PopWars

Can’t remember how I first came across Milton Rogovin’s Buffalo photos. They really hit home with me and I painted a picture of Rogovin and his wife, Anne, in 2003. The Pyramid Art Gallery hosted a traveling show of his work around that time and I met him there and gave him a print of my painting. His wife had just died at that point and now Milton is dead at 101. There’s a nice slideshow of his photos on the Times’ site.

We took Sam Jones out to the Apple Store on Saturday before Steve Jobs announced his decision to step down for a bit. Sam was wearing his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt and his Buffalo Bills jacket. His iPad kept trying to restart while he was using it. The store was mobbed and we waited in line to make an appointment with a genius. Sam gave the woman in a blue shirt his email address and about five minutes later a friendly guy in a blue shirt came over to help us. He scrolled through Sam’s ten pages of game app icons and said, “This looks like it’s been dropped.” Sam said, “Oh yeah. I’ve dropped it a bunch of times.” I cringed but the Apple guy smiled and said. “Breakage isn’t covered in your warranty but I’ll see what I can do.” Sam walked out with a new iPad.

I’m definitely a long time Apple fanboy. When my father bought his Mac II in the late eighties we used to go over there to set type and we eventually bought our own Mac II. We’ve probably had one of almost every model they’ve made since. Well I guess we never had a “toilet seat” and we don’t have an Airbook and we don’t have an iPhone but I wouldn’t leave home without my iTouch. Just by looking at Steve Jobs I would say he has a lot to do with their elegantly designed products. I don’t get that confident feeling by looking at the other execs. I hope he gets well soon.

Nod doesn’t play out that often and I was bummed that we missed them on Saturday at Abilene.
Nod – World Still Wants You

The spinning color wheel that has been haunting me for the last week was an indication of hard drive failure. At least I think it was the hard drive. It got so all I got was a snowy screen. I was concerned that the the system was corrupt and that maybe my Time Machine backups would also be compromised but Marco at the Apple Store assured me that I would be able to do a full restore when I get my iMac back. I should have just looked at the Time Machine folder on my back up drive and I wouldn’t have lost sleep last night because all the files are there. I hadn’t really poked around in there because I pictured it all compressed and unreadable.

When Marco lifted my iMac out the box he spotted the small black and white photo of Peggi, sitting behind her Farfisa and in front of a Vox amp, that I had stuck on top of the Apple logo at the bottom of my screen. He said he was a musician too. He played with friends while going to school in Ithaca but hadn’t hooked up with anyone to play with since moving here. The Apple store was mobbed and they were running about twenty five minutes late at the Genius Bar. The place was packed and I felt like I was in China with all the busy workers running around in blue t-shirts swiping credit cards in their PDAs for the well heeled shoppers. A kid was holding a seminar in the middle of the showroom. Six middle aged students sat on stools at table with their iPhones and laptops. They were learning how to sync the two.

We stopped at Talbot’s on the way home and Peggi returned the sweater she got from my mom for Christmas. Peggi always says my mom has great taste in clothes but this sweater didn’t fit her body type. She found a suitable replacement and picked up an extra top. I found a comfortable chair to sit down in and I noticed that I was wearing the shirt that my mom gave me this year. They had no WiFi in the store but they were playing great music, all black pop, two Michael Jackson tunes and a great cover of “Some Kind of Wonderful”, a song by the 1960′s Rochester band, Soul Brothers Six, later covered by Grand Funk Railroad.

Bitter cold and lots of snow – just the way we like it. The cold part keeps the snow in top notch condition. We skied up to the top of the ridge in Spring Valley and stood up there for a few minutes in silence.

I called Apple today because why not? One of my machines is still under warranty and it was acting up. Hanging up, actually, and they had me unplug the computer and all peripherals and then restart which resets my System Management Controller. I plugged everything back in and it worked – for a while. I had a hunch it was my USB hub because it would disconnect my external drives every once in a while. So I called Apple back asked if it was OK to plug a hub into my keyboard which then goes USB to the computer and they confirmed that that was my problem. The technician also told me to go into my User/Library and dump my “Caches” folder. “Drag the whole thing to the trash.” They suggested that I do that once a moth to speed up the performance of my machine.

