Erich Stauffer

Category: Pop Culture

  • Today in 1994: A Story

    This is my attempt to tell you what I did on January 19, 2012 using only the language available in 1994:

    I woke up this morning at 5:20, a full 10 minutes before the alarm clock on my dresser was to go off. My wife didn’t want the alarm to wake the baby so she told me to get up and turn it off before-hand. I checked the mail box before I left to see if I had any letters, but it was empty.

    By 6:45 I was standing in the lobby of Sunshine Cafe at the corner of 116th and Meridian waiting for the BNI Network Masters meeting to start. It was my first meeting as an official member. I ordered biscuits and gravy, letting my wife know the cost by writing out a letter and dropping it in the mail to her.

    At 9 AM I deposited a check into the bank through the drive-up window at the corner of 116th and Rangeline before driving to Southport. Again, I wrote a letter to my wife informing her of the deposit and dropped it in the mail. I arrived at my client’s office at 10 AM. I had zoned out and passed 31 and 37, having to double-back at Mann Road.

    At the client’s office, I installed a battery backup to the server, a cable box for the TV, and a COM link on a PC. I then had my mouth filled with puddy to make a mold for a snoring appliance and almost puked on the pregnant hygienist. Then I went to Jack in the Box and waited in line long enough to decide to leave. It was 12:15 AM. I knew this because I looked at the clock in my car. While I was at Jack in the Box, I let all of my friends know I was there by sending out 75 post cards. Nobody wrote back.

    I had a job interview at 1 so I drove towards it until I found a China Buffet. They only took cash so I had to drive to the bank and withdraw some cash. They had peppered chicken, but it had onions in it. The egg rolls were okay, but the crab ragun was dry. The soup was good, but they kept it in an open bowl that dried out the top and sludged over the cup when I poured it. I liked that they had soy sauce at the table. You paid after you ate, which delayed me some, but I arrived at the interview at 12:50.

    I walked in the front door of the office, which looked like a shanty-town of workstations. A lady asked me what I was here for. I told her and then asked her what she did. She said she was the boss. She apparently was married to the boss, which also makes her the boss. She had brown hair. The HR lady came and got me, took me upstairs and I asked her how long she’d been married. She’s been married 6 months, the same amount of time she’s been an HR manager. I told them I had a fetish for visiting conference rooms. They laughed.

    At 2 PM I found a payphone to call my wife. She asked me to buy laundry detergent at Sam’s Club. She had packed a picture of the detergent we use in my front pocket so I knew which type to get. After I left Sam’s Club I drove to a client’s house to look at their daughter’s PC.

    No one was home when I arrived so I walked into the back door, which was open, and started working on the PC. It had many viruses. While I was working on the PC, the owners wife came home, waived, and took a miter saw into the garage for several minutes. She came back and said she was very cold. She also pointed out that I was wearing brown socks with black shoes and then proceeded to give me a pair of black socks. I did not put them on, but instead put them in my briefcase. She also gave me a banana. I felt bad eating it in front of her, but I did.

    At 5 PM I traveled to a meeting where Gerry Dick was speaking so that I could get some free food. They had baked potato medallions with sour cream, mini-bagels with cheese and pineapple, miniature boneless chicken wings with ranch sauce, cornbread and cream cheese jelly squares, and celery. I ate a lot of celery. There was a Ukrainian woman there trying to sell me her services. I asked if her friend was from Ukraine too and she said, “No, Russia” inasmuch a way as you can spit a word. I sent another letter to my wife and then drove to another meeting.

    I was having trouble finding the second meeting so I stopped and bought a map from the gas station. I had printed out the instructions with the address, but I still didn’t know how to get there. The map got me to the general vicinity, but all I could see was a high school so I parked and went inside. The room number was H321. I looked for a map on the wall of the school, but couldn’t find one. I did however find a table full of cheese and crackers, but being full from the previous meeting I left the group of people to their cake and punch.

    The halls were all marked with letters. I saw A on the left and J on the right. I walked toward the J and found H. “I am close” I thought. I eventually found H, but only found rooms starting with 1 so i went upstairs. There the rooms only went to 2 so I went downstairs. I was getting very upset and willing to leave, but just then I found a map on the wall. The map confirmed that there was no room in this building called H321.

    I then went to the local library and looked up the facility in a book. There I found a map of a second building that contained a room H321. I walked back to this other building, which was behind the high school and used the map on the wall to find the class room. The food looked like it had been provided by a concession stand going out of business. There were two single-serving potato chip bags, a large bag of Crunch and Munch, some bruised strawberries, and some blackberries. I put a little bit of all of it on my plate and sat down. It was 6 PM.

