brykmantra.com

My previous posts — the Three Related Thoughts series — took about twice as long to write as I thought, so I got (or rather stayed) farther behind in my topics, so let’s get down to some geek-related things from the past few days, starting with this little gem that I saw in the Office Depot circular last night:

It’s a Swissmemory Swiss Army Knife with a 512MB flash drive, plus the standard S.A.K. utensils like knife, nail file, flathead screwdriver, scissors, and pressurized ballpoint pen.

Those Swiss soldiers know how to party, huh? Especially with half a gig of data storage.

Anyway, the ad said it had a laser pointer, but it doesn’t.

Bummer, because that would have been way too cool.

But hey, it was on sale for $29.99 after rebate, and it’s hard to find a 512MB flash drive for that price even without the Swiss coolness.

This has been a geeky week anyway, since I spent most of Fridaydoing tech support. New Boss in Training has decided to start calling in a megabucks-per-hour computer consultant to fix our computer problems, but it was taking up too much of Main Computer Guy’s time, since being a computer guy isn’t his main job.

The thing is, though, that I’m A+ Certified (i.e., qualified to work on computers), as I listed on my job description that I gave to NBiT during his first week. Maybe he just doesn’t want computer fixing to distract me from my work either.

That’s fine, but my concern is that everybody thinks I’m being bypassed because of low confidence in my abilities.

I worked to counteract that on Thursday and Friday, by quickly and decidely fixing the many problems that arose, and chatting up the people around me as to the highly technical things I did to work each miracle. Among those miracles were: Trying to diagnose Marlene’s frequent computer freezes (software conflicts, duh), get one of her co-workers into the LAN (she had wiped out the pre-typed domain name from the sign-in dialog box, so I typed it back in), and replaced David’s CD drive after the outside professional computer guy tore it to pieces trying to get it to eject.

I took the computer back to my desk to swap out the drive, a routine operation, so that more people would be sure to see me in action.

Life is good, and geek life is great. But maybe I should frame and hang my A+ certificate just to drive the point home.

Anyway, I was in such a geek mood by the time I got home that I decided to do some periodic maintenance on my home PC, to get ready for winter (assuming that season ever gets here, seeing as we’re 20 degrees above normal temps in November). I replaced a missing expansion port plate, and reinstalled by floppy drive carriage (including one of my backup drives) which had been on my table since spring, and installed a bay fan array that I’ve had since before I got my Antec case, because it wouldn’t fit my HP case. I also evicted a whole bunch of dust bunnies from around the vents.

Geek vigilance never rests.

Oh, and one more (geek) thing: Is there anything geekier than fractals? I think not.

One of my co-workers also happens to be one of my best commenters these days, and her screen name is Fract_L, because she’s into fractals, so this is for her: A link to the fractal-related post I did in 2004, when Google did a salute to the Father of Fractals.

Previously on brykMantra: I was talking about having spent five days in Lubbock, a city so conservative that Democrat and Republican candidates get into fistfights over who loves President Bush more — so conservative that the now-closed military base seems to have been a liberalizing influence. In part two, I mentioned that I counterweighted my time there by listening to the university radio station, where they play some of the best alternative music available (which is not unusual for college stations).

In this third installation, I wanted to highlight the band the really got my attention: The Go! Team (not be confused with the 80s band Go Team, whose members went on to form Bikini Kill).

This Brighton, England, group’s work has many of the trappings of contemporary alternative music — hip-hop beat, thrashing guitars, rap vocals — but what sets them apart is the fact that their sound is based on sounds of the 60s through the 80s, especially TV themes and scores. They sample extensively from older music (I believe I caught some Archie Bell and the Drells), plus they play instruments that would seem out of place in contemporary music, like harmonica and banjo.

Their latest album is Thunder, Lightning, Strike, and it instantly evokes memories of the television programs from my teen years and early adulthood.

Most of the instrumentals, like “Ladyflash”, “Junior Kickstart”, “Everyone’s a VIP to Someone”, and especially “Friendship Update”, almost sound like they were lifted from 1970′s TV movies and series — and it’s possible that a lot of the sampling was.

But besides pandering to the old fogey market, they also use elements that capture memories of universal school activities, like jumprope chants, pep squad cheers, and drumline rhythms.

It was almost like being back in markching band.

My favorite song on the album is “Bottle Rocket”, layers the energetic girl rapper Ninja over a horn fanfare that sounds like something right out of The Bionic Woman.

This album boils down American 70s mainstream culture to its essence and serves it up in a brand new hip hop bottle.

That’s quite an accomplishment for a bunch of kids, not to mention a bunch of British kids.

So seriously, check them out. Here are some resources:

The Go! Team official site.

The Go! Team on Wikipedia.

Reviews of the latest album and a recent U.S. concert at Pitchfork media and Filter magazine.

The album’s listing on Amazon, where I highly recommend that you listen to some of the song samples.

