I Love Vintage

It seems that right now retro and vintage are one of the "in" styles for the youth crowd of high school and college age kids. I find this incredibly ironic as I was retro back in high school in the late 90s when it certainly wasn't cool. I loved Space Invaders and the NES back when it wasn't cool at all. I'm not trying to claim to be a trend setter or anything like that, but I do find it ironic that what I once thought was my own thing has quite a much bigger following than I ever knew.

As a child I had a few vintage toys belonging to my parents. My brother and I played with my dad's wagon train set while my sisters played with mom's doll house. We had plenty of our own brand new toys but we were exposed to some older items early on teaching us that indeed there was a world before us.

Now when I grew older we had some poor financial times with my dad losing his job and being handicapped for a while. So we never had all the newest and greatest things but we did do a lot of shopping at yard sales. When all my friends had Playstations and Nintendo 64 I was rocking with a used NES and an Atari 2600. They weren't just used items to me, they were now mine and something special. Special because they were unique and something that had survived and through the hunt of it all, I was able to find.

I also am a big fan of quality items. While much of our furniture is perhaps out of date and I know my mom would llike to update the style of much of it, we have much better quality items than the average run of the mill Ikea/Target styles that many families buy today. Likewise many of my items for my home office are of great quality. For example I have an antique box holding my pens and pencils which is much more asthetically pleasing than your run of the mill Rubbermaid pencil box and I only paid $5 for it at a barn sale. Don't even get me started on some of my vintage medium format folder and TLR cameras.

One other thing I should mention is that for those into enviromentalism (I'm not, really) vintage also has that neat credential of saving stuff from landfills and preventing new crap in China being made. For the latter reason I try to buy used and vintage whenever possible or at the very least a high quality Made in the USA item but this could spark its own post in general.

Basically to sum up I'm glad that retro is really picking up. When I see a high school age kid wearing a shirt he got at Hot Topic with Tanooki Mario on it I smile and hope that they don't just wear the shirt but actually play the game sometime. While they are at it they could play some records and use a fountain pen. Vintage never goes out of style; it's always cool.

My constant struggles

There are times in my life where I feel that I have zero control over my actions. This is especially true in regards to finances. I know many of my close friends and family will disagree with me and point out how I am often going out of my way to save a dollar here and there but there are times when I just give in. Usually I am alright when left alone but whether influenced by family, friends or simply the urge to "treat" myself I tend to find myself giving in to purchases I never intended to buy.

As I stated earlier, many of my friends and family feel that I'm "lucky" to have a nice job and get quite annoyed that I don't just go around and buy every little impulse purchase that I want. They also seem to have little sympathy when I feel guilty for buying things I don't necessarily want.

While I do try to be good I am, of course, imperfect and I do give in to purchases that amount to either status symbols or to clutter. They tend to break down into two major categories:

Impulse Buys: These are small and on their own aren't really all that bad. For example I spent $10 on this last weekend at a yard sale on a box full of collector's glasses with various characters on them. When I first checked them out I wanted to just get the two Pacman ones for my vintage gaming collection. Yet the allure of having a whole pile of McDonalds glasses and my dad talking to the lady to get a huge discount. While some collectors may say I got them at a good price, I really have no use for them and quite frankly are going out at our next tag sale.

Status Symbols: A year ago I bought a new car. My 98 Cavalier needed serious repairs and it was frankly starting to fall apart. While I suppose I could've fixed it I was afraid of it being a money sink. So I replaced one bad money put with another. I bought a brand new car when I could've bought a perfectly reliable used car for a third of what my "econo" Elantra cost. Yet I felt that with my new job I deserved a brand new car. Because of that, I'm keeping this car until the wheels fall off.

New Toys: A week or so ago I bought a digital SLR. Once upon a time I was seriously considering a career in photography. Since unfortunately the market of photographers is so flooded and I didn't want to be a portrait photographer I ended up back in the tech world. In my college days I would choot at least one 36 exposure roll of slides a week. Now I'm lucky if I get a roll shot every month or so. Besides, I prefer my folding and twin lens cameras so buying a digital SLR was simply a new toy that would collect dust. Luckily the day after receiving it I realized my folly and sent it back for a refund. Now I can buy a digicam for when I want a quick digital or something to carry in my pocket.

So as you can see it's a constant struggle to keep my spending under control. I guess all I can say is that I just need to watch myself a bit more.

Old computer memories ...

My history with computers goes back as far as the Apple II. From kindergarten to middle school I happily typed away at school on those classics and since my parents were too poor to afford a computer for the home, I never really realized how tech had jumped up.

The first computer I owned was in 1995 or so and it was a ten year old Commodore 64 hand me down. I admit that by then I knew there were things like the internet and actual processing power that it couldn't handle but at least it was mine, much to the ridicule of many classmates.

Once I got to high school things did change. Thanks to my electronics shop and some friends I was able to slowly piece together from found parts some various PCs. I went from an 8086 to a 386 or a 486 to by graduation time a Pentium 75 running Windows 95 and using free internet from NetZero. Through four years and at least a half dozen computers (most of which I found some way of breaking) and then after NetZero decided to kick off heavy users I actually coughed up the money and got Adelphia cable internet.

I entered college under the computer science program and soon discovered that while using the lab computers was alright I really needed a home computer of my own. Enter the AMD TBird 750. Now there was a computer I had loads of fun with. It was my first real modern computer and since then I've had at least fairly modern ones and I'm actually typing on a two month old PC right now.

Strangely the further forward I go, sometimes I want to pick up those things I've left behind. In future blog posts I plan on talking about how I now use old outdated word processors and RTF files. I type on a 20 year old keyboard and take my notes on index cards. It should be lots of fun to talk about.

Gas and the silly things we do to save a penny

So as I just get back from gassing up on my lunch break I realized something. My trip odometer read 1.0 miles from the Sunoco station where I get my gas. This morning I drove by a Shell station priced at 4.059 for regular unleaded which I decided to pass on by opting to instead make a separate trip on my lunch break to the local Sunoco to fuel up at 4.029

So I filled my tank with about 7 gallons of unleaded which will last me for about 4-5 days on the road average at an average of around 32-34mpg depending on various factors. I started to think about this and realized that my cost per mile isn't all that much, all things considered, at around 12 and a half cents per mile. That means my little trip to Sunoco cost me a quarter. Had I bought the gas at Shell on my way home I would have paid about 21 cents more (3 cents per gallon for 7 gallons) meaning a net savings of $0.03!

Granted, this is all anecdotal of course but it does remind me of how my grandmother used to say that people spend dimes to save pennies or something like that. It's still a wash as even if I bought gas 100 times a year it would still be less than a case of soda or a coffee at Starbucks but it is something to make you think.

So I forgot to mention that my Wii came back from Nintendo about 5 days after I sent it to them. Now that's FANTASTIC service.

In the meantime I've been playing many videogames (mostly Smash Bros. Brawl) but otherwise keeping busy with wrestling and what not.

Wii is FUBAR

Yeah, as the title says, my Wii is down for the count due to some weird artifacts showing up on the screen. Once I get my UPS return ship label from Nintendo I will be mailing it back for a repair/replacement.

Sad, but what can you do?

Maybe now would be a good time to start Ribbit King or play more Ikaruga on my Gamecube.

Zelda lives on

Just a note to say that while I haven't played Zelda in the last few days, I have gotten all the way up to the Wind Temple.