  • Gateway Board Games

    A non-exhaustive list of board games for new board gamers.

    Gateway Games (1 to 1 1/2 hours playtime / Simple Rulesets)

    Medium Weight Games (1 1/2 – 2 hours playtime / Intermediate Rulesets)

    Heavy Games (2 – 3 hours playtime / Time to teach/learn 30 minutes)

    Large Format Games (3+ hours / Extremely complex Rulesets)

    Disclaimer: DO NOT START WITH THESE GAMES

    My Top 5 Favorites

  • The Glee Freaks and Geeks Mean Girl Graduate

    Recently I finished watching the first three seasons of Glee, followed by Mean Girls and The Graduate, and topped off with a little Freaks and Geeks. I couldn’t help but create connections where no connections actually existed and I have diagrammed them here in this venn:

    Venn Movies TV Show

    Apparently I wasn’t the first person to notice that both Glee and Freaks and Geeks used McKinley High for their school name, but I didn’t realize that it was also the name used in The Wonder Years. I thought I could find a better connection between Mean Girls and Freaks and Geeks, but all I could come up with was Lizzy Caplan. I am pretty proud of the “quickly broken marriages” connection between Glee and The Graduate though since Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays) dumps both her first fiance and her first husband for Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), which is similar to Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) stealing away Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross) from her wedding. My favorite though was the “Plastics” connection between the now famous line* in The Graduate and the name of the most popular group in Mean Girls.

    *”One Word: Plastics”: The theme of an innocent and confused youth who is exploited, mis-directed, seduced (literally and figuratively) and betrayed by a corrupt, decadent, and discredited older generation (that finds its stability in “plastics”) was well understood by film audiences and captured the spirit of the times. In Mean Girls, the “Plastics” are “an exclusive group of girls led by queen bee Regina George”, who are depicted as shallow, arrogant, and thoughtless.

    NOTE: One thing I forgot to include in the venn diagram is that Mean Girls and The Graduate are both movies and Glee and Freaks and Geeks are both television shows. I’m not sure that matters, but the difference in medium does affect how the story plays out. There is much less time for a story to develop in a movie, but on the other hand, sometimes simple story arcs can take seemingly way to long to reveal themselves in a television story. Freaks and Geeks didn’t even get a chance to complete their story as eighteen episodes were completed, but the series was canceled after only twelve had aired until the complete series was later released on DVD. I watched it on Netflix. And now I have to get back to work.

    PS. If you liked this post, you might also like the jukebox musical I wrote or Zac’s reviews of LOST.

    PPS: The last four blog posts were written during the Blizzard of 2012. #snowpocalypse #2012blizzard #indasnow

  • The Settlers of Catan

    I was browsing the Amazon Best Seller lists and noticed that Settlers of Catan was the number 2 item in the Toys and Games category. I’ve played many, many hours of and even once had a blog devoted exclusively to Settler’s of Catan (until their lawyers told me to shut it down). I recently even bought a second copy of Catan because the first version I bought was a “Gallery” edition, which is highly limited. I ended up getting the full version for me and my wife to play.

    settlers-of-catanI love board games and I’ve written before about entrepreneur and startup board games. My sister-in-law must have known this because she gave me a copy of Klaus Teuber’s Catan Adventures, “Elasund, the First City“, which I haven’t played yet, but one reviewer said:

    This game has just the right mix of strategy, randomness, and backstabbing to make it fun. You have to be careful, though. too much backstabbing and your wife will never play it with you again! There are multiple strategies you can use to try and win, such as being the first to start the building of the church which will inevitably destroy your opponents’ (or your) buildings if they lie in it’s path. Or you can concentrate on the city walls which will net you extra cards when pirates attack. or maybe you can just go for the straightforward approach and just start trying to build as much as possible and hope your opponents don’t steal your building permits. The randomness is just a roll of the dice but you can manipulate the outcome of that depending on how much influence you have. I mentioned backstabbing earlier; you can use your opponent’s building permits against them. This is a game where come-from-behind victories can be common if people take advantage of influence and let other players unwittingly help them build.

    I almost lost my marriage and my kids over playing too much Catan. It’s very addictive. It’s also trademarked in case their lawyers are reading this.

  • One Night – a Rock Musical

    This is a story about three boys and one girl who meet on a train “one night”

    This is a “jukebox musical” compilation I made on Spotify which weaves a story out of pop songs. You can listen to it on Spotify here: One Night

    [Act I]

    1. Some Nights by Fun – Three boys looking for something to stand for decide to stay up all night and start walking towards the train station.

    2. Breathe Me by Sia – A girl named Valerie is walking the streets alone at night after selling herself for drugs. She gets on the train.

