Robin Harbron

I’m going to indulge myself for the next while, blogging about music I’ve been involved in. I’ve got quite a few recordings on cassette I’ve made over the years, and I’ve wanted to make digital copies of them. There are stories attached to many of the songs that interest me, and will possibly interest others, so it might make a fun project. I’m not so deluded to think that this music is great, but some of it is fun, and it’s nostalgic for myself and a few of my readers, so hey. Here we go!

My first band was called “Heads Up!“. I’m pretty sure the name had an exclamation mark in it. It consisted of Ron Petrick (keyboard), Darren Foulds (guitar) and me (bass). Vocals were shared between us, though I was encouraged to sing as little as possible. Drums were provided either by a BOSS Dr. Rhythm, or the built-in Casio-beats in Ron’s keyboard 🙂

This was back somewhere between 1988-1990, I’ll have to see if I can come up with some clues to more precisely nail it down. Darren and I were brand new to our instruments, but Ron had years of piano experience behind him, and he would help us with notes and stuff when we needed it. We would practice in Ron’s room, and never had a gig, though we did make a number of recordings with my trusty Sanyo dual-cassette blaster, which in fact I used to replay the tapes back into the computer last night.

I’ll work through a number of songs, one per post usually, and we’ll start with “Meaningless Love Song“. I’m pretty sure this was the first thing we worked on. It’s an instrumental, and Ron wrote it. Shroom comes in with some great (well, funny and raw) guitar towards the end, and I get a BASS SOLO which created a whole bunch of laughter, almost entirely directed at my complete lack of BASS SOLOING abilities.

So here you go, Meaningless Love Song.

And if you can’t get enough of this, here’s the Blooper version – another take where both Darren and I try to get more adventuresome, and fail.

It took most of the day, but I’ve finally moved (completely) away from Blogger. I’m now using WordPress, just like my good buddy Shroom. I imported all my old posts from Blogger, but I don’t know of a way of importing all the comments. I manually did a couple, and will do more if anyone really misses any in particular. Hey, I’m sentimental.

I’ve changed the tag line of my blog to cover more of the stuff I want to blog about. Soon I’ll probably do a series on old music I’ve recorded or been a part of, complete with .mp3s for you folks to listen to.

If anything seems broken on the new site, please let me know. And friends who link to me, please change the link to http://www.psw.ca/robin – I couldn’t get WordPress to post to the exact same address again.

I think I need to start multiple blogs so my much appreciated and widely diverse bunch of readers can just see what they want – pictures of my kids, video game stuff, or even music stuff that I’ve occasionally had the urge to write about.

Or maybe some of the software out there allows users to filter out the stuff they don’t want? It’d be neat to have multiple URLs so people could choose which to bookmark, and they’d only get the stuff they were interested in, and those who wanted to see the whole deal could still get it at one convenient spot. Suggestions are welcome!

Maybe only a mother would notice that Peter hadn’t yet been included in a Kyla picture, so here he is with a slightly frightening grin, with his month-old sister.

I’m just about finished reading the fifth and final book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy to my oldest two daughters. Talking about HHGTTG to a friend, I mentioned that I think I like Douglas Adams’ other series, about Dirk Gently the detective, better nowadays, even though the Dirk Gently series only has two books, and a partially unfinished 3rd story. I then realized what a stupid phrase “partially unfinished” was. Although I guess something could be completely unfinished, like the epic 300 million dollar movie I’m making.

Anyway, here’s another excerpt from my partially unfinished novel:

Likewise, the controversy over which early computer game was first continues to rage. It may have been Dr. Edward Grunfungle’s Jupiter Lander game written in 1962, which was a simulation of a spacecraft landing on Jupiter.

It wasn’Â’t played in real-time: the player (called a computer operator on perpetual coffee break, back in those days) would read the current staus of the ship on the line printer. Information such as fuel remaining, current velocity and distance from the planet were relayed. The player would then go to the punch card machine (similar in appearance and function to a manual typewriter) and punch a card with the amount of thrust they wanted to apply next turn.

