Baseball Trip Replay - Day 10 - June 2, 1994

June 2 - Tibor and Pete went to work; I slept. Got up and got my oil changed. Dialed into work, but when I went to shut down my computer, the system got corrupted, and the machine wouldn't boot (flashing disk question mark icon). Sigh. Spent the rest of the afternoon reading, and enjoying the thunderstorm. I hadn't seen a good one for a while.

That evening, Pete had to work very late. Tibor and I went to dinner (you guessed it, Mexican). We went CD shopping, came back, played cards, played pool, and went to bed.

Tibor has a "luxury condominium" right next to where he works in an eighteen story buiding. He is on the fifth floor. In the basement, there is a ping-pong table (no ball) and a pool table. Nice place.

I can't believe I did this trip without a good point-and-shoot camera. This "picture" was taken of the view outside of Tibor's window. I have no business with a fully manual camera.

Baseball Trip Replay - Day 9 - June 1, 1994

June 1 - Set out for Denver. The drive was about an hour too long. Most of the flat-for-as-far-as-the-eye-can-see part of the trip, I was watching the big storm move east of me before I got to it, so I missed it.

Stopped at the Cadillac Ranch just outside of Amarillo. This is a patch of farmland off of I-40 that a guy took ten 40-60's vintage Caddilacs and stuck them nose-first into the ground. The fins stick up out of the ground. He spray painted them blue and took out all of the glass. There is lots of really cool graffiti, and they are fun to climb on. Art. Serious Art.

Went through the prettiest small town I have ever seen, Rocky Ford, CO. Just a gorgeous, quaint little town.

As the sun was going down over the Rockies, I had to sit on Highway 50 and wait for the construction trucks to pack up and go home.

Got to Pueblo right about sunset. The combination of the sunset, the darker rain clouds and Pike's Peak made a great view.

I finally got to Denver about 10 PM, and got to Tibor Roberts' place. This place is kind of hopping this weekend; I am here for my trip, and one of Tibor's friends from grad school is working out here for a week and staying with Tibor.

Route: I-27 North to I-40 (Amarillo). I-40 West to US-385. US-385 North to US 287 (Boise City, OK). US-287 West to US-50 (Lamar, CO). US-50 West to I-25 (Pueblo). I-25 North to Denver.

 

Saying goodbye to Grandmother and Roy. He died 4 years later; this is last time I saw him.

Grandmother took this. It's one of only two picture I have of this car.

Baseball Trip Replay - Day 8 - May 31, 1994

May 31 - Well, I think we ran out of things to talk about. However, I had to figure out how to ship this antique radio (it's in a cabinet 42" high) back home. Grandmother's phone was acting up also. I arranged the shipping from a pay phone, and called the phone company to look at the problem.

When I was preparing for this trip, I had tried to find a knee-length raincoat with a hood since I am expecting rain to happen somewhere this summer. I first went to Sears, and then Target, but they said that raincoats were "seasonal" in California. I went to North Face, an outdoor shop, and they didn't have what I wanted, and what they did have, they wanted $70 for. When I told Grandmother this, we went down to Wal-Mart in Plainview and found one for $15. Stupid California.

Grandmother and Me

Zenith Model 9-S-262 from 1938. It worked when I brought it home from Grandmother's in 1981. She then took it back and stored it when I went to college. Did not work in 1994. I sent it to California. Never got it fixed. Sold to collector in 2006.

Baseball Trip Replay - Day 7 - May 30, 1994

May 30 - Memorial Day - Grandmother and I talked all day. I tried to dial into the net, but Grandmother has a phone which doesn't work with TouchTone, and Sprint needs TouchTone for phone cards, and my computer doesn't have an output for the phone, only an input for the line into the modem. Sigh.

Baseball Trip Replay - Day 6 - May 29, 1994

May 29 - Mrs. Carey woke me up with an omelette already cooked for me. After thanking them profusely, I set out for Plainview. I was dreading this a bit because I know how boring driving in the Panhandle can be. New Mexico was dull; however, they had been getting lots of rain in West Texas recently, so all the grass and crops were green and there were lots of colorful flowers
along the highway.

I got into Plainview about 4:00, and Grandmother proceeded to stuff me full of food. My step-grandfather, Roy, is really getting old. He is quite deaf, so he has trouble keeping up with conversations, and he has circulation problems in his legs, so he has to sit in his recliner with his feet up. He sits and reads the paper most of the time.

Grandmother and I "visited" until bedtime.

Route: US 285 North to US 70 (Roswell). US 70 East to Plainview.

Hmm. Apparently my route was sub-optimal. At least I didn't go through Lubbock.

