The Best Stuff 9: iPod + MP3

My graduation present from high school was one of the first CD players. Small portables weren't out yet, so this was a component to put on the shelf next to your amp, and it was a heavy beast, shielded to protect users against the laser inside. I spent a good chunk of my paychecks on music; by the time I was 19 a couple years later I had almost 200 discs.

I can remember sitting at my first color Mac several years later wondering how you could hook the computer to a CD jukebox and pick song names from the computer and not need the jewel cases to know what song number you wanted.

Around 2000 Greg Peterson from church didn't know any other Mac users and had an extra copy of SoundJam MP (later sold to Apple to become iTunes). MP3 was impressive, but on my 250 MB hard drive I could rip a couple albums and fill what was left of my hard disk. When 20 gigabyte hard disks became common a few years later MP3 started to make sense. Mixtapes no longer took hours to make.

When the iPod came out I jumped on one of the first models — before they worked easily with Windows, before the iTunes Music Store, back when Apple was a computer company on the rocks and might not survive the next quarter.

The 1G/2G iPod and its interface (photo center) were fantastic. I could be driving and change the volume or skip songs without looking. I could follow a reference in one song (Stevie Wonder Master Blaster) to another song by a different artist (Bob Marley Jammin'). I'd be by myself listening to it and say out loud, "This is the best thing I ever bought."

Apple went to touch buttons and screens and wrecked the iPod's usability as strictly a music player. But they're so rich now they can pretty much do what they want.

This photo of our family's iPods (Madeleine's green Nano and Touch are missing) took a lot of tries because iPods are so dang reflective. I took this photo at night in the dark, manually popping a flash about 20 times around the perimeter of the scene. My beloved old school 2G iPod in the center looks chunkier ... because it is. Plus it's closer to camera, balanced on a toilet paper tube. Compared to today's slender, shiny iPods, this is Christopher Pike's communicator.

The Best Stuff 8: E-mail

I almost invented e-mail. In 1993 I was a frustrated Boy Scout leader desperately trying to relay details about upcoming activities to parents of the boys in our troop. (It turns out 12-year-old boys are not the most reliable messengers). It was near impossible to reliably get information to everybody without spending hours on the phone.

I dreamed of a system where everybody had a fax machine connected in their home near the front door, where the mailbox used to be. You could key a message into your computer and then blast it out to multiple people electronically. When they got home from work or school, all the family’s messages would be waiting for them in a pile of transmitted “mail” by the door.

When e-mail came out and everyone started getting addresses, it was heaven. E-mail complemented my introverted side by letting me “talk” to others without the requisite courage and involuntary biochemical side effects involved in making actual eye contact or uncomfortable small talk. Plus I’m an excellent writer (I rocked the GRE writing element) but only an average speaker.

E-mail now makes my current career possible. I work 400 miles from my actual office and collaborate with colleagues all over the country.

There are some downsides. I get 200 messages a day, many of which require action. My Blackberry tethers me to work whether I want it or not.

E-mail was the killer Internet app that led to further advances. Yesterday at a national web conference in DC I met Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup.com. After living through 9/11 as a New York City resident he realized it shouldn’t take a disaster to befriend your neighbors. His site helps you organize face-to-face activities in your area — it uses the Internet to get you off the Internet. In 2004 this guy from Illinois used Meetup to successfully organize people to help him run for the U.S. Senate; later he moved on to higher office.

Yesterday the AP Stylebook officially recognized the word “email” without a hyphen.

• This is a terrible precedent. Are we now supposed to write “ecommerce,” “ebanking”? Ick.
• I was a philatelist, but even I don’t know how much a first-class stamp costs these days. At this point isn’t it redundant to use the “e”?

The Best Stuff 7: Fonts

I have loved letters as long as I can remember. And I remember a lot in this department.

One of my earliest childhood memories (age 1 or 2) is of running and hiding behind our TV as James Earl Jones’ shorn head came on Sesame Street to recite the alphabet in a booming voice. He gave me the willies, but I loved the geometric letters they used on screen.

It was the same font on the label on my dad’s 8-track tape of the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack. Even when I was young I knew the face was called Futura. I don’t know how I learned this.

Once my mom brought home a box of Life cereal. I couldn’t wait for the cereal to be gone so I could cut out the block letters L-I-F-E and play with them.

When I was 6 or 7 our family painted a giant train mural on my sister’s bedroom wall. Riding on top of each of the flatbed cars were condensed bold capital letters in groups of 2 and 3. I can remember watching my parents trace the letters onto the wall. We had a font painted on the wall in our house!

