The 1980s were a pretty unique time to be a kid. It was a period where electronic games and gadgets were on the rise, but they hadn’t fully consumed our childhoods. Perhaps it was an era of simpler pleasures, but GI-Joes, Transformers, He-Man, Legos, and even marbles were things I played with in my youth.
In late 1982, I remember asking…well, no, I didn’t ask. I BEGGED my parents at a department store for this little basketball game. You’d wind up a little guy shaped like a basketball, and then let him go and he’d hop up to a peg and then start going around in circles above a platform until you slammed a button. If your timing was right, he’d be catapulted into the basket scoring you a point. I can’t recall if I’d seen it on a TV commercial or just saw it in the store. It was probably $10 or $15, but anyways, nope, my parents wouldn’t have any of that. I was a kid…I was disappointed of course!
Fast forward to Christmas Day morning. Santa delivered a 4-year-old the best present he had ever received!
Maybe it’s just the feeling of nostalgia I sometimes get, but these pictures also bring so much emotion to me now that I’m 46. Perhaps it’s the happiness a simple, thoughtful gift can bring, or even thinking about how happy my parents must have felt when they saw my Christmas totally get made by the gift.
Gifts, no matter when they are given, can be quite special depending on the circumstance. They don’t need to be expensive. They don’t even need to be tangible. The best ones come from those that know you, and love you.
The Minnesota Orchestra knocked it out of the park last night! Sunday afternoon had Bethany and I making a trip to Orchestra Hall to watch the Minnesota Orchestra perform the motion picture score to the movie “Back to the Future”, and it was incredible. The actual movie was played on a projection screen, while the score was performed live. Let me tell you, I would be here every weekend if I could hear the best of Alan Silvestri and Hans Zimmer played by Minnesota’s best-in-the-business musicians. Enjoy a few minutes of the performance!
Yacht Rock [yot rok]; late 70s to early 80s somewhat corny soft rock music, usually with high production value, jazz and R&B influences, use of an electric piano, and lyrics about heartbroken or foolish men. Think: “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers, “Sailing” by Christopher Cross, “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan, “She’s Gone” by Hall & Oats, and “Runaround” by Boz Scaggs.
Bethany and I have been exploring this genre ever since our 5,000+ mile road trip out west this Summer, and I must admit, I’ve been kind of obsessed with it these last several months. A few Saturdays ago, we went to see “Yächtley Crëw” at Treasure Island in Welch, and had second row seats to this band who covers, and makes fun of, several of the hit songs from this era. Imagine our surprise when we weren’t the youngest people there! And the place was PACKED! This band is also featured in HBO’s documentary on Yacht Rock called “Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary” which was released on their streaming platform “Max” on Black Friday.
Part of the holiday experience back in the 1980s was to fire up the Apple ][ computer, put in the diskette for “The Print Shop”, and print out Christmas cards and banners.
If this flooded back some memories for you, perhaps you’d like to do it all again this Christmas!
Head over to https://theprintshop.club which is a complete Apple ][ emulator with “The Print Shop” preloaded, where, from your own web browser, you can create a card, sign, letterhead, or banner, just like you used to do 40 years ago. When you’re finished, the website will generate a PDF file for you that you can print on your home printer. Likely, a lot less loud and annoying than the old dot-matrix printers of days gone by!
There’s only one guy in the United States that makes the kind of orthotics that work well for Bethany, and they are nearly 8 years old. After 8 years of the kind of active lifestyle we live, wear is to be expected. Even then, I didn’t exactly expect that Bethany would have worn a hole in the heel of carbon fiber!
So with maybe a week or two notice, we were back to Las Vegas for an emergency repair and overall refreshening of the rivets, straps, Velcro, and all the other pieces that have seen better days. Mitch from Ortho Rehab Designs repairs carbon fiber in-house, a process which fascinated me as he explained it.
Of course, while we waited for the 2-day repair process to finish, we had time on our hands. But without Bethany’s braces, we had to experience Vegas as if the technology to allow Bethany to walk didn’t exist. And that meant some very real on-the-job training in ADA for both of us, and the real-life sociology and difficulties people that use wheelchairs go through every day.
We drove around Vegas and experienced the strip, which has changed quite a bit in the last 8 years. The F1 race just finished up as we were arriving, and it was kind of cool to be driving on the actual track the F1 drivers drove on! Our hotel, the Fontainbleau, had F1 cars and Aston Marton’s in the lobby to celebrate the event. Much of the strip was still in its reconfigured format for the week. The locals were so happy it was over, they couldn’t tell me enough!
We stopped by the Arte Museum which was a very modern museum that tantalized your senses of sight, sound, taste, and smell, so that you were totally immersed in each room with an original artwork. Dozens of projection systems in each room blanketed the walls and floor, and dozens of speakers surrounded you with music and ambient sounds of the scene you were a part of. Each room smelled different, like forest or flowers. Bethany and I colored a picture of an elephant on paper, which after placing underneath a scanner, instantly materialized on the wall and started walking around and trumpeting. In the tea room, when you moved your tea cup around the table, scanners would follow it and create pictures inside your cup which would disappear as you picked it up to take a sip. This was one of the coolest things I’ve done in Vegas!
We returned from Vegas very early Wednesday morning, just in time for a final day of work before the holiday.
Which brings me back to being thankful, for a lot of things. It’s fantastic that technology exists and people exist that strive to better the lives of others. Mitch from Ortho Rehab Designs who designed, engineered, and builds custom carbon fiber braces in his own office. The wonderful bell desk at Fontainebleau that procured a folding wheelchair for us so we could continue with our adventures. All the people that didn’t treat us any differently along the way.
And outside of the trip, I remain thankful for my family. I remain thankful for the friends that stand beside me in my life. I am thankful for good health and the gifts I have received in my life that allow me to live the way I do. And I am very thankful for Bethany.
Thanksgiving to me is not just the holiday in the way of Christmas. It is truly a time we should all reflect on how lucky we are. Take a few moments today to do just that!
Netflix showed last night that while its content delivery networks (CDNs) continue to work well delivering static content, I believe their edge infrastructure in regional internet exchange points (IXPs) were completely unprepared for a live presentation that millions of people were watching.
Netflix can start by adding more infrastructure in the 511 Building in downtown Minneapolis, because most people in this area that I talked to had to keep hitting refresh or go back 10 minutes in order to view a potato 240p stream of the fights. However, if you used a VPN to modify your perceived location to a different area of the world, streaming worked a lot better with no buffering…HD even!
What is the most puzzling to me is how a company, that wouldn’t exist now without its technology infrastructure, and which has a net income of $2+ billion a quarter, and nearly a year in lead time before the fight, couldn’t possibly prepare better for this event. Things aren’t all well at Netflix.
Political polls continually forget to acknowledge the reality that there are a large group of people that will respond to these polls in the exact opposite way of how they intend to vote, purely out of sarcasm.
Happy 100th Birthday, May Bottke! (May was my Kindergarten Teacher at Lincoln Elementary School in 1983-1984, and I was the popcorn man in the Kindergarten circus!)
It was so great to have a few minutes to talk with this special lady. And yes, she still remembers my birthday!
Me touching the Apollo 13 Command Module…the machine that held together after a nearby service module explosion, and after being in a deep freeze in space, to get astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swaggert home in April of 1970. Picture from July 2017 @ The Cosmosphere, Hutchinson, Kansas.