Baseball Trip Replay - Day 5 - May 28, 1994

May 28 - I got off to a late start, but then packed up and headed for Carlsbad, NM. After a long, really dull drive, I arrived about 8:30 PM. There was some scenery; I went through Guadalupe Mountains National Park. There were some really cool mountains, but it was so small.

I stayed with Martha Carey's parents in Carlsbad. Martha's sister was playing a recital that evening, so they weren't home when I got there. They just left the front door open for me. Wow.

Mrs. Carey left me microwave dinner, and I nuked some lasagna and watched tv. After I got bored with that, I went to the piano room. They have two grand pianos and a pipe organ in one half of the living room. I started messing around with some Mozart which I have no hope of playing. They got back, and we got to know each other.

Turns out they have a PC and an HP Laser Jet IIP printer with 512K, and they are having printing problems in Windows (suprise, suprise). I explained to them why and the best way to fix it, and Mr. Carey said, "I think you have earned your keep!"

Route: I-10 East to US-62-180 (in El Paso). US-62-180 East to Carlsbad.

Baseball Trip Replay - Day 4 - May 27, 1994

May 27 - Bobb and I went to the Tucson Sonora Desert Museum, and had a blast. This place has lots of plants and animals from the desert. It has lots of different species of cactus, with an entire display devoted to the Saguaro. There was an aviary, a special hummingbird aviary, a display of
desert cats, a prairie dog town, some coyotes, foxes, etc. It was a neat place, and the cafeteria has good food.

Bobb then drove me to the Kitt Peak Observatory, which has lots of cool telescopes and a killer view.

We picked Nancy up from work, and had dinner at a place serving Middle Eastern food; I had a wonderful chicken kabob with rice and vegetables.

We then all went to the Tucson-Salt Lake City baseball game. I had never been to a minor league game before; I think I still prefer the majors. Don't get me wrong; I had a great time. Nancy, who had never enjoyed going to a game before, really liked it a lot. Was a wild game; there were five errors, including one on a botched rundown play, three more rundowns, three wild-pitches
and two passed balls. Tucson won on a double in the bottom of the eighth, 8-7.

No internet information about minor league games from 1994.

Baseball Trip day 3 - May 26, 1994

May 26 - Checked out in the morning, and headed for Tuscon. Almost got stopped on I-8 for doing 62 in a 55. The road was downhill, and I was passing somebody, and someone else was, too. The person behind me got stopped.

I left the fog in San Diego. It was quite hot just over the mountains. The land is fairly desolate, but there are actually quite a few plants to look at, and there are lots of mountains. So the drive wasn't too bad.

Well, take that back. Both sides of Yuma for 75 miles or so are really quite dull (not as dull as some of the stuff later in the trip, however). My favorite spot on this drive was the "rest area" on California side of the border. It consisted of a big patch of dirt with two picnic tables, a pay
phone, and two porta-potties. Wow, what a place.

I got into Tucson about 5, and found Bobb Head's and Nancy Nelson's house without any trouble. I settled in, and Bobb, Nancy and I went out for (wait for it), Mexican food! (In Arizona? What a surprise!). Bobb had a Morris dance rehearsal at his house, and Nancy had to go out an try to attract bugs with a black light since it had rained the night before. (She is a graduate student
in entomology at ASU). This is not a usual occurrence in late May.

Route to Tucson: I-805 South to Cal-163 East. 163 East to I-8 East. I-8 East to I-10 East. I-10 East to Tucson.

Baseball Trip day 2 - May 25, 1994

May 25 - Woke up at 5:56 AM to find the room shaking from an aftershock to the January Northridge Quake. Couldn't get back to sleep, so read a little while. Got checked out about 9, and headed to San Diego.

Checked into the TravelLodge, and took a one-hour nap. Went and visited Anna's aunt and uncle, Linda and Fred. Talked with them a while, and went to the game.

Jack Murphy Stadium is really ugly from the outside. It looks like several praying mantis' atacking a giant doughnut. But the inside is nice.

I got really good seats, which is not too big a surprise, since the owners have done their best to alienate the fans. I was about ten rows back right behind home plate.

They closed the upper deck, and put tarps with all of the team logos on them on the seats. Looks kind of cool. All of the hawkers wear pin-striped baseball uniforms with the word "HAWKERS" on their chest. They were cool. The weather was still nippy with fog; I was hoping to have left that behind in the Bay Area.

The Giants beat the Padres 5-1 (I wrote this down wrong in 1994; it was actually 5-2.)

Route: I-110 to I-710 South. I-710 South to I-405 South. I-405 to I-5 South. I-5 South to I-805 South into town.

