people it can be done, but it holds all my music and the rip of Garden State I did looks really, really good on it.

I’m just a little bummed that there was no ice cream involved.

My friend Kat has gone back to school this year to pursue a Graphic Arts degree. She already has one or two other degrees, but after working in a design-related job for a few years, she’s decided she wants to be more formally educated in the subject.

“Good for you!” I said when she was planning her collegiate return. “It’ll be tough and you’ll be busy, but good for you. I’m all for it!”

It was easy for me to back her decision because

a) I wasn’t the one going back to college.
b) It didn’t really mean any extra work for me.

While a) is still dependable and trustworthy, b) has decided to laugh at me and poke me with sticks while dancing around me singing, “I lied! I lied! Ha ha, I lied!”

See, a Graphic Arts major starts off in art classes. While I have been the subject of a few “30-second sketches,” it still wasn’t really any extra work for me. But then, a few weeks ago, I got this call:

“Monkey?” (Everyone’s “monkey” these days. I’m not sure how it happened, but it’s there, so what can you do?) “Monkey, how would you like to go to an art showing with me?”

(If you touch a pill bug, it will curl up into a little ball. If you suggest weird things to me, one eyebrow will raise and one will lower. They are the same sort of involuntary, programmed reaction.)

“An art show, eh?” I said. “I’m not so sure about that…” All art shows, as I’m sure you are aware, are pretentious and ridiculously self-important. There are no exceptions to this rule. I had no desire to go see a Barbie doll tied to a panda with tooth floss as a way to represent the subjection of women in China. I had no need of a “students whose work means something” injection. My immunity was plenty built-up, thank you.

But Kat can be very persuasive, and she was going to get extra credit for going to these things. So I went. And… it wasn’t that bad. There were even several pieces I enjoyed. In fact, I had many different reactions to the many pieces, so the showing had the desired effect. On one I liked the colors. On another I liked the emotion expressed. This one was juvenile, thrown-together, and ridiculous, but that one used layers in an interesting way. Honestly, after we left, I admitted that I had actually enjoyed it.

You know what that means, right? It means I get to go to more showings. The second one we went to was similar to the first one – several different artists, some good some not so much. The third showing was one artist, sort of a graduate thesis kind of thing. While I could appreciate the thoughts and feelings behind her paintings, I didn’t really care for the paintings themselves.

The fourth showing was actually the same night as the third, in the room right next door. This was an undergraduate show and looked like one. Remember my fears of going to a showing of “students whose work means something”? Yeah, that’s what this show was. The room was dark, there was a DJ doing the whole techno-music-with-turntables thing, and there were all sorts of ridiculous “pieces:”

• a girl sitting under an umbrella with big plastic raindrops labeled “war” and “hunger” and what-have-you suspended over her
• a guy tied with thick ropes cutting himself free with an ACTUAL BUTCHER KNIFE
• a girl knitting yarn using 10-foot knitting needles
• a girl standing on… something, wearing a 6-foot hoop skirt
• some sort of segmented, jointed dragon-thing hanging from the ceiling
• a guy dressed in all black, bound, gagged, and blindfolded lying on the floor under papier-mâché scissors suspended from the ceiling

That last fellow almost got himself kicked a few times just while we were there. Lying on the floor of a darkened room doesn’t seem like a good career move, but should get him nice and used to suffering for his “art.”

As soon as we walked into this one, Kat grabbed my arm and warned me not to “make fun of this one until we left.” It was difficult, but I did my best. Afterward she agreed it was ridiculous and I reminded her that this was exactly the sort of thing that caused my eyebrows to do what they do. She had gone specifically for the grad student show, but felt we really couldn’t pass up the right-next-door freak show while we were there.

This past Friday we went to a show that had three parts to it: a collection of one woman’s paintings, a collection of technical drawings from a few different people, and some wire-and-glass sculptures done by two women. This was a return to some sort of normalcy for me, and I went back to liking some and not liking others. I particularly enjoyed the computer-rendered technical stuff, which wasn’t too surprising.

After that show there was another one downtown that we went to. Most of the shows are named, I just can’t remember what they’ve been named. This one, though, was named “Blink,” and featured a few works of an electronic nature. One piece had participants defending Earth from alien attack by singing karaoke (Kat participated, saved the Earth, and got a patch/badge for her troubles). Another piece was a big balloon that flashed when touched. And the biggest piece was BioHEX41, complete with the two “artists” dressed in DEVO-like outfits surveying people on their eating habits and moods before having those people “interact” with the sculpture and recording the results (the results were a series of flashing lights, and it seemed to be interesting to them that my results included flashing red lights near the “tail”). While this exhibit was in the direction of the freak show, it was more enjoyable – most likely because the participants seemed to be having a bit more fun, and also because it was electronic in nature.

