Well, happy post-holidays, everyone, and greetings again from the sleepy St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, Missouri, where I'm celebrating the holidays myself with my family. I've skipped updating for the last couple of days, because duh, I've been celebrating the holiday with my family, so have instead just been keeping short notes in my paper notebook about what's been going on, and thought I'd share those with you today now that the holiday is officially over. And what the hell, since I'm here with access to my dad's Mac PowerBook G4 laptop, and Wifi connections every goddamn corner I turn, I thought I'd load up a bunch of photos and MP3 files as well, to supplement today's notes. So, sorry to all you mobile users, because I know it took a long damn time for today's page to load; but all you desktop/laptop users, hopefully you'll get a kick out of all the extra media embedded in today's entry.

So, a great plus to this year's holidays - my brother and sister-in-law were able to make it in for Christmas this year, for the first time in something like three years now. Hooray! My brother, for those who don't know, is just as much a smartass as me, just as much into weirdo artistic projects and goofy television shows as me, and in fact is way more into it than me when it comes to some subjects, because he has cable television and I don't. And my sister-in-law, of course, is just as much a smartass as well - I don't think my brother could've handled getting married to someone who wasn't - and tends to share a lot of my brother's strange random obsessions (including IKEA, "living doll" beauty pageants, Iron Chef, the Miss America Pageant and porn). And they used to live in St. Louis, see, and both worked for Washington University, so I got to see them every holiday and that was great. But now they live in New York City (the Bronx), and both have high-paying but high-maintenance jobs, and sometimes can't get away for holidays, and sometimes are visiting her family (like Thanksgiving, for example, where they visited her brother in San Diego instead, and spent three days drinking and getting a tan on a rented yacht...fuckers).

So they're here this year, and that's great, and we all hang out and crack wise and make smartass jokes and embarrass my mom to death in public. And in fact, since they still have so many friends here in St. Louis, they always end up getting a hotel in the city when they visit now, so that they can stay out late with their friends in the city and not have a 45-minute drive back to St. Charles waiting at the end of the night. (And because they have so many frequent-flyer miles stacked up that they get great deals on the hotel rooms.) So tonight I guess I'm going to be going out with them and their friends, down in the city, which is great because of course it'll be the first time in about a week I've hung out with a group of people my age and into my kind of things. Well, yeehaw. And I'm sure, absolutely sure, that I will be whipping out my cellphone tonight and calling up Audioblogger.com and recording a new audio post with my brother and sister-in-law for my [randommedia] page, because they're such funny goddamn fuckers when they're trashed and hanging around each other; like a professional team, really, like that couple in the Thin Man movie series from the 1930s, except a whole lot dirtier and into a lot stranger things. And there will be lots more photos documenting this, of course, to my Flickr account soon, so hold on another day or so for that.

And that reminds me of important news for RSS subscribers, which is that what you saw above was not a typo - I've indeed changed the name of my audio Blogspot page from "randomaudio" to its current "randommedia," to reflect that real-time cellphone photos will be now going there as well. So you'll most like need to delete the old subscription address and add the new one; by right-clicking on that link, selecting "Copy Address to Clipboard," then pasting it in the "Add Feed" window at your RSS reader. Actually, I now have somehow collected up like five goddamn different kinds of ways to send photos straight from my cellphone to a website in real time...I guess because I'm an alpha tester at so many of these places, just the absolute first moment I hear about it, and excitedly go over and sign up and promptly start bitching and bitching about what I don't like about it.

Poor David Hue, founder of PixPulse, has been dealing with a bunch of crabby emails recently from me, for example, and he's actually been handling them with a lot of grace, which made me want to mention it. They're basically another photo-sharing site, with a basic Flickr-style layout and interface and features, and even programming (the versatile, dynamic, oh-so-hip AJAX, that is, cool as hell on desktops but will crash a mobile device every single fucking time). What they're claiming, though, is that by this time next year they're going to have a really, really kickass interface via WAP as well, for people not only on cellphones but for high-end devices like mine; an xHTML version, basicallly, that will give you each and every option of the desktop version, simply in static form instead of unopenable dynamic. I'll believe it when I see it, of course, but for now I'm impressed that this is an even a goal for PixPulse, because Flickr certainly has shown no interest whatsofuckingever in building a mobile static interface - it's either AJAX-friendly computers or fuck you, valuable member. I hate that goddamn attitude from programmers - you hear me, third-party developers? So I'll switch to PixPulse if they get this xHTML version running, sure; I've got no problem with that at all. We'll see, I guess.