Game Link: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1994/B05250SDN1994.htm

Note that I forgot to bring my clipboard into the stadium. I did have my little travel notebook, so this in how I kept score.

Baseball trip day 1 - May 24, 1994

May 24 - Took Anna to work, ran a couple of errands and headed out. Arrived in LA about 5:30, got checked into a cheap motel in KoreaTown, and headed to the game. Parked in the worst possible location; had to walk around the stadium and up a hellish number of stairs. Got into the stadium and then was informed that no video cameras were allowed. Checked mine with lost and found, and found my seat. My seat was in the front row of the top deck, and I felt like I was falling the whole game. It was a Candlestick-like night, although not really that cold. But there was a lot of fog. Aside from the annoyance of the video camera and the rail that blocked my view of the field, I liked Dodger Stadium. Grass, build for baseball only, etc. The DiamondVision screen had an incredible picture, the best I have ever seen.

The Cubs beat the Dodgers, 2-0. (https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1994/B05240LAN1994.htm)

I was really surprised that it only took me fifteen minutes to get back to the motel.

Route from San Fransisco (where my last errand was): I-580 East to I-5. I-5 South to I-110. I-110 to city streets for KoreaTown.




(Please note that these maps are just for show; they may or may not represent the route I actually took).

Dodger Stadium

Scoresheet from game

Baseball trip replay

When I was growing up watching baseball in Houston in the late 70s, early 80s, they used to advertise from places like Wrigley Field or Dodger Stadium for travel packages to those cities to see the Astros play. That sounded so cool to me, but I really wanted to see the other stadia as well. Plus, we never got to see American League stadia on TV, except for the All-Star Game, playoffs, and World Series, because we were a "National League" city, so the NBC Game of the Week had an awful lot of Mets, Cubs, Dodgers, and Cardinals games.

I wanted to see them all.

When I started working in the real world, I got a job at Claris, an Apple subsidiary. At the time, Apple was giving paid sabbaticals; you could take six weeks paid plus whatever your vacation time you had accumulated after you had worked there for five years.

My first idea for my sabbatical was to go to Leningrad for several weeks and study Russian, but when the Soviet Union broke apart in 1992, all of the agencies I had been looking at stopped existing.

So I decided to do a baseball tour. I wrote a computer program (the current version of that is on github; the original was in C) to help me with routing since it is a variation of a hard computer science problem called the Travelling Salesman Problem. Claris had been loaned an RS 6000 machine since it was the initial way a developer could port applications from the MC68000 architecture to the Power PC architecture. However, it was sitting unused because those porting efforts moved back to the Mac. So I borrowed it. I input distances and schedules for teams for the 1994 season, ran the program for a week, when it spit out an answer, and got tickets.

That in an of itself was fun. I had to call each ticket office on the phone. I did discover that about 13 of the 24 teams I needed to call (I went to the two Bay Area stadia separately before the trip started) used Ticketmaster, but the rest each had their own way off processing. When I called the Detroit Tigers ticket office (in January), I had to call M-F 9-5 Eastern, and when I got somebody, he took my credit card info over the phone, went over to a drawer with all of the tickets for that game in it, took out mine, and dropped them in the mail.

I then set out and drove for 11 weeks. 20000 miles. Oh, and my ex-wife and I found a house we wanted the Sunday before I left, so I was also trying to manage my part of that process while on the road. Using telephone and dial-up internet. For email. No websites yet.

It was a blast. It was long. And some things in my world changed during the 3 months I was gone.

Starting tomorrow, May 24, 2020, the 26th anniversary of the first day of this trip, I am going to repost my blog entries I wrote at the time. They are generally pretty short. I will also include links to games, and other sites I saw. May not have many pictures, but I will try (I did not have a good camera).

Once it is all done, I will wrap it up with a entry about the trip, how the world changed during the summer, how baseball and world has changed since, and some other stuff.

I may not post everyday, but I will catch up if I have to miss a couple here and there.

Miami Story

Originally in life, I was going to be a jazz musician.

My sister started piano lessons when I was in 3rd grade. At the same time, my mother bought an encyclopedia from the grocery store, one volume at a time. When I got to the article on music, it laid out the basics of how to read music. That, combined with my sister's piano books, taught me the basics.

Around that time, the Lubbock S&H Green Stamps store shut down. My parents had been collecting them for years, so my dad went to the closing. He came back with a guitar.

All four of us tried it out. My sister's hands were too small, and she was much more interested in singing, anyway. My mother hated having callouses on her fingertips. My dad and I started figuring it out, however.

Dad was a natural. He picked it up, and within weeks, he was playing 50s and 60s rock and roll songs. For years, he and my mother would jam after dinner, having a cigarette, almost every night.