The player would then head down 4 flights of stairs, card in hand, go through two security gates, wait in line with numerous scientists and accountants to have their card read by the card reader. They would then return upstairs and await their next turn when the printer updated the ship’Â’s status. This took between 30 minutes and several hours depending on the current work load of the mainframe computer.

Unfortunately each game turn only represented one second of game time, and considering you started your descent several thousand miles away from the planet, a game could easily take months to play. Even worse, you couldn’t actually win the game, because as Dr. Grunfungle knew, you can’Â’t actually land on Jupiter as– it’Â’s a gas giant with no known solid core. No matter how you played, your ship would eventually become crushed by the massive atmospheric pressure.

Nevertheless, this game spread around from research centre to research centre, and had many fans and perhaps even addicts. Someone did figure out that the only workable strategy was to apply maximum thrust right from the beginning and eventually you would entirely escape the planet’Â’s gravity, extending the life of the virtual astronaut nicely, but doing little for his quality of life.

Some people have been asking for new pictures of the newest Harbron, so here she is again, at 22 days old, and also appearing, her big brother Benjamin, who turned 3 years old this month.

Frederick Sokall, on the other hand, had a different path to his discovery. He was trying to generate a picture on the TV from a discrete circuit he had made. He thought it might be useful to display words for advertising, though due to the very limited resolution his design was capable of, it was only good for displaying a single row of letters or numbers that were made of a minimal number of strictly vertical or horizontal lines.

After pushing his design as far as he could go, he grew discouraged because he could think of very few useful messages he could convey with the limited technology. “IT THE HI-H LIFE” was the best he had come up with in his imaginary advertising campaign for a new high-rise office building when his mother, bringing his newly washed laundry to his room, asked Sokall if he was playing Hangman. She suggested he tried “G” next, and left her bachelor son to his games.

Sokall seized this misguided but nevertheless brilliant idea, and went to work creating the extra circuitry to allow the player to interactively solve the hangman puzzle. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the technology he had to work with, each hangman puzzle had to be hard-wired. Eventually he got it down to taking only a few hours to reconfigure the game, but even this proved to be beyond the patience of the most enthusiastic of the pioneering play-testers that he could find.

This led Sokall to then become the inventor of the plug-in game cartridge which would be so influential as the home video game market matured. But at this time, the cartridges measured approximately 10 inches by 14 inches, weighed over thirty-five pounds each, were potentially explosive if dropped, and still had the distinct disadvantage of only containing one single 16 character puzzle per cartridge.

Sokall, like Lebandoski, tried to find a manufacturer for his TV Hangman Game, but was also unable. In addition to all the reasons already cited above, the potential manufacturers got hung-up on the idea of how to label and market the cartridges. The initial straight-forward approach of naming the puzzle, such as “HIT THE TEE” or “LET THE FIE TOOT” was found to ruin the fun and surprise of solving the puzzle. Just simply numbering the puzzles wouldn’t work for long, since people would quickly learn that puzzle #13 was “IT TO LOO TOO” and so forth. Random assortments of unlabelled cartridges might have worked, but then there was the too certain chance of duplicates angering repeat customers. In the end, Sokall ended up giving up on trying to sell his Hangman system, and just continued to make puzzles to stump his mother, for his own personal enjoyment.

Years later, Frederick Sokall and Doug Lebandoski would meet and team up in a way that had a large impact on the video game industry, but for the time being, both remained unaware of one another’s nearly simultaneous discoveries, and the general public was likewise unaware of these two pioneering fathers, apart from the Heidenschieferfleebens and many other happy repaired television watchers.

From Alex’s blurt on Shroom’s page, I learned about yWriter which is a free word-processor for novel writers. I haven’t really checked it out yet, but it has Alex’s approval.

The programmer of yWriter, Simon Haynes, is also a published novelist. His Hal Spacejock series appears to be doing well, at least within the genre. With a name like Simon Haynes you’d expect him to be Australian, and you’d be right. I lived two years of my life in .au so that always earns bonus coolness points from me.