    3. Kill Your Heroes by Awol Nation – The boys notice her sitting alone and afraid and decide to approach her.

    4. Shake it Out by Florence and the Machine – The train stops and they all get off the train downtown and go into a club where Valerie sings while one boy goes to the bar and the other two go off to the bathroom.

    5. We are Young by Fun – The boy at the bar begins courting Valerie inside the club. They end up leaving the club together and walking along the street together.

    6. Lights by Ellie Goulding – The girl ends up talking about how much she misses her home and begins walking back towards the train when the other two boys appear.

    7. Ho Hey by The Lumineers – One of the boy begins singing to Valerie stating that she should be his sweetheart instead. She doesn’t want anything to do with him.

    8. Wide Awake by Katy Perry – Valerie then realizes now what she has to do and she goes home to her family.

    9. I Will Wait by Mumford & Sons – One of the boy begins to kneel down and begins singing to her about how he will wait for her.

    10. The Cave by Mumford and Sons – They boys get off of the train and begin walking home as the sun rises.

    [Act II]

    11. Fiction by The xx – One boy wakes up lamenting the night before. He curses the daylight and the light of day between him and Valerie.

    12. Madness by Muse – Another boy wakes up back at home in his room and begins singing about Valerie. He realizes what she needs and begins to make a plan.

    13. It’s Time by Imagine Dragons – the third boy wakes up and refuses to change who he is or where he came from. He wants to bend the world to his will – and because of that he is lonely.

    14. Both of Us by Taylor Swift and B.o.B. – Valerie wakes up at her house and is confronted by her angry father. She ends up realizing why she left home in the first place and begins running back to meet one of the boys.

    15. Glad You Came by The Wanted – Valerie meets one of the boys and he begins to sing to her about how glad he is that she’s come back.

    16. Good Time by Owl City and Carly Rae Jespen – Valerie and the boy sing a duet together about the good times they see themselves together in the future.

    17. Too Close by Alex Clare – Just then, another boy appears to confront Valerie about his love for her and he sings her this song.

    18. As Long As You Love Me by Justin Bieber – Another boy appears to proclaim his love to Valerie.

    19. Wild Ones by Flo Rida and Sia – Valerie ends up choosing one of the boys and they sing together about making a new home together.

    20. Home by Phillip Phillips – The boy and Valerie go make a new home for themselves.

  • Change in Tune

    Lyrics are starting to lean towards sticking together, forgiveness, and “home”.

    In Fun’s We Are Young, they sing, “I know you’re trying to forget…I’m trying hard to take it back…I’ll carry you home.” In Phillip Phillips’ Home, he sings, “Don’t pay no mind to the demons, they fill you with fear….just know you’re not alone, cause I’m going to make this place your home.” Florence and the Machine sings in Shake it Out, “Every demon wants his pound of flesh…and it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back, so shake him off.” Mumford and Son’s I Will Wait sings, “You forgave and I won’t forget …now in some way, shake the excess.”

    In Gym Class Heroes’ Stereo Hearts, Travie McCoy sings, “Holding grudges over love is ancient artifacts,” and in A** Back Home (Panic City Remix by Gym Class Heroes Featuring Neon Hitch) they sing, “We put the us in trust, baby.” In Justin Bieber’s As Long As You Love Me, Big Sean sings, “Us, trust…a couple of things I can’t spell without ‘u’,” and continues with, “The grass ain’t always greener on the other side, It’s green where you water it. So I know we got issues baby, but I’d rather work on this with you than to go ahead and start with someone new.”

    I ended up using some of these songs on a “jukebox musical” compilation I made. Zac Parsons has a great review of Fun: Some Nights that you might also find interesting.

  • For Those About to Make, I Salute You

    In the late 70’s there was a DIY revolution happening in computers at a time when early adopters were literally building their own PCs. A few of these builders got the notion to turn this hobby into a business and we got businesses like HP and Apple out of it. Now the same type of revolution is happening with Makers because of advances in tools that have allowed the everyday man with a passion to build something a few years ago that would have been financially implausible.

    Chris Anderson of WIRED magazine has written extensively about the Maker movement and has written a new book about it called, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. An excerpt from this book was included as an article in WIRED about how the New MakerBot Replicator will change the face of desktop manufacturing. In the article, Anderson describes the two main modes of manufacturing, “When 3-D printers make an object, they use an ‘additive’ technology, which is to say they build objects layer by layer from the bottom up. (By contrast, other computer-controlled machines, such as the CNC router and CNC mill, are ‘subtractive’; they use a spinning tool to cut or grind away material.)

