SLLEA RCA Video Adapter – You Get What You Pay For

The old saying “you get what you pay for” is usually true. Recently I had a brilliant idea. Instead of hooking up my old computers and video game consoles to a large television, wouldn’t it be nice if I could hook them up to a small flat screen monitor? I have a couple of 4:3 ratio flat screen monitors out in the garage that could work for just such a project. The only hurdle is that those monitors only have VGA inputs, and my old computers and video game consoles all have RCA (composite) outputs. If only someone made a… (read more)

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Beastie Boys Book (2018)

Adam “King Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Mike “Mike D” Diamond — two founding members of the legendary Beastie Boys — spend the first hundred or so pages of the new voluminous Beastie Boys Book describing New York City as it appeared in the early 1980s. It’s a bit wild, with lots of (unsupervised) teens hanging out at clubs, causing mischief, and discovering music both before and of their time. It was in that setting that Horovitz and Diamond met Adam “MCA” Yauch, discovered and dabbled in the hardcore punk music scene, and eventually went on to form one of the most… (read more)

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The Death of Mr. Moonpie

I first blogged about Mr. Moonpie more than ten years ago and about six years I recorded an entire podcast about the guy, but for those of you new to the party, here’s a brief recap of the life — and now, death — of Mr. Moonpie. I grew up connecting to computer bulletin board systems (BBSes) run by other people, but didn’t set up my own until the mid 1990s. Named after a line from an Ice-T song, The Gas Chamber BBS quickly became one of the more popular underground bulletin board systems in the Oklahoma City area. I… (read more)

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A Week of Moving

What a whirlwind the past seven days have been. Last Sunday was moving day. We weren’t done packing everything when the movers arrived, but I’m not sure that anyone’s ever completely ready to move. By the time the moving company backed their trucks into our driveway, we had packed most of the big stuff and we packed most of the small stuff. We had packed most of the things we wanted to keep, and a lot of the things we had planned to part with. We packed and packed and packed. First we ran out of boxes. Then, we ran… (read more)

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Hard to Say Goodbye

Friday night, I did something I said I wasn’t going to do. Tired of sorting old computer parts and sick of the packing process, I dumped multiple drawers full of old computer parts into a medium-sized box, taped the box shut, and wrote the following words on the side: COMPUTER JUNK. It’s definitely not junk. I mean, it is, and it isn’t. I guess if you call modems and network cards that wouldn’t work with any computer made in the past twenty years junk, well, to you it might be junk. Most people would call it junk. Oh, hell, who… (read more)

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Moving and my Columbus Day Casino Tradition

I was sitting downstairs yesterday morning with two crisp $100 bills in my pocket when Susan reminded me the realtor would be here in an hour to go through and assess our house. Columbus Day is a “mommy and daddy” holiday, where the kids have to go to school but Susan and I are off work. Four or five years ago the two of us decided that would be a good day to a local casino during the day, and that has turned into a tradition. With the closing date on our new house less than two weeks away, “the… (read more)

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My Intergalactic Tubs Runneth Over

“Do you really need that many tubs for your Star Wars stuff?” she asked. I can’t remember which part I hid from her — that I’d already used the ten tubs I had from the last time we moved, that I’d already bought and filled ten more, or that I needed another ten to finish packing — but by the time all the tubs had been filled, there was no hiding the hoard. Until we get settled, there’s a chance my Star Wars collection may remain in storage for a few months. I don’t want my things to get crushed.… (read more)

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Betsy Byars and the Rattlesnake: The TV Kid

Last night I took a break from packing and read The TV Kid, written by Betsy Byars and published in 1976. No matter how many books I had access to growing up, there was always something magical and exciting about ordering new ones from the Scholastic order forms at school. Few choices were more gut-wrenching than narrowing down which books to order from those colorful quarterly pamphlets, each one filled with lists of new releases, best sellers, and old favorites. In each one I would circle a dozen books I hoped to purchase, which my mom would help me narrow… (read more)

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Star Wednesday: Imperial Troop Transporter / Imperial Cruiser

By 1979, Kenner must have been panicking. Owning the toy rights to the Star Wars franchise was essentially like being able to print their own money. Kids were lining up at toy stores across the country with cash in hand, eager to purchase any and every action figure the company released. We’re not just talking Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader here. Some of the first figures released included Power Droid, a small box with legs whose only line in the movie was the noise “gonk,” and Death Star Droid, a silver robot who had no dialog at all. And while… (read more)

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Repairing $1,000 Rims with a $6 Paint Pen

Shortly after I bought my Ford Flex, I replaced the stock wheels with a custom set of aftermarket rims and tires. Shortly after that, we drove the Flex to Denver to attend my friend Robb Sherwin’s wedding. While in Denver I attempted to parallel park, and in the process I rubbed up against a curb and scratched two of my four brand new rims. Normally it wouldn’t be so bad, but these rims are black, which really makes the scrapes stand out. Back in Oklahoma, I checked around for quotes on repairing the rims. The original quotes I got ($100/rim)… (read more)

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