I guess you have to go WalMart to pick up AC DC’s new disc. And I think Sears may have an exclusive on black jeans now. I have one old pair that I wear while painting. The knees are worn through and they’re pretty covered in paint. I wear my other pair when I’m not painting but they’re getting pretty ratty so I need to move a new pair into the rotation.

We went out to the Gap in Eastview Mall where I had bought my last pair. Why do they call them a “pair” anyway? I can see a pair of socks but pants? I had read that Gap hired a new designer. Guess the guy doesn’t like black jeans. The salesman recommended Lord & Taylor at the other end of the mall. On the way we stopped at Abercromie & Fitch. It was like a disco in the middle of the afternoon. The sixteen year old salesboy suggested Express. We studied the Mall map and planned our route. A saleswoman at Banana Republic said they had “light black”. I said, “like grey?” She showed us some dark denim. Eddie Bower had prefaded black. I can do that myself. Express had some “Low Rise” jeans. I have a hard enough time keeping my pants up as it is so I nixed those. We struck out at Lord & Taylor and gave up.

We stopped at Apple store to look at the new laptops and and then Ann Taylor where Peggi tried on a top. I wandered around the store and took this photo of a guy bringing wood to his lady. A saleswoman there asked me, “Are you finding everything alright?” I said, “I’m not looking for anything.”

I mentioned this to Bob Martin at our Margaret Explosion gig and he said, “Try Sears”.

I brought my MacBook to the Super Bowl party at my parents house and found a neighbor’s wifi connection to do my blog entry. I wasn’t really paying attention to the game but I gathered it was a good one. It seemed like a long string of commercials interrupted by short bursts of football. I prefer the English version, the beautiful game with no commercials for forty five minutes. I was looking forward to the Apple commercials but I didn’t see any. My niece said they aired one for the MacBook Air before the game started. I admit to being an Macophile but $1799 is too much for a laptop.

Our Apple stock has lost seventy dollars a share from its high but then our stockbroker (who talked us into selling a hundred shares when it was at 70) now says, “Hey, if I had told you seven months ago that Apple would be at 124 now, wouldn’t you want to buy some?” OK, so I am not upset about the stock slipping. I am upset that Apple has trashed its iMovie program. It has been completely rewritten. I never had to read the help forums while using the old iMovie HD. It was all drag and drop intuitive. The first time I used this upgrade I popped open a new project and was greeted with a black window with little boxes with round dashed borders and a prompt to “Drag Media Files Here”. Everything I tried to drag here bounced off. And not only that, they have removed features like the ability to mix multiple audio tracks. The only reason I can think of for why they would be trashing this program is that they are trying to get you to buy their more expensive editing software like Final Cut. But what do I know? My nephew has the scoop.

And now that I’m running Apple’s newest operating system I have “Time Machine” writing huge backup files to my external hard drive of all my botched movie experiments. Apple must have thought it had the Midas Touch.

Lake Ontario

We took a walk down to the lake or up to the lake. It’s downhill but it’s due north so I don’t know which is more correct. This same shot would look completely different everyday if I took it that often. The color of the sky, the water and the land are always changing.

My father hired a plumber a few weeks ago and he used a flashlight that he cranked to get going. It’s a wind up LED flashlight that doesn’t require batteries. My father was so impressed with it, he ordered one for each of the kids for Christmas. It will be perfect for taking walks after dark.

Our nephew, Matt, emailed that he had done a tutorial and screencast on his site (theilife.com) of one of the tasks that we gave him while he is staying here over Christmas. He says he is “having trouble finding Mac problems to solve and he would appreciate it if we could send him questions that we or our friends have in the future.” So send us Mac questions and we’ll pass them along to him.

Our nephew is a geek. When he was five or six he was picking up the empty computer boxes from the curb when neighbors upgraded their systems. He drew keyboards on cardboard and sat in front of the boxes like they were real computers. He had his first Mac at seven or eight and set up a server in his bedroom when he was sixteen. He is still in high school but recently won tickets to MacWorld in San Francisco this January. And today we heard that Information Week has used some of his photos and his reporting in a piece they did on the new Apple Store in Manhattan. He waited on line for four hours to get in the doors for their grand opening. He was paid $250 for the photos.

New Apple Store on 14th Street in Manhattan. Photo by Matthew Dodd.