friday night videos
In the early 1980s, MTV was big. Really big. Everyone wanted it, but the problem is that most people couldn't get cable TV. Logistics prevented many from getting cable more than anything else. In other words, unless you lived somewhere that was really close to the utility poles, you couldn't get cable.
The house I grew up in could not get cable. Well, that's not entirely true. When I asked my father about it, he said the cable company wanted to charge some ridiculous amount of money to run a line to the house. The house was situated somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 to 500 feet from the main road. Power and telephone were delivered via three utility poles literally in the middle of the woods. While the power and phone company didn't seem to have issue running poles and wires on their dime, the cable company did, so my father said "screw you" and never got cable.
Before continuing, later on as a teenager I lived in an apartment with my father where there was cable, and I watched so much MTV it was ridiculous. Anyway..
For those of us that didn't have cable such as yours truly, there was only one other way to watch music videos, and that was Friday Night Videos. This was a show that ran from 1983 to 2000. It was on every Friday night (obviously) at 12:30am. From '83 to '87 it was a 90-minute show. From '87 to 2000 it was cut down to 60 minutes.
I always found it weird that Friday was in the name of the show when technically it always aired on Saturday. Whatever.
On many Friday nights I stayed up until I could barely hold my eyes open just to watch FNV. For a 10-year-old of the 1980s, that was pretty much as exciting as a Friday night would get. Rarely did I make it from 12:30am all the way to 2am, so what I did is popped in a videocassette - a Betamax cassette, thank you very much - and started recording the show at 12:30am, watched for maybe a half-hour, then went to bed. The next day after Saturday morning cartoons I would watch what I missed.
FNV started getting really annoying when they kept playing the same crap over and over again each week. Out of all the videos they played, you maybe saw 3 that were cool - out of a 90-minute show.
The show was cut to 60 minutes in 1987 for a very specific reason: Late Night with David Letterman. Dave was getting better ratings than FNV, so the show was bumped from 12:30 to 1:30 to give the 12:30 spot to Letterman's show. This was a smart move on NBC's part because FNV at that point was getting really stale.
Up until I researched this I had absolutely no idea FNV had lasted until 2000.
Squier tuner replacements
After over 20 years of faithful service, the high-E tuner on my 1989 Squier II Stratocaster doesn't work anymore. The tuner button doesn't turn the post anymore because it simply wore out due to age.
Getting exact replacement tuners for a Squier Strat/Stratocaster isn't exactly easy. The Squier tuners mount via two small wood screws on the back of the pegboard while Fender tuners mount on the front of the pegboard via a single nut.
What this means is that you can't just walk into a guitar shop and buy exact-fit Squier tuners because they simply won't have them. Yes, you can buy exact-fit Fender tuners, but they won't fit the Squier.
My '89 Squier II Stratocaster is nearly identical to the Squier Bullet Strat, but something a lot of people don't know about my Squier II tuners is that they're plastic. The high-E has literally started to decay after years of use; this happens with any guitar that has plastic tuner buttons. Squiers all have metal tuner buttons these days, but back in the late 80s/early 90s there were Squier Stratocasters aplenty that donned the plastic buttons.
I can still tune the string by taking a pair of pliers and turning the post, but the tuner button itself won't turn the post at all because it's literally falling apart.
I measured the spacing of the posts and the screw hole spacing between the '89 and a 2010 Squier and they appear to be identical. If not identical, they're only off by maybe a millimeter or less, so they should fit.
When you look at the '89 and 2010 side by side, the tuners may look different, but they're not except for cover shape. The '89 has a hexagon cover shape while the 2010 has a square, but both of them at the plate are parallelogram-shaped and the screw holes appear to match up. The hexagon covers on the '89 actually gives the optical illusion that they're larger than the 2010's tuners, but they're not.
I was in luck as someone on eBay was selling Squier Bullet tuners that are exact-fit.
They're brand new and only cost me $12.90 with shipping included for a full set of 6.
I bought them today, so hopefully they'll arrive before the end of the week.
There is a slight possibility these tuners won't fit my '89. Even though the measurements check out, you can never be too sure with these things.
I see it this way - it's worth 13 bucks to find out whether this will work or not. If not, I have a complete spare set of tuners for my 2010 Squier.
The Lawnmower Man
The Lawnmower Man is a 1992 movie which unfortunately has not aged well. This is one of the "cyber" sci-fi movies of the 1990s, and the idea of what 'the computer world' was back then does not translate well now.
If I remember correctly, the reason I rented this movie is because Stephen King's name is on it. If you look at the movie poster, it does say "Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man".
But does the movie have anything to do with King's The Lawnmower Man short story from 1975? Barely. King in fact sued the producers of the film for attaching his name to it, stating that the film had "virtually nothing to do" with his original short story. Did he win the lawsuit? Yes, but it took him two years to do it. The studio had to cough up 2.5 million in damages.
Anyway, the point is that if you were expecting The Lawnmower Man to be any good because of a King storyline, you'll be sorely disappointed as it's nothing but 1990s-flavor Hollywood sci-fi schlock.
Back when I watched this movie in the 90s, I loved it and thought it was really cool. When I tried watching it again recently, I couldn't even get halfway through the film.