And just see if you don’t enjoy this living anachronism of a band as much as I do.

Previously on brykMantra: I recently spent five days in ultra-conservative Lubbock, and I found a nice balance in listening to the Texas Tech radio station, KTXT-FM, which, like most campus stations, offers a wonderful change from the bland, corporate-owned, homogenized radio stations that dominate the nation’s airwaves.

It was even more interesting to me, since I had once been a DJ on that same station, many, many years ago. The music has changed, of couse, but relatively speaking, it’s the same thing: Music that’s more progressive and less commercial than the mainstream pap being forced on the masses by the Big Radio machine.

Bands they played while I was there included Wolf Parade (the DJs were particularly fond of the band’s song “Modern World”), Sigur Ros, The Grabs, Audioslave, SNMNMNM and The Go! Team.

One thing that is different are the DJ names. Back when I was on the air, about half of us used our real names, and the rest used an air name that sounded snappy yet nondescript — just like on the big corporate stations.

Now, though, the DJ names are colorful and catchy, like multiplayer game screen names or rap artist monikers — names like El Supremo, The Reverend, Mrs. Lawless, Burgers, Beatnik, The Chief, Kerouac, Red Hot, and my personal favorite-ever DJ name, A Single Grain of Rice.

There was also a lot more discussion: whole hours devoted to several of the on-hour personalities discussing various issues. The big discussion last week was about some preachers that took to the soapbox in the University’s Free Speech Area (another thing we didn’t have when I was a student) and began making pronouncement about who would be going straight to hell — including some of the station’s DJ that happened to be present.

Apparently, the result was quite a bit of screaming and name-calling and profanity, and other highly entertaining features, and the next day several of the station personnel talked about the incidents at length.

Of course, it could be argued that they should be playing music instead of talking amongst themselves, since that latter activity is of much more interest to themselves than the general public.

But then, this is the Information Generation, that grew up with the Internet and instant messaging, maybe a discussion show is more appropriate.

At any rate, you too can catch their fine programming without travelling to Lubbock by going to their website and listening to their audio stream — another thing, of course, that we didn’t have back in the day.

(If the site is down, as it has been lately, or if the listen-link on the site doesn’t work, you can still listen in by going here).

Up next: A few thoughts on one of the bands that I listed above, and which I’ve been listening to since I got back.

Being out of town for several days — out of my comfort zone, living out of a suitcase and a snack bar — gave me a fresh perspective, and lots of time to think, and I’ve arranged several of those thoughts into three related areas, the first of which is this:

Here’s what you need to know about Lubbock: When I was there in October 2004, right before the elections, the airwaves were filled with congressional campaign commercials, just like they were all across the country.

The ads for Republican candidates said, He’s a strong conservative candidate who supports the President!

The ads for Democrat candidates said, He’s a strong conservative candidate who supports the President, and who doesn’t take orders from the party bosses in Washington!

That pretty much sums up the city these days.

Now, I’m a fairly conservative guy, with “conservative” meaning that I go to church on Sunday, and I belive in a strong military, a balanced budget, and a small federal government that keeps its nose out of people’s lives.

“Conservative” doesn’t seem to mean that any more.

These days, conservative means that you support stretching the military to its breaking point, legislating people’s lives in favor of corporate and radical religious interests, and assume everyone is guilty until they can prove themselves innocent.

Regardless of how many times you say the words “freedom” and “liberty” in a State of the Union speech, it doesn’t cover up the fact that America is on the wrong track, and Lubbock is fully on board that train.

Here’s another example: When the local Air Force base closed in the 90s,
Lubbock became MORE conservative.

In other words: The U.S. military is liberal compared to Lubbock.

Of course, it’s not as simple as that: The base brought in hundreds of people from all different parts of the country, meaning that there was a diversity of perspectives present in the city. In addition, many of these outside people were college-educated officers who, although the tended to be fiscally conservative, as are a lot of well-paid people, they also had an expanded world view that informed there opinions and tastes.

On the day that Philip Glass’ “Songs from Liquid Days” was released in 1984, the vinyl edition was sold out of the store I went to on the first day. Of course, there were probably no more than three or four copies, but this was just at one store, and the fact that they were sold out on the first day meant that there was at least a handful of other folks in this little cowboy city with an appreciation of the finer things.

Now, though, I have to wonder how much culture still exists there. Of course, there are postive signs: The city has a symphony, a ballet company, Buddhist meditation classes, health food stores, a classical-music-and-NPR radio station, and, of course, Texas Tech University.

Large universities in even the most straightlaced towns are havens for contrary thought, and Tech is no exception.

I bring this up mainly because I spent a lot of my five days in Lubbock last week listening to KTXT-FM, the campus radio station, and the contrast between the station and the city was both striking and refreshing.

And that brings us to Part 2 of these Three Related Thoughts …