I was still young, so I was slower. I like guitar, but it was pretty hard.

Around that time, my uncle, who was an Eastman degree holder, ex-band director, and a computer programmer, gave me a book on music harmony for Christmas. I kind of looked at it; after all, I was 10.

I started playing saxophone at 12 in 6th grade. In 7th grade, at Lanier Jr. High in Houston, I was put into a jazz band, knowing nothing about jazz. The director taught us well; I got hooked on jazz. One day, he taught us the blues scale. I took home my horn and noodled around, and this great lick came out of my horn. (To this day, I wish I remembered it!). Right then, I decided I wanted to be a jazz musician when I grew up. Discovered bari sax in 8th grade, and have been playing it ever since.

I also got much more serious about that harmony book; I worked all of the way through it. Once I realized that you did not have to hear what you were writing, the exercises were easy. Hearing the music would have to come later.

I attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston for 10th grade. The first day of classes, I went to a class called "Music Theory". That day, they explained what treble and bass clef were, and where all of the notes on the staff were ("Every Good Boy Does Fine"). I was incredulous.

Afterwards, I went to the instructor and asked what was being taught in that course. He explained that we would learn intervals, triads, voice leading, major and minor chords, and dominant sevenths.

This was harmony, except that the modern term apparently was "theory". I told him I already knew this stuff. He then told me to hang on, and we went back to his office. He wrote out an 8-bar figured bass exercise, and told me to go voice lead the exercise, and bring it back a couple of days later.

Which is how I ended up as a sophomore in a class full of juniors for Theory II. My senior year at HSPVA they did not offer Theory III. I really wish that they had.

I got an academic scholarship, and a music scholarship to the University of Miami in Florida. Not quite all of the tuition was covered, but about 2/3's was. The first week, they gave me a music theory placement test. They put me in Theory II, where the first day, we went over voice leading dominant sevenths.

This was a big step backwards for me, so I asked the instructor why I was in that course. He said that I did not do well on the placement test. I asked him to show me, as I found that hard to believe.

He, and the head of the department, looked at my exam. And I saw the problem immediately. In music theory, you label chords with numbers, depending on where in the scale the root is. But you use Roman numerals. And you use CAPITAL letters for major, and small letters for minor. So far so good. So, V is a major chord starting on the 5th scale degree, and v is a minor chord starting on the 5th scale degree.

These people put bars across the top and bottom of their capital Roman numerals. I just used capital letters. They graded my test assuming I did not know the difference between major and minor.

The head of the department, Dr. Kam, told me to wait a few minutes. He came back out and said,

"We are putting you in Theory III".

I said, "Really? What did I not know?"

He said, "You missed Neopolitan Seconds, and Augmented Sixth Chords."

I said, "If you give me 24 hours, could I take the test again? I am sure I could learn them tonight."

He laughed, and said, "No. I want you to really learn them, not just memorize them for a placement test."

He didn't know me very well.

He taught my Theory III class. At least he was interesting; I slept through most of the class, doing the homework in the class room while everybody was gathering before the class started.

I then took his Theory IV class, 20th Century Music. And here is where the fun began. I loved it. I also got to know him pretty well. The class was a blast.

Midway through the semester, he asked the class for help. The Miami Theory Department was putting on a Contemporary Music Festival for an entire weekend. All kinds of strange stuff was being performed.

I only performed on saxophone twice at Miami because I did not make a jazz band. I practiced a bunch! I played bass and contrabass clarinet in Wind Ensemble, and played piccolo and alto flute on several recording sessions, and a couple of master's recitals. The first time I played sax, I read in the pit for Ain't Misbehaving. It was fun; the entire cast was black, of course, but the entire band was white and in the shadows.

The second time was in the Contemporary Music Festival. We had one performance piece in the music quad that consisted of four of us wearing Walkmans and headphones, improvising to chord changes that only we could hear.

The festival opened with atonal trumpet fanfares from the rooftops of the 360 dorm towers (somewhere around 12 stories tall), and went from there.

In the leadup to this festival, Dr. Kam surprised our theory class with a guest, the avant-guard composer John Cage. He was in town as a featured clinician for the festival. He came to the back of the class and sat down with us jazzers.

He was 69 years old. Near the end of the class, he turned around to the four of us hanging out in the back, and said, "You guys play jazz, right? I can tell."

We all nodded. He continued,

"You guys want to go out to the Everglades and get some mushrooms? I know a place that has really good ones. But I need a car."

I was as straight-laced about these things then as I am now, and bowed out, but the other three enthusiastically said yes.

