by Chris Barrus
The voltage regulators on Apple’s 17″ flat panel monitors have been failing and there’s a great deal of justified hand-wringing and irate anger at Apple’s inflexible out-of-warranty strategy which is to replace the monitor at a $500+ cost. If your Apple LCD is flaking out, go directly to Monitor Experts in Anaheim – they can fix them at a fraction of the price.
Not affiliated with them in anyway, just a satisfied customer with three formerly dead displays.
Yeesh. The latest AMG site redesign is quite possibly the worst site redesign ever. Browsing by genre, theme, etc. is now “subscriber content” (attention BugMeNot!), less information is now listed on an artist page and there’s this:
“Notice: You are accessing allmusic.com with a browser that is not currently supported. The appearance and functionality of the site could be impacted. allmusic.com is optimized for Internet Explorer 5.5 and above for Windows.”
Firefox and Safari users apparently have to step to the rear of the bus. Sorry AMG, I’m out – I’ll pop in for the occasional discography check, but feel free to drop dead in the meantime.
And finally back home after being out in NYC for awhile. Public service announcement: you might think that you’re getting a deal with cheap airfare on America West, but you would be wrong because there’s a good chance that your flight will be cancelled due to mechanical problems. I was late able to catch a new connecting flight to SNA, but apparently I’m not the first one that’s had this happen. More America Worst West commentary and the obligatory sucks page.
To add insult to injury, the first gate I attempted to depart from at JFK was British Airways‘ old Concorde gate and lounge. Tremendously obvious thought of course but while standing around watching the dust gather in the lounge I can’t help but count up the number of steps backwards travel/culture/etc. is taking. Sure, I’m not in any situation where I can spring for supersonic travel, but goddamn I sure want the option to.
Additionally, someone at America West needs to get it through their thick head that if they’re going to serve the New York and Miami areas they need to offer some food that doesn’t have pork in it. Just saying…
For something billed as one of the best airports in the country LAS sure is an anonymous sprawl. Much like Las Vegas itself I suppose. I’m sure at some point in it’s past McCarran International swung as much as the rest of Vegas in the 1960s but wannabe Rat Packers would need a magnifying glass and tray full of martinis to unearth any evidence of its past. Now you have to leave LAS’ secure area to drink up because even with Vegas’ current sleaze-positive image there isn’t an appropriately scuzzy airport bar to anchor the terminal. Just a couple of clean, well-lit sports bars devoid of anything, including customers.
LAS is not that great of a place to hang out. The high-rolling gentry of course, fly on corporate or privately-leased jets and consequently never use the terminal, but there’s still plenty of people-watching opportunities if free-floating anxiety is your bag. People anxious to hit the casinos and do things that they can “leave in Vegas” and hungover people anxious to get the hell out of town after blowing their wad. The only “regulars” that LAS has are the “Janet” 737s of the Area 51 squadron and the mannequins that are part of the vintage Bonanza and Hughes Air West airline displays.
I’m off to NYC for awhile so blogging is haphazard at best. One side-effect of all this traveling is that I’ve become a de-facto connoisseur of airport bars. I have come to the conclusion that the most dismal airport bar in the country is the Gibson Guitar Lounge at SNA. Nothing like a moldy old recent poster-sized photo of Lynyrd Skynyrd to put you in the mood for cross-country travel.
When they haven’t been running “Flops!”-related programming, Trio has been showing the obscure teen exploitation movie Over The Edge on occasion. Known these days as Matt Dillon’s first movie and Kurt Cobain’s favorite movie, Over The Edge is the only movie I can think of that documented suburban teenaged angst and nihilism. Teen culture from 1977 to 1980 has always been divided up among punks and unhip valley kids but little about the then-new suburban areas that catered to upwardly mobile parents who sweated over property values. Of course, growing up in Orange County in the 1970s means that I’m the target audience for the movie, and while I didn’t feel the need to get stoned, smash cars, and listen to Cheap Trick there were plenty of kids I knew in junior high who could have easily been part of it. I had no idea that the movie was based on actual events that happened in Foster City, California in the mid-70s.
Apparently a DVD will finally be released later in 2004. There’s the obligatory fan web site with a “then and now” photo tour of New Granada (actually Aurora and Greely, Colorado) and a recent interview with director Jonathan Kaplan.
One thing I always wondered about was the television station that apparently played nothing but computer generated patterns on the screen. Apparently, some cable companies would have a channel that was nothing but a music track and an early audio visualizer supplying the video. Atari had a device called Atari Video Music that generated video pretty much identical to what’s in the movie.
Video synthesizers are themselves an oddball piece of early tech that bears further investigation. AudioVisualizers.com has a run down of the models.