I really enjoyed browsing his website, and any fellow NaNoWriMo would probably be very interested in his series of articles about writing and the business surrounding it – check it out here.

And just because Tim cares, here’s another excerpt from “The Entirely True Alt-History of Video Games”. Watch out for the extreme run-on-sentence.

According to customers Mr. and Mrs. Jack Heidenschieferfleeben, Lebandoski was working on repairing their 1949 model television set. Jack Junior was viewing the repair man’s progress anxiously. Lebandoski had unknowingly incorrectly wired some of his diagnostic equipment into the back of the television, and when he turned the set back on to run some tests, Jack Junior exclaimed “One Wall Paddleball!”

Everyone gathered around the set to see what the commotion was about, and after liberally applying some five-year old imagination to what they saw on the TV screen, they had to agree that yes indeed, it did look like a bit of a game of One Wall Paddleball was going on, despite being a bit blockier than normal.

After fixing the Heidenschieferfleeben’s set, much to Junior’s delight, Lebandoski went back to his shop and spent much of the next month replicating and improving upon that initial freak accident. He then had a working prototype which he had dubbed “Television One Wall Paddleball”.

He tried shopping it around to various manufacturers who rejected it on various grounds. The most significant strike against it was the lack of widespread appeal of One Wall Paddleball, which was limited to a few regions around the United States of America. Even then, the potential manufacturers reasoned, who would want to sit inside their house playing Paddleball on their television set when they could be outside, playing the real thing?

Lebandoski‚’s insistence that playing simulated sport on his machine was actually more healthy, since you were far less prone to injury sitting in your livingroom on the sofa fell on deaf ears, and eventually he gave up on his entrepreneurial venture, and went back to television repair.

I did well my first day of NaNoWriMo, hitting the daily quota of 1666 words. But I found the subject (or at least my take on it) to be an awful lot of work. Very little easy dialogue, a whole bunch of fictional facts. After a pathetic 300 words on day two, I shelved this project for now.

I started a second novel, and I’m up to almost 6000 words on it now, and I’m finding it far easier to write this post-apocalyptic novel than the previous idea, “The Entirely True Alt-History of Video Games”. The new novel is still somewhat video game related – it’s potentially the story for a game I’d like to make.

Anyway, I figure I’ll post excerpts from my quickly-abandoned novel here over the next while, so here’s part one (critical comments welcome):

Chapter One: Ancient History

People have pretty much always found time to play. Right after all the more primal needs are met, what’s a caveman to do for entertainment but hit his neighbour with a stick? Surely after a while that grew tiresome, so the caveman and his neighbour would each take a stick, and hit each other with them. And then they would hit each other less often, and instead take to hitting stones, or maybe a wound up ball of sinew or something, and then group themselves in groups (okay, that’s silly, let’s call them teams) with three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie on each side, on ice when the water hole froze over out in the savannah every so often.

That’s not necessarily the way it really happened, but surely it’s possible. Anyway, the point we’re trying to make is that people have always been trying to find new ways to entertain themselves, and it only makes sense that humanity would be using the most sophisticated technology we’ve come up with so far to play games. And look at pictures of nude people, but that’s not what this story is about.

This story is about the history of computer and video games, and every part of it is true if you choose to believe it. If you’re not convinced, you could pretend it’s just a speculative fiction story about an alternate earth in an alternative universe that is completely like the earth that you know so much about, except the parts that are different. That way you can go on believing whatever you want about the so-called real earth that you’re so knowledgeable about.

There is plenty of debate over who invented the first video game. Doug Lebandoski and Frederick Sokall are the two names most frequently cited. Both were TV repairmen and electronics hobbyists, and both made their discoveries largely by accident in 1951.

Including myself, I know of 7 people who are probably participating in the NaNoWriMo contest this year. I’m really looking forward to it, and my novel should be at least somewhat On-Topic for my blog, so maybe I’ll talk about it here.