Got lots and lots of cool little presents this year; man, just some really great stuff. My brother and sister-in-law got me a pile of pirated DVDs (arrgh, matey!), just a bunch of funny stuff that will be great to watch while all fucked up in Chicago on a cold winter night - Harold and Kumar, Family Guy, Triumph the Insult Dog, all six fucking Star Wars movies, two full DVDs of Star Wars supplementary material, etc, yay. And I was expecting this, because this is what I asked them to get me this year, because I'm all into collecting the pirated and bargain-bin DVDs these days. But then they got me a Swatch as well, a really nice one in fact, because my brother has one and has really ended up loving it, and remembered how I used to watch a bunch of Swatches back in the '80s in the first place, in high school (the fashion, in fact, among the new-wavers, was to wear three or four up one arm), and he thought it would make me "more hip with those young readers of yours, ya old fuck." So am I hip again? Oh, and a pair of socks from hipster store H&M with trucker mudflap naked ladies stitched into the weave instead of, say, argyle. Okay, now I'm down with the kids again! Wait, do the kids still say "down?" I'm...jiggy with them? I'm off the hook. Er, something.

And then my parents got me something I was expecting as well, except more of it than I was expecting; basically, a bunch of crazy-ass effective winter clothing being sold in one of those freaky right-wing militia catalogs - you know, where they're also selling assorted "human-hunt gutting knives" and camoflauge, and rations for your mountain compound...er, winter resort. Why are my parents getting a right-wing militia retail catalog? Oh, I suppose the same reason they're getting the one full of genuine Soviet crap these guys keep finding in the backs of warehouses in post-Communist Russia; and the one for National Public Radio, which is just so full of cutsie-wutsie little NPR crap that it makes me want to puke every time I look at it; and the other fucking, what, 200 other catalogs they get delivered every month? It's insane, I'm telling you. Anyway, I look like a ninja in all my new winter gear (even got a wicking-style pullover mask, but I'm afraid of getting jumped by cops if I wear it in Chicago), but needless to say it's all black, so I can't get a decent picture of it all.

And some other things - that sharp leather suit jacket actually purchased over Thanksgiving, and a new perfect-sized straparound/fannypack thingie for my international trips, that will give me instant access to the five or so things I always need instant access to while traveling (like passport, Treo, cash, cigarettes, etc). And there are so many of those types of bags, and some are so crappy, but they got the one just the most perfect for me, so that's great. But the absolute coolest was I think one of the more inexpensive ones - an ADSTech "Instant Music" converter, for hooking up old analog stereo equipment (like turntables and cassette players) to your computer, for conversion into digital MP3 format. Hallelujah, sing it to the heavens! I've been wanting a setup like this for so long, man, because I have so much invested in my old formats of collected music, and especially a lot of stuff that's hard to find in any modern digital format.

The whole process has inspired an entire 2,000 entry from me, of course, which will probably be coming tomorrow - about digging through all my old vinyl and cassettes; remembering stories from junior high, high school, college; how weird it is to listen to the poor quality of my old cassettes, and remember how acceptable it was even five or six years ago; and especially how surprisingly flawless and easy the converter actually worked, and how I want to give a big, strong recommendation to the company who makes it. Just for now, though, I thought I'd at least share a couple of files, so you could hear what the conversion actually sounds like. This link, for example, is to one of the vinyl conversions I made; just right-click on it (Control-click on a Mac), choose "Save File As..." to your hard drive, then add it to your usual music collection. And it was created in iTunes, so if you open it in iTunes yourself, you should get all the extended metadata about the track as well - album, label, year, track number, cover artwork, even extended comments about the actual equipment used to create the conversion. (Let me know if it doesn't go through, by the way. Oh, and I hear that the cover artwork will pop up on the screen if you listen to it on a video iPod; if someone does this, could they take a snapshot of it for me to post here? Thanks!)