Art is a funny thing. To some, the best art is realistic, recreating humanity at its best and worst. To others, the best art is abstract, recreating… man, I don’t know. I’ll never be a Pollock fan myself, but I sort of understand that other people can be. In the end, I’m learning that art is about extracting some sort of reaction, and thoughtfulness, revulsion, and amusement can, in this case, sometimes be equal.

But I will always believe that there’s a reason some will be “starving artists.” It’s because they should be. Weirdos.

Years: 1988-89
Teachers: Mr. Braughler, Mrs. Carlson, Mr. Flaming, Mrs. Jackson, Mr. Weniger

(It’s at this point that I’ll go ahead and warn you that there’s a lot of sports stuff coming up. Even though I’m not a “sports guy,” it seems like I did a lot of sports things my Junior year. Sorry about that. If I’d known then that I would be blogging now, I might have tried to do more exciting things.)

My Junior year was a big year for me, a year of changes. For one, my brother was no longer at the same school as me, having graduated and gone off to college in South Carolina. Though I would still occasionally get called “Mike” by a teacher, to anyone coming to the school from this point on I would be how they knew the family name.

The school also got a new principal my Junior year. We’d had Mr. Akins up to that point, and he was also the football coach. Though I don’t believe it ever happened to me, I’ve heard from fellow students/players that they occasionally received more leniency in punishment during football season because they were needed on-field. And after having typed that, I now realize why it never happened to me: I was never needed on the field.

Football was even a change for me this year. I went from playing random line positions (both defense and offense) to stating that I wanted to try tight end, a sort-of line position that had me running downfield for passes, too. My timing couldn’t have been worse, as my Junior year was also the year the team started breaking in a new quarterback. I’ve explained it to people this way: “The year I decided to try being a receiver was the year we had predominately a running game.” On top of that, I was an every-other-play guy, as coach used me and the other tight end to run plays into the new QB. We had a game mid-season against our rivals Ethan Allen where coach finally had me in every play, though. Somewhere mid-game he took me out and had Chris Z. (the other guy) go in for the rest of the game. I think he (Coach) was testing to see how the two of us would do in an “every play” situation. The very next play Chris was in, the QB threw him a pass in the endzone. Touchdown, just like that. It was kind of funny, really.

Still, I ended up with impressive stats at the end of my Junior year of football: I caught 100% of the passes thrown my way and had an average of seven yards gained. This is because I was thrown exactly one pass and I caught it. I was tackled immediately thereafter, largely because I wasn’t exactly sure what to do once I caught a pass in a game, as I had never done it before. The play was “Quickie to the Left End,” where I would sprint off the line and look for the ball immediately, a play designed to catch the defense off guard. I remember catching the ball and turning to see three defenders on approach vectors… and that’s it. The story was told later that I caught the ball and then didn’t do anything – “froze” I think was the word they used – and I took some ribbing over that one for quite some time.

This was the same game where a weird penalty was called (something like “team members pushing the running back forward” or somesuch) and I was on the sideline and was asking people around me what the deal was. Coach Flaming, in the midst of being mad at the refs, overheard me and yelled, “If you’d quit wasting your time playing videogames and learn more about football, maybe you’d know what was going on!” While the penalty called was obscure enough that I doubt he was right, I find it somewhat amusing that once I started playing football videogames in college, I learned way more about the way the game is played than I ever did in high school. And I have yet to see that particular penalty called in any football videogame I’ve ever played.

If I don’t point it out he will, so I better go ahead and mention that one touchdown my friend Dave (a runningback) got was due in some small part to what he calls “a fantastic block” on my part. When tight ends aren’t running downfield on a pass pattern, they’re blocking. On this one play, Dave was coming right around my end of the line. This was apparently the one time I was able to contain the defender and Dave was able to get past and go on his way to the endzone. I only remember this because he pointed it out when the team was watching the game tape the next week in practice. So there’s that.

Our class got a new English teacher this year, Mrs. Carlson. She was… hmm. I’m not exactly sure how to describe her. After a year of running roughshod over Miss Swank, I think we probably needed a teacher like Mrs. Carlson. Talking in class was punished by push-ups. Late assignments might have you skipping around the classroom singing “A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket.” Using the word “ain’t” would get you a nose-tweaking (a Mrs. Carlson practice not limited to the classroom, as she would tweak noses of visiting chapel speakers or whoever else happened to be around her). I never had to sing in class, but I do believe I led the class in push-ups by the end of the year.

