…for I studied physics, and I have duct tape.
Here’s the story: I was assembling a set of shelves for our front hallway, and I was having trouble driving in its screws with the allen key provided. So I duct-taped the allen key to a screwdriver, which provided the necessary torque to finish the job.
Moving to another country requires you to seriously pare down your belongings. I brought only what I could fit in my previous car — Rhonda the Honda — which meant I had to be choosy with what I kept. One of the things I kept is my trusty Korg Wavestation A/D rackmount synthesizer.
Long before that fateful day when Karl Mohr and I took our accordions out on the streets of Toronto, I was a synth player, and my favorite synth was the Wavestation, which I bought from my friend, TV/film composer Steve Skratt back in 1992.
I played it during back at Crazy Go Nuts University, in our grungy, Faith No More-esque band, Volume…
…and after I graduated in all sorts of projects including providing sound effects and background music for my work making interactive CD-ROMS…
…to synth jam sessions, such as the time when Steve Skratt, Karl Mohr, and I were part of the group providing the music for the book launch of The Lion in the Room Next Door, which was written by Karl’s mother, Merilyn Simonds:
As I’m in the process of reviving some old computers of mine and bringing them back to active duty, I’m also bringing the Wavestation A/D back to life. Expect to hear it sometime soon.
If you’re curious about what the Wavestation A/D can do, check out this video, which provides a grand tour of this classic synth:
I’ve had many great first weeks on the job, but this first week on the job had a particularly unfair advantage: I was working at b5media, and the timing was such that my first week on the job was the same week the company went to the South by Southwest Interactive Festival 2008 — that’s the one where Airbnb launched and got only two bookings.
I arrived on Day 1 of the festival and was going to spend a long time in the registration line, when some friends — Min Jung Kim and Rannie Turingan — who were on the “How to Kick Ass at Your First SxSW” panel heard I’d arrived. They somehow used their panel host powers to fast-track me through registration, bring me up to their panel (which was full of big names), and then play accordion for the audience.
That’s what the photo above shows. The best part? I’m literally upstaging Tim Ferriss.
I saw this while going out for a neighborhood walk with Anitra this morning. I need to find out who the owners are, and make friends with them so th I too can cruise down the Hillsborough River in a unicorn boat!
Since I’ve been avoiding the gym since March due to the coronavirus, a good chunk of my regular exercise has revolved around a 10K bike ride that I try to do at least five days a week.
While Florida provides a fantastic climate for year-round cycling, Florida drivers provide a hostile environment for cyclists. The state is still number one in cycling deaths, and I have no intention of adding to that record. Luckily for me, my stomping grounds of Seminole Heights is a lovely residential neighborhood with plenty of quiet tree-lined streets with classic bungalows, “pocket parks”, gorgeous tropical foliage and other things to see that provide miles and miles of great cycling.
I take a different route every day, but at least half the time, I include Lake Roberta on that route.
The word “lake” is a little bit of a stretch — it’s actually a pond surrounded by a residential street, Roberta Circle:
Lake Roberta is home to all sorts of life forms, from the humans who live in the houses on Roberta Circle, to the creatures that live in or near the water. Those include an assortment of different kinds of ducks, a number of ill-tempered geese, ibises, turtles, lizards, squirrels, and possums. I don’t think that there’s a gator in there — with all the houses in the area, I can’t see the people who live nearby not calling wildlife control if they ever see one.
Roberta Circle provides a great way to help collect my 10K. By luck or design, each lap around the “lake” is a quarter mile, and the asphalt is nice and smooth. 4 laps around the lake adds an easy mile to my minimum goal of 6, and I get pretty scenery as a bonus.
My move from Toronto to Florida — a little over six years ago now — forced me to really apply a rule I try to follow: If you’ve been hanging onto something and never use it, let it go. Sell it, give it to someone who really needs it, or toss it. I’ve had to use this rule more since moving from Toronto to Tampa, as the move required me to take only what I could fit in my old car, and because I didn’t want to treat my mother’s basement in Toronto like a free storage place forever.
In spite of this rule, I’ve hung on to one piece of clothing that I’ve had since the very last days 1999 and that I almost never wear. It’s a grey zippered sweatshirt, a photo of which you’ll see later on in this article. There’s nothing terribly bad about it; I like the color, but the cut’s all wrong, it’s a little too big, it has ridiculous snap-straps all over (in the photo, you can see one of them around the neck). While it’s perfectly serviceable, I don’t like it enough to keep it under normal circumstances. It would’ve ended up at the drop-off of a Goodwill or some other charity ages ago. Still, I keep it, and I only get it dry-cleaned by professionals. Why? Because it’s a special gift from my dad.
In 1999, my former high school classmate André Fenton was doing neuroscience research at the Czech Academy of Sciences and decided that he wanted to ring in the year 2000 by throwing a big New Year’s Eve party in the nicest place that he could rent somewhere near Prague.
He found a great place — Zamek Roztěž (although these days, it’s marketed as Casa Serena Chateau and Gold Resort). It’s a “hunting castle” originally built in the late 1600s in the village of Roztěž, located in the Kutna Hora district, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Prague. I was invited to the party, and while there, had a grand old time:
Upon hearing that I would be staying at a castle somewhere in the central European woods in the dead of winter, Dad decided to surprise me by buying me something to keep me warm. That thing was the zippered sweatshirt, and he gave it to me just as he dropped me off at the airport to catch my flight to Amsterdam, and then Prague.
“I got this for you. I don’t want you to be cold when you’re in that castle.”
I thanked him for the sweatshirt, gave him a big hug, wished him a happy new year in advance, and told him that I’d send photos that I’d take with my still-newish digital camera (1024 by 768 pixels in super-fine mode!) to mom via email (he never had an email address).
It’s not really what I would’ve bought, but it’s big and warm, I thought, and it served me well on the flight, in the castle (which wasn’t all that cold — they’d been doing a fair bit of renovating), and especially well on a hike around the castle grounds with some lovely company on the night of January 1st, 2000:
Because I am a big ol’ sentimental softie, not only have I kept this sweatshirt that I don’t really like all these years, but I take it with me whenever I travel far to someplace cold, as a sort of comforting tradition. I wore it walking through the streets of Prague, while shivering on the slopes at Whistler while trying to figure out how snowboarding worked. I wore it when I was conducting mobile technology assessments in the bitter cold of Athabasca’s oil sands. As I drove through the snow-covered hills of West Virginia on those chilly days of March 2014 as I moved to Tampa to be with Anitra, I had it on. I bring it with me on our trips to Toronto in winter. I last wore it during the handful of days that Tampa gets close to freezing, when the office’s heating just wasn’t keeping up. It keeps me warm, not only in the physical sense, but also in the way that it reminds me of his kindness and generosity.
Me, in the “Dad sweatshirt”.
Dad died at the end of February 2006. But thanks to this sweatshirt that I normally wouldn’t be all that crazy about, I have a little bit of him that I can take with me when I’m cold and far from home. That’s why I’ll never part with it.
Happy Father’s Day, everyone.