Growing up my grandparents owned a printing shop and there were always Letraset rub-on letters around to play with. Sometimes I used them; mostly I wanted to save them and look at them. (In later years I learned my grandmother was into fonts, too. Her favorite face was Souvenir, and she bought a copy when it came out in the 70s for phototypesetters.)

My first job out of high school was as a typesetter in a small printing shop. I used a Compugraphic machine the size of a desk to enter passages of text line by line on light-sensitive photo paper that spooled into a black light-tight canister. After I developed the type with noxious chemicals I’d slather wax on the back of it, take it to my light table, and with a T-square to keep the lines straight I’d make it into a layout ready for the press.

In 1989 when I started playing with Macs the coolest feature of all was you could change fonts as you wanted. But the fonts only looked good at certain preset sizes.

Around the time I bought my own first Mac in 1991 Apple came out with TrueType, which made scalable type available to everyone for free. It was a competitor to Adobe’s PostScript Type 1 fonts without the licensing fees. In response, Adobe started giving away its Adobe Type Manager software, and I ordered mine right away for a small shipping charge. I was in love. I spent hours studying the Adobe type catalog.

For the next couple of years I spent my young married couple allowance on fonts. Adobe ran Font of the Month specials, and it was all I could do to patiently wait for the beginning of the month to find out the next packages on sale. Meanwhile at work I got a new HP LaserJet 4M, the first 600 dpi printer, and my journey to the dark side was complete.

My favorite font is Adobe Myriad. It’s been described as the VW Bug of fonts — versatile enough to work for any project. I bought it not long after it was released in 1992. It must have been November ’93 when I faxed a note to Adobe’s offices that read ‘Dear Santa Claus, please put Myriad on as your December Font of the Month,’ with other suitable words of begging and pleading. Sure enough, it made the list in December, and for the measly sum of $49 it was mine, all mine.

I love that fonts can be used to impart meaning beyond what the words themselves say. Oddly enough, now that I work on the web I don’t use fonts that much. You’ll see Myriad in most of the web graphics I do, and that’s about it.

But I still can't look at a cereal box without naming, and critiquing the designer's choice of the fonts. I can still name just about any font there is and give a little history of it or its designer. Just try and stump me.

The Best Stuff 6: Apple Macintosh

I’ve never owned a PC.

I started using Macs in 1989 in my campus job at BYU. My job with the Space Management office was to track church meeting times and locations for 140 student wards that met in vacant campus facilities on the weekends. (There are 261 now.)

The person previously in my position worked with a specialty printer each year to produce an enormous 3 x 3-foot poster. It was a mess that took forever to prepare. On one side were all the church boundaries hand-laid over blurry maps of Provo and Orem. On the other side was an error-prone listing of street names cross-indexed to wards, along with a list of 140 bishops with addresses and phone numbers.

With my new Mac and desktop publishing I revamped everything. I exported the church information off the mainframe into my Mac, and used newfangled tools (Microsoft Word and an Apple LaserWriter) to create printing masters for the listing pages — no more errors from re-typesetting the list. My CAD friend down the hall in Engineering (where they had the most expensive Mac of all, a IIfx) got hold of electronic city maps, over which he plotted clean ward and stake boundaries. The new church directory was transformed into a cheap, convenient 8-1/2" x 11" booklet with maps down the centerfold.

I can still remember the sensation of realizing that with the right software you could make the Mac into any tool. I was hooked. We bought.

Since then we’ve had several Macs at home, not counting another 20 I’ve speced and used over my last 20+ years at work.

• Macintosh Classic (1991)
• Macintosh Quadra 630 (1994)
• Power Macintosh G3 (blue & white, 1999)
• iMac (white, first Intel model, 2006)
• iMac (silver, 2008)

I used to be a rabid, literature-toting Mac evangelist. Lately, Microsoft’s products have come to speak for themselves and have pretty much made me obsolete.

People still ask me if they should get a Mac, especially when they notice they’re more expensive.

If you want a computer that just works when you turn it on; if you don’t have a personal technical support staff based in your home; if you don’t want to lose all your data to viruses or spyware; most of all, if your time is at all valuable to you — get a Mac.

The Best Stuff 5: Wedding Ring (1991)

Joanie and I got engaged in 1991 when we were in college. We did a lot of ring shopping and finally found what she liked, a cathedral setting.