Mrs. Carlson had a habit of dragging her teacher desk over the wooden floor – she would drag it out of the way and then drag it back – a couple of times per class. It made the most horrible scraping sound you can imagine. While I am not one for pranks, my friend Eric and I hit on an idea one day. We and some other people were using her classroom after school to make decorations and we decided to nail her table to the floor. It had little removable rubber caps in the bottoms of the hollow table legs, so we removed them and nailed them to the floor and then put the table back over them. The next morning we waited for the inevitable table-pull. Sure enough, she tried. And then, with a puzzled look, she tried again. She came around front to see who had their feet on the table impeding her progress, scowled, and tried again. By this time most of us were busting up, as news had spread of our attempts to thwart the awful noise. She finally noticed us and asked us what was going on. On finding out, she laughed and laughed – luckily for us! – and admitted she knew it was awful that she pulled the table so frequently. The nails were removed after class… and she went right back to her old ways the very next day. There’s no teaching teachers!

I had the opportunity to be in the Academy Singers my Junior and Senior years, a smaller-than-the-concert-choir singing group that had occasion to travel different places and sing. Some time in December we had the chance to be part of some Christmas celebrations by doing some singing on a street downtown on a Saturday. I distinctly remember Mr. Braughler saying “no coats!” I showed up wearing my suit coat and no winter coat… and froze to death for the next hour or so. He apparently meant “no suit coats under your winter coats” but hadn’t made that abundantly clear to the more thick-headed of his group members. There’s a picture in the yearbook of us singing downtown, everyone in nice heavy coats except one lone idiot who looks slightly blue, even though the picture is in black and white.

I joined the basketball team my Junior year… sorta. A good number of my friends were on the team and they always told great stories about going off to tournaments and stuff and I wanted to be a part of it. The team needed a stat-keeper, so that’s what I did. Somewhere along the line I wrote new lyrics to “Goober Peas” along the lines of “Stats, stats, stats, stats / Keeping ev’ry stat.” At the end of the season when Coach Flaming was being pressured (a little by me, but mostly by my friends) to let me letter in the sport because I’d been at every game and all that, he said, “If you sing your ‘Stats’ song at the pep rally, I’ll let you letter.” Done & done. I guess I’ve always been an entertainer at heart, even if those I’m trying to entertain aren’t very entertained. I think there were maybe three people entertained, but I got my letter for basketball!

One day in February I was running late for school – I needed to pick up Phil and Eric and get to Academy Singers practice – and as I was headed out my dad said, “Don’t go the back way today. The roads are bad this morning.” I think I said okay, but I needed to make up some time and the back roads were the best method. I wasn’t a mile from home before I spun around a couple of times and ended up in the ditch. I spent the walk-run across the fields to my house wondering how I was going to explain to Dad that I’d gone the back route. I’m sure he was mad, but what I remember more is that he got his tractor and went and pulled my car out of the ditch. The accident scared me, and I made some specific spiritual choices following it that I still think about to this day. Aside from that, there are two other things I remember about the accident:

1. My car never worked quite the same after that.
2. There was a Kenny G song on the radio when I went in the ditch. I only tolerated Kenny G at that time but have been annoyed by his music ever since.

I played baseball again in the spring, my second and last season doing so. We had a new coach who didn’t like me much, but he let me play second base and had someone else hit for me. I was a pretty decent second baseman, really. Not outstanding, but decent. But I couldn’t hit to save my life. Our pitchers would hit (and hit well, in some cases!), and coach would use a pinch hitter for me. Somewhere along the line he found that another player could play second okay but could also hit, and I spent the rest of the season on the bench. Meh. I was only there for fun anyway, so it didn’t matter too much (case in point: while on the bench, I wore a baseball cap that had Vulcan ears on it). I did have one shining moment before my early retirement, though. It was shining enough that Phil, who was our Mr. Sports (meaning he was really really good at any sport he played and was really really serious about playing – I’m not sure why he liked me, frankly), and also wrote the baseball blurb for the yearbook mentioned it. We were playing Ethan Allen and a fellow came up to bat, and there was a man on first. I remembered that on his last at-bat he had hit it straight up the line over the second base, so I moved over a bit closer to the base (second basemen are actually normally placed between first and second bases). Sure enough, he hit it almost exactly in the same place, so I was able to scoop it up, step on second and throw the ball to first for a double play. Double plays are rare enough in high school ball that it was pretty exciting – I think Phil just about fell over from shock. I don’t think it would have worked out so well if our first baseman, Josh, hadn’t been 6’3”. I seem to remember him having to stretch pretty much full-length to reel that one in. Still, it was the highlight of my baseball career and I was commemorated in the yearbook with these words: “Several things from the ’89 season will be remembered […], Mark’s spirited and ‘gnarly’ encouragements from the bench, as well as his double play at Ethan Allen.”

I remember my Junior year being a pretty good year, overall, and that’s in spite of the fact that I looked like this:

Me in 1988