The track is a live version of "My Ever Changing Moods," a fantastic song by a fantastic band called The Style Council, off a British import I picked up in 1986 called The Style Council, Live!, that over the years I never was able to find released on CD. (And in fact, I just checked and it's not even available at the iTunes store.) And remember, of course, that this was recorded on a high-end turntable off a vinyl pressing that was kept in really good shape, and that of course I have hearing problems as well; but I think, anyway, that the MP3 sounds pretty much as good as a burn off a CD usually sounds as well. And especially if you set your equalizer to turn down the bass and up the high trebles; iTunes users, the track should be programmed to switch your equalizer to this automatically while playing the song. Not bad from a 20-year-old vinyl pressing that's been sitting in a dank basement for the last decade, playing on a 40-year-old turntable. And besides, when it comes to getting to listen again to some of these really great old albums, I'll take "pretty much as good" over "not getting to listen to them at all" any day.

And then this other link is to one of the cassette conversions; specifically, it's a voice-break spot from my old college radio show, "Two Hours of Torch," a combination of American standards (cabaret music, torch music, etc) and smartass commentary, which originally aired on KCOU 88.1 fm Columbia MO, 1992-93. And now, you'll tell with this one that the source was a cassette, that in fact I think there's not much to be done about that. And in fact, even the source wasn't exactly studio-quality; it was just a tape recording off an actual radio signal of the show coming in, set up in the DJ lounge there on-premise. But still, for a direct-from-radio recording, on a magnetic tape also sitting in a dank basement for a decade, played on a cassette deck that's 25 years old itself...not too terribly bad, really. So that track just gives you a random idea of what my radio show was like, when music wasn't playing - goofy comments, off-the-cuff remarks, little sit-ins with friends and fellow DJs. (This particular track, for example, features my old buddy Troy Lund, who back then did the weekly hardcore punk show, and is now in Seattle and is a fairly well-known indie-rock musician and sound engineer.)

So that's going to be fun, I think, to go through all those old "Torch" tapes of mine, and pulling out all the ones that are maybe the funniest or that feature friends who have gone on to have online lives themselves (like, for example, The Great and Powerful Doctor David Robinson, who's in Los Angeles now and doing pretty well as a stand-up comedian, and who used to sit in for little voice breaks a lot on my show, because he was just always fucking hanging around the station anyway, goddamn little slacker). Frankly, I kinda like the idea of someone Googling for one of my old college-radio friends, and finding in the results one of these '90s radio recordings where they're acting like a goof; there's something a little evil but enjoyable to me about the idea. So I'll probably be getting around to that this summer, which is likely the next time I'll be in St. Charles again for any length.

Wow, and I still have so much more to tell you about, but I've gone on so long already, so I guess tomorrow I will finish up the random notes; and then on Thursday will be the separate entry about this analog conversion process and all the funny and enjoyable nostalgic thoughts it's brought up. And then I'll be back in Chicago by then, of course, and back to my regular routine and daily updates via mobile device. I thought I'd finish today, though, by showing you what else I stumbled across, as I was combing my parents' den and basement shelves, hunting down old cassettes. On the right, the first computing device I ever owned - a National Semiconductor 700 calculator, red LED display and not even able to find the square root of a number. Got this in...hmm, 1977, fourth grade, and was so, so excited. Of course, I had already owned tech gadgets before this - circuitry set, crystal radio, etc. But this was my very first computing device, which is what got me so psyched. And then of course two or three years later my dad and went in together to get our first actual home computer - a TRS-80 Color Computer, and by the way, shut up. And then on the left, my first computing device to do fancy things like functions and graphing - the Texas Instruments TI-35, pretty much a standard for all math dorks in the mid-'80s. Got to use it to cheat the entire first half of the year in high-school Calculus, because the teacher didn't know such devices even existed; but then he read something in a magazine, got wise, and suddenly all our TI-35s were banned on test days. Damnit!