Just about every 5 minutes I was wincing at Hollywood's idea of what "high tech" was. Here are two examples:
Almost every time the lead character does something on the computer, it talks to him. When he records a journal for example, the computer says "journal started" or something like that. And of course the computer's voice is a monotone female.
The "secret lab" the lead character works in has the worst lighting imaginable. Dark, subdued, cool blue lighting is all you ever see, what you see of it. Scientists in this movie never have to see what they're working on, apparently. And to note, this same crap is still practiced today in modern TV cop dramas. CSI in particular is notorious for this. The lab is ALWAYS dark. Yes, the one place where bright light is needed more than anywhere else, and it's dark - but it looks cool! Yeah, that's just ducky.
I got 47 minutes into the flick, could not stand the schlock any further and had to turn it off. Being I know a fair amount about computers now compared to the early 90s, what the movie tries to pass off as usable high tech is a complete joke now - almost as much as Bad Guy Brimley's fax machine. And heck, even if I didn't know jack squat about computers, I'd still think the tech is a joke in The Lawnmower Man.
Aside from the tech crapola, is the movie any good? Not really. Although you can follow along with what's going on easily - which is a plus - there's way too much filler and not enough story, so things are dragged out just to fill screen time.
I turned off the movie right before the movie goes into total CGI mode, where is where all the budget went; I know from that point forward it's not a film but basically a cartoon until the end.
Maybe someday when I'm in the mood for cartoony film CGI of the early 90s, I'll watch the rest of the movie.
Rich's Sound - Single Coil Strut
This is what may be the first in a series of posts on how I get my specific guitar sound. I receive many questions on the subject, so hopefully this will answer a few of them.
In this installment, I'm going to talk about why I prefer a single coil pickup over a humbucker.
To begin, I'm not opposed to humbuckers and in fact own a guitar with humbuckers in it, so I don't want you to think "Rich never plays guitars with humbuckers in them", because I do. You don't see me playing a humbucker-equipped guitar often simply because I prefer the single coil sound. If you happen to play a guitar with one or more humbucker pickups in it, I'm not telling you humbuckers are "bad". I'm just saying that the single coil sound is what I prefer.
What I appreciate most about single coil pickups is the brightness of the sound. Humbuckers by nature have more midrange tone in them and to me sound "flat" because of it compared to a single.
A Stratocaster guitar in SSS configuration allows me to use every setting on the guitar whereas I can't do that with a humbucker, or at least not easily. In an HH configuration I'm usually limited to two settings that I can make work for me, that being bridge-only or neck-only with the middle setting (bridge+neck) being altogether worthless concerning my specific sound. In an HSS configuration I can only use 3 settings. Bridge, middle+neck and neck because the H combined with the S doesn't do anything for me.
For guitars with humbuckers that have a split-coil option, I run into the same problem. My Schecter C-1 Classic even though HH does in fact have a 5-way "mega switch" selector from the factory that splits the coils into singles to get 5 tones, but again, of those 5 I can only use three that actually work for me.
Singles on their own using wide spacing is the "natural" way, so to speak, that a Stratocaster guitar works. The single coil pickup defines the personality of the Stratocaster guitar as far as I'm concerned.
Again, I'm not saying that humbuckers are bad, because they're not. But a lot of the sound you hear from my playing is a direct result of single coil pickups. Yes, they're bright, clacky and twangy, but that's the way I prefer them.
720k
I never really used floppy disks that much, and only did because I had to and not because I wanted to. And man did it tick me off when they went bad, which happened a lot. Back in the day there was this WWF wrestling game I had for my Commodore 64. It was expensive and I really, really liked playing it. It was two 5.25-inch floppies and then one day the second disk went bad, even though I oh-so-carefully took great care of the disks and properly put them away after each use. I was not happy. Just about all of my other memories with floppies are exactly like the one I just described. The floppy was just notoriously unreliable. It wasn't a matter of if they would fail but when.
I have a 720k disk I have in my possession. One of three, actually. They're for my Alesis Datadisk which I no longer use. When I bought the thing, the eBay seller was nice enough to provide a 10-pack of double-density disks with it. Why DD disks? Because the Alesis can't use high-density. All that would happen if you chucked a 1.44MB disk into the Alesis is that it would format it at 720k because for whatever reason, Alesis didn't use a high-density floppy drive in the Datadisk.
I wondered if those 720k floppies were still usable, so I attempted to format them. I discovered you can't format a 720k floppy in Windows XP or any Windows beyond that unless you use FORMAT from the command line a very specific way, which is:
FORMAT A: /T:80 /N:9
That formats 80 tracks with 9 sectors per track, and the floppy is at that point usable; you can copy files over to it and whatnot.
Why did I bother doing this? a) just to see if I could, and b) they wouldn't be usable in my Win7 box otherwise since that OS cannot format a 720k floppy.
Do I plan on using them? No. In fact the only reason I have a floppy drive in my computer box is because the case doesn't have a cover for the floppy bay. If I didn't have a floppy drive in there, it would just be a big dust-inviting hole.
Come to think of it, I should replace it with a card reader.
EDIT: Bought a card reader. 17 bucks, shipping included. Will arrive before the end of the week. Time to kick that floppy drive to the curb. :)