    A Maker, Michal Zalewski, has created documentation for one type of subtractive milling called the
    Guerrilla guide to CNC machining, mold making, and resin casting; Benchtop CNC manufacturing tutorial for robot builders, model makers, and other hobbyists. He writes, “For the past decade, we were being promised a revolution in desktop manufacturing – but unbeknownst to many, a simple, affordable, and home-workshop-friendly solution is already well within the reach. The only problem with [CNC] is that the workflows and materials suitable for small scale, hobby engineering are almost completely undocumented, and difficult to discover on your own.” Zalewski has turned this frustration into a passion and has documented what he has learned so that all can benefit. He got started by buying, “a small CNC mill (Roland MDX-15), set up a resin casting workshop, and invested months of intermittent trial, error, and triumph to understand and befriend both technologies – and document them so that others don’t have to go through all the pain.” While the additive MakerBot Replicator2 is currently hovering at around $2500, Zalewski states that you can get a CNC workshop setup for around $2000. Contrast that with CEREC crown machines, which are subtractive mills that make crowns for teeth and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

    Co-Working Spaces for Micro Manufacturing

    If you’re not interested in buying your own equipment and are close enough to one of these co-working facilities for Makers, you can experience the DIY revolution together:

      Canada

    • MakerSpace – Victoria, BC, Canada – a 3D printer, laser engraver, welding, woodworking, electronics, and a blacksmith shop (with casting furnace)
    • Site3 – Toronto, CA – a variety of milling machines as well as a laser cutter, 3D printer and a new DIY 3-axis CNC that we are putting together right now. Membership works on a monthly fee like you might expect, and each member is given responsibilities for maintaining the shop.
      Australia

    • Robots & Dinosaurs – Sydney, Australia – a couple of cnc mills, a choice of several 3D printers, a laser cutter, and a whole bunch of other useful gear, and people happy to show you how to use them.
    • Make, Hack, Void – Canberra, Australia

    If you know of more, please add them to the comments below.

  • Things have changed. Times are different.

    Business owners used to be able to pay the Yellow Pages once per year and get business all year long without having to do anything.
    Things have changed. Times are different.
    You now have to do content marketing, social media marketing, traditional marketing.
    Social media is complicated:

    http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-marketing-landscape-complicated-2012-5

  • The Future Was Now

    In the summer of 1988, my parents bought a Chevy Suburban and drove our whole family down to Walt Disney World (the only time we ever went). My dad worked for GM at the time and so when we got to the Epcot Center, we got to cut in line to the now closed, World of Motion ride. It was a view of the future. Or should I say, a view of a possible future – one that mostly hasn’t happened – but that’s not what this post is about.

    Rebecca Murphey, a JavaScript engineer at Bocoup, wrote in her blog about how her dad bought one of the first personal computers:

    “In 1982, Timex came out with the Timex Sinclair TS-1000…the computer, a few times thicker than the original iPad but with about the same footprint, cost $99.95.”

    My dad bought one too and I remember having to hook it up to a special data tape player/recorder that acted as the ‘hard drive’. It’s what loaded and recorded changes to programs that displayed on the screen. I remember piecing the parts together and waiting for it to appear on the black and white television screen. We could load BASIC and type in commands, but we didn’t do much more than that. This post isn’t really about my early exposure to technology, it’s more about the man who exposed me to it.

    While we didn’t have humanoid robots in our kitchen, we had dishwashers who washed our dishes for us – and a furnace that detected a sudden change in temperature and automatically adjusted accordingly. My dad grew up in a house with no running water. He took a bath in a metal tub in the middle of the kitchen next to the fire-burning stove. He used a Sears catalog for toilet paper in the outhouse out back – yet he was the only person in his class to build an automobile from spare parts.

    Silly Robot

    I can only imagine my son re-discovering a vehicle from today, trying to understand this “hard app” (car radio) he found. What is it like growing up with a computer in every room and in every pocket? What is it like to always be on the Internet, always knowing where everyone is and what everyone is doing? What is it like to have your entire childhood documented in status messages, online galleries, and Youtube channels? When I went to high school, we weren’t even allowed to carry beepers.

    I can only imagine how no running water, building your own car, learning how to program, and buying one of the first personal computers can shape the way you teach your children about technology. And I can only imagine how growing up with Timex Sinclair TS-1000’s, Atari 2600’s, Nintendo NES’, Windows 3.1, Netscape, Winsock, Windows 95, Nokia Cellphones, College Club, Myspace, and finally Facebook can change how I teach my children about technology. I worry that technology enables too much using and not enough doing. That’s part of what this blog is about – giving back to what I’ve learned from the Internet – and my dad.