The ring was going to be ready to pick up on April 13, but I had other plans up my sleeve — I got off work early, plunked down the last gigantic payment and got it a day early on April 12, my birthday.

That evening Joanie made me a nice birthday dinner and then I surprised her with the ring. She got very excited and ran off to show all her friends. Leaving me sitting there alone for the rest of my birthday (I may be exaggerating).

Before Joanie and I started getting serious, I had other plans for the ring down payment. Apple had just released their first reasonably-priced basic computer, the Macintosh Classic: $1,000 for an 8 MHz machine with 1 MB RAM, an unprecedented value. I had been saving up this wad so I wouldn’t have to spend any more time in the computer labs at school. The joke was, ‘Yep, there’s all your computer money there on my finger.’

We eventually got the computer after we got married that summer. The wait was worth it.

Out of everything I’ve ever spent money on, this ring has been my best purchase of all time.

The Best Stuff 4: Devo, New Traditionalists (1981)

I got my first vinyl record when I was 8, Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like An Eagle. The “space sounds” on the title track sounded cool. What I liked was the synthesizers, but the 80s hadn’t happened yet, where we started to get music that was heavily, or completely electronic.

In my freshman year of high school I discovered the first music I really, really, really liked. My friend at school Dennis lent me his Devo New Traditionalists album and I must have borrowed it (no, stole it) for several months. It had synths, vocoder, electronic plus studio drums, and stinging surf guitar. And no mushy love songs.

Their songs were about not fitting in, the confusion of relationships, genetic experimentation, world domination, and how society was going down the tubes. Their lyrics used words like "aliens" and "mutants." They were post-punk reporters standing up to The Man.

Their image was boldly different: they dressed in matching futuric outfits with plastic JFK pompadour hairdos, posed in robotic formation. In their concerts from the period they played while marching on treadmills. They were geeky, anti-cool.

This record came along at a perfect time in my life — I was just becoming a teenager and trying to figure out the world after starting high school in a new state. This music was so different than anything that was popular at the time (Pat Benatar, Joan Jett), and I realized that was OK. From here I started listening to music that nobody else had heard of or was popular, and it was OK.

I must have listened to this record a couple hundred times over the years, on multiple copies. This includes a dry spell for a couple decades during which it was not available on CD.

1. Dennis Souter’s loaned cassette (1981)
2. Low-bias TDK tape I made from friend Chrissy’s vinyl LP (1982)
3. A couple of songs found on the Greatest Hits CD (1993)
4. Used British import found in Chapel Hill used CD shop during grad school (2006)
5. Remastered CD released, the best sounding version ever (2010)

I love music and have purchased hundreds of records. If I had to take only one with me on the desert island, this is it.

The Best Stuff 3: Casio VL-Tone (1981)

In 8th grade I shared a desk with Ethan Schlesser. Our empire was a trapezoid-shaped table big enough for two chairs, at the terraced top level of an abandoned band room. Ethan and I prided ourselves in the messiness of our desk. Using bungee cords as potential energy triggers we set up elaborate exploding traps for anyone who dared breathe near our stuff.

Besides being crafty, Ethan was also talented. In band he could play anything on the piano by ear, two-handed. His most popular song was the theme from Charlie Brown, which he could do perfectly. He was totally into music.

One day Ethan brought to school his Casio VL-Tone, a little foot-long keyboard, which in 1981 was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I had to get one.

After a lot of waiting, on my last day of middle school Mom took me to Burdines at Pompano Fashion Square to get my own VL-Tone. I think it was $150. From the time I got it there has been a distinctively satisfying clicking noise of the keys as you pull it out of the vinyl case.

I played clarinet in band so I knew about notes and keys, but I didn’t know the piano. On this little keyboard I learned the spaces between the notes and how to sound out songs by ear by playing along with the radio or my records. I made my own sounds using its tone generator and ADSR envelopes, but also by muffling the speaker with my left hand like a wah-wah pedal. I learned a lot about music with this little unit.

The summer between middle and high school I took my new VL-Tone to Wisconsin during an extended visit with my cousins. While on a trip with their family I discovered you could record a scale quickly at the slowest speed on the sequencer, then play it back at the fastest speed for some fun video game noises. Playing this back repeatedly in the confines of the van with my laughing cousins made my Uncle Denny a little nuts.

The white keys are numbered and you can use it as calculator. My freshman algebra teacher asked us to bring a calculator to class one day, so I brought my VL-Tone. I had the coolest calculator in class and caused a little bit of a stir. Never a bad thing to do as the new kid in school.