I just received my copy of Chris Baty’s “No Plot, No Problem”, which is the semi-official help guide to the NaNoWriMo contest, written by the founder himself. I’ve been looking through it, and have some helpful hints to share with you guys, if you wish:

Sign up for an account at NaNoWriMo. This makes you an official participant, allows you to send in your manuscript to keep your word tally updated (remember, this is a “race” to 50,000 words in a month), and gives you access to the forums which seem overwhelming busy, but could be very useful if you’re looking for some help/suggestions. I’d also like to start a mail list or something between the participants that I know personally, for encouragement/bragging. It seems that if you sign in, then click on Local Events->Writing Buddies, you can add users. Try adding me, MacbthPSW, and we’ll see if that fits the bill.

BTW, think about donating to NaNoWriMo, to help cover their organizational costs.

Next, make two lists which will guide your writing: a list of all the things you think make a good novel (e.g. first person perspective, quirky characters, music, feisty old people) and another list of things you dislike in novels (irredeemably malicious main characters, books set on farms, books set in the nineteenth century). I stole those examples from Chris Baty.

If you’re thinking about characters, ask yourself these sorts of questions about them: Age? Gender? Employment? Friends, family, love interests? What’s their home like? Hobbies? What were they doing one year ago? Five years ago? Values and politics? It’s suggested that if you know these things, the characters can largely write themselves.

Finally, realize that this dash to 50,000 words is just a first draft, and that pretty much nobody writes a great first draft. The novel will be crappy, but at least you’ve done it, and there will undoubtedly be good stuff in there. The point in emphasizing quantity over quality is to get over the inner critic that stops you from writing altogether. I figure even if you agonize over every sentence in your novel (and probably give up, or at least take years to write it) is it really going to be that much better than just flying through? It’s going to be a first draft, no matter what.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with! And please, share your tips on what works (and dispute the ones above, if you have reason to).

(Anyone notice that Blogger’s spell-checker doesn’t know the word “blog”!?)

Day Three was a Sunday, the Expo was over for another year, and today I’d head home, but first was some good hang-out time. A friend and I went for a long drive trying to find breakfast, and ended up settling for Denny’s. I ordered one of the specials for $4.99, and he got something for nearly $8 something. When the food arrived, we noticed that we had identical meals. The waitress was quick to helpfully point out that he got an extra slice of toast or something. We had a good talk over our content-wise similar meals, some of which seems pretty ironic and sad in the light of his now impending divorce (unknown to him at the time).

We then gathered at the hotel, and took over the lobby / continental breakfast area. I set up my development environment for the game we’ve been developing, and we picked away at doing the conversion to PAL over the afternoon in between lots of stories and laughs. I then packed up a bit before dark and started the drive back to Thunder Bay.

A few little stories about my departure from Chicago:

I drove alongside a stretch Hummer down the interstate for a while. I had hardly ever seen a normal Hummer in real-life at this point, so a 40 foot long Hummer made quite an impression on me, especially given the subject matter of the game I had just been working on at the hotel an hour earlier.

I figured I’d pick up a few Whoppers (2 for $3 – it has to be a deal, or I just can’t bring myself to buy fast food) for the road on the way out, so I went back to the nearby Burger King where I had had such terrible onion rings on Friday. This time I went through the drive-through. I had a hard time placing my order, as it sounded like someone was operating a very loud chainsaw right nearby, and I couldn’t hear the guy on the speaker, and he couldn’t hear me. Then I pulled around the corner to the window to pay and discovered that the sound actually belonged to a dirt bike which was being raced full-throttle back and forth on an empty lot immediately beside the restaurant – the bike couldn’t have been more than 10 feet away from my van as it passed by. Not what you expect, buying burgers in Chicago.

Finally, Chicago highways are always under construction, so you see lots of lit up signs saying things like “EXPECT DELAYS”. One of the ones on the way out of the city instead said “EXCEPT DELAYS”. Not really a typo as such – was the person who programmed that board trying to say “ACCEPT DELAYS”? Probably good advice.