About
m o n a x,
another weblog.

Tony Adams
tony at atoms.net

Friends / Links

All content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

oughtFour
This is not a new resolution. I swear.

There is so much I neglected to blog on about last year. In the light of hindsight here are a few highlights.

- My world got bigger.
g e o g r a p h i c a l l y
Not in the I Traveled to Belarus sense of the word. My local world got bigger. Part of it was working for a month or so up in Lake County. There are beautiful forest preserves up there and lots of just plain rural-ness up yonder. For the whole of my fifeen years of living in Chicago, I've never been up there for anything except passing through on 94 enroute to Wisconsin. Expansion westward came as a result of exhausting Chicago's north side streets and having a very flexible summer schedule. I could take the time for long rides out to the suburbs such as the rides out to Elk Grove Village I blogged about earlier in the year.

c u l t u r a l l y
One of the benefits of single life is that you can pretty much do whatever you want - even something as weird as attending Taste of Elmwood Park. I've always loved the idea of street fairs. Live music, beer and sunshine are all great things. But most of the more popular street fairs in Chicago have become un-bearably crowed with trixies and chads. However, smaller streetfairs out in the bungalow belt and suburbs In 2004 I also stumbled onto the phenomenon of the parish carnival. A great many catholic churches in chicago and the surrounding suburbs throw an annual carnival to raise funds - and perhaps to have some fun or at least provide some fun for their whole neighborhood. Having zero interest in the obvious aspects of the carnivals, the hokey rides for children and, uh, well that was all I thought there was to it until I happened to be riding past St. Barts on Addison in early summer. I heard a live band churning out some old Skynard. Of course I had to investigate. Lacking a parking lot, often the logical venue for a carnival, St Barts closed down the street on the west side of the church for the rides and stuff, and strung the rest of the carnival out along an alley with some of the event (bingo) held inside the church. Tucked away in the belly of all this in a small courtyard was the beer "garden". Under a big yellow and white striped rain fly, several dozen large tables, a couple hundred chairs, a beer stand a stage. The band, The Way Cool Band, which was so decidely uncool that they may have zeroed out the odometer and started back round the cool-uncool spectrum.

This post is massively not finished, but I accidentally published it and then I thought that if I left it up here, I might actually be shamed into finishing it. We will see...

[] permanent link

For a long time now I've been thinking that I'd blown a speaker. I was
hearing a bit of distortion. Too lazy to investigate, I just ignored it to the best of my ability. Today I couldn't take it any longer. I removed the grill from the speaker. It looked fine. Then I remembered that I had turned on the iTunes equalizer a while ago. I looked at it and saw that for some insane reason, I had the pre-amp turned up. I pushed that back down to below 0 and now everything sounds great. I just need to turn up the output device a bit. d'oh

[/arts] permanent link