You'll hear the blippy drums and Piano of a VL-Tone in the German group Trio's song Da Da Da, and the Human League's song Get Carter (from Dare, one of the finest albums of the 1980s) uses the Fantasy voice.

I don't think I ever got to tell Ethan I got a VL-Tone like his because I moved to Missouri after middle school. Hopefully he will see this on Facebook and I can tell him thanks for getting me interested in playing my own music.

I’ve had a couple of fancier keyboards since my trusty VL-Tone, but it's still a treat every once in a while to pull it out and play, old school. It has provided me years of enjoyment — including the last couple days as I found it in the basement and started playing again.

The Best Stuff 2: Star Wars (1977)

Star Wars is ingrained into my childhood. I remember at age 9 dramatically reporting my weekend to my summer recreation counselor: "I experienced Star Wars."

After we first saw it at the theater, my Dad let us stay and watch it a second time in a row. I couldn't believe we got to do that. When it was re-released the next year we piled into our van and saw it at the drive-in at Deerfield Beach. It was like nothing we had ever seen. My uncle somehow got a Betamax copy of the movie and we watched it endlessly when we visited his house. Fantastic.

From the Scholastic Book Club at school I bought "The Story of Star Wars," packed full of photos from the movie. It was my reference to memorize the ships, costumes and story so I could draw everything, and build them with Legos. This is all you could do in the days before home video.

I had an LP dramatization that helped me learn the lines with precision. I can still nail Obi-Wan gazing over the mesa: "Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious." No need to check the quote, I know it's right.

I made my own costumes with my Mom. For Halloween one year I was Luke Skywalker, and a Tusken Raider for another. I tried building a stormtrooper mask out of chipboard, toilet paper tubes and masking tape but it didn't really work out. In middle school art class we did batik on fabric, I dribbled wax on drawings of R2-D2 and C-3PO.

I had all 12 original Star Wars figures, they were $1.88 each. There were six that were incredibly hard to find for a long time, but on one visit to Lionel Play World the last six I needed were all in stock! I couldn't believe my luck as I cashed out. Some of these are still floating around the house.

The design of the Star Wars universe affected everything I did, and still creeps in. A couple weeks ago I saw a car on the Thruway that had some of the same lines as an Empire Strikes Back snowspeeder.

As the disembodied voice of Obi-Wan pronounced to Luke in the X-wing cockpit after destroying the Death Star, "The Force will be with you, always." More truth there than I ever knew.

The Best Stuff

Welcome to post number 600 of the Grandon Fan Club!

To commemorate the occasion I'm going to do a series on my favorite stuff.

This has a very "consumer" bent to it — these are products I bought or received as gifts, media that have shaped me, or perfect inventions released in my lifetime that I love and use every day.

I outlined the complete list a few weeks back and it came to a nice even 10. We'll go in chronological order, and they'll pop up every so often here.

Best Stuff 1: Lego Rescue Helicopter (1975)

This was my very first Lego set, from when I was 7. I've spent hundreds of hours of my life, maybe thousands, with Legos. When other kids were playing outside, I'd be inside building cities, vehicles, or spaceships. As a kid I had more Legos than anybody I knew. I still have them all, along with the instructions. I lusted for a long while for Lego Set 190, which in 1975 at 526 pieces was the Biggest Of Them All. I remember picking it up at Lionel Play World in Pompano Beach, one of the greatest days of my life.

Sometimes I let my brother and sister play with my Legos, but only if they washed their hands first, with soap. Sometimes they tried to trick me by just dampening their hands. I was onto their tricks. I'd do a smell test, and send them back to the bathroom if they tried to fool me.

Legos today are priced in sets at about 10 cents per piece ... I don't know how that compares to Lego retail pricing in the 1970s. However there is a noticeable change in the types of pieces you get today — they're smaller and more detailed; there are not as many hefty "bricks" for building solid structures.

I get my classic box out on special occasions and build with my kids, but we put them away when we're done and we play "floor sweeper" on our hands and knees to make sure we didn't miss any. We don't mix them with modern Legos. We build some great stuff out of my old Legos — I have the advantage because I know what bricks are in there and how many of each of the special pieces there are.

I've rubbed off on my boys a little bit. Malcolm has his own Lego room in the basement, and saves up and spends $100 without blinking on a new set. He went to his first Lego store in New York City this weekend and came home with some great stuff. This last Christmas Carter got into it and made a long all-Lego list for Santa; he now has some of his own sets. The tradition continues.