I went through all of this to say that at least two of the guys who took John Cage out and got stoned ended up in the Miami Sound Machine a couple of years later, and at least one of them is in this video:

Loma Prieta Memories

I know that this is not an anniversary, or anything. But I was asked to post this story on Facebook, so I decided to blog about it, and then post a link.

In the fall of 1989, I had been in California for a little over a year. My buddies from Rice and StyleWare who worked at Claris usually went on a CD run about once a month, and then dinner afterwards. Our favorite place, though certainly not the only one, was Tower Records. Not sure what city it was in, actually. Mountain View, Los Altos, and Palo Alto all had borders around there. It was at the corner of El Camino Real and San Antonio Rd, caddy-corner from Chef Chu's (yum!) and Armadillo Willy's (meh).

One fine afternoon, we decided to go on a run, and try to beat the traffic by leaving Claris right at 5:00. I already decided not to watch the World Series; neither of the teams (Giants and As) were my team, and the Astros had been in a pennant race with the Giants in 1989, and lost out. World Series games are too early on the West Coast.

I drove, and my two buds rode along. I put a cassette into my car stereo, and off we went.

We were driving on Old Mountain View-Alviso Road, which runs parallel to CA-237, at that point, almost a freeway (still had traffic lights but was freeway speed). At the Santa Clara-Sunnyvale border, there is a bridge over a creek. Right before that bridge, the car hit something like a log, followed almost immediately like another impact. But I did not see anything on the road.

I stopped the car, but it was rocking in all directions. It was an earthquake. It went on quite a while. The cars on the highway were not aware of it, but the street lights were all swaying.

The rocking (it was not shaking) stopped after a while. We looked at each other, shrugged, and kept going. "There are lots of earthquakes here, right?" "Right."

Came around the corner to the fire station, and they were lining up the trucks at the end of the driveway by the street. Then we noticed that the traffic lights had no power.

Growing up in Houston, the safest place to drive when there was no power was the freeway, since the intersections did not rely on lights. So we got on 237, exited 101, and then exited San Antonio, going towards El Camino Real.

About halfway to El Camino, at Central, the traffic started. None of the traffic lights had power. By now, it was about 5:20, and people were leaving to go home.

We were almost to El Camino when an aftershock hit. We got to the parking lot, and it was full of people milling around. Some of the windows at Tower were shattered. The light at San Antonio and El Camino was off. This is when we got scared.

I switched to FM radio, and there was only one station on the air, KSJO. The DJ said "Whoa! Another one! We are riding the waves here, the ground waves!"

The other drive-time host said, "Whoa! Look at the TV! The Bay Bridge is broken!"

"Be careful out there! And here is a surfing song for those ground waves!" and proceeded to start playing Surfing Safari.

We turned left onto El Camino and discussed our options. We were now afraid of bridges and overpasses. None of us had any food at home (we were all bachelors). The car had maybe 1/8 tank of gas. I had $4 and credit cards. I was now starting to worry about getting home to Milpitas.

We did notice that about every mile, there was power at that intersection with El Camino Real. When we got to Grant Road, there was a gas station with power. I spent my last $4 and got the tank up to almost half (gas was cheaper then!) It was getting very dark by now.

We then proceeded to go down El Camino Real some more. The plan was to go down to Bowers, and head up to Claris that way. At Remington/Fair Oaks, there was an open restaurant! Spoons! Not the best food, but it was edible, and had power. We stopped and got a table. They took credit cards! Ate a big big meal.

When we left, there was a 3 hour wait. The motorcycle store next door had a big line where they were selling generators.

Finally got back to Claris about 8:00 PM. We went in the front door. The security guard and one of the admins were manning the front desk. They checked out names off of a list, but told us we could not go any further. There was cosmetic damage, and the building was being inspected.

So we tried to go home. I had to go home on 237; it was really the only viable route, and I did not know any others yet anyway.

It was a parking lot. And, it still had traffic lights. At just about every single light, there was a major accident. It was a harrowing hour and a half for a 15 minute drive. Getting past where it intersected with 880 took a LONG time.

I drove up to the house in Milpitas, and my roommate was wondering the dark streets with a guitar, singing. We went into our dark house, and realized something. Both of us had waterbeds. Waterbeds had to be heated, or the sleeper risked hypothermia. We had no power...

I fished out my emergency transistor radio and discovered KCBS AM, where I caught up with everything that was known up to that point (the Bay Bridge break; the Cypress collapse; the Marina District burning; the cancellation of the World Series game; all of the bridges were closed). And that there was looting.

I can't believe we were worried; we were 50 miles from San Fransisco. Nonetheless, we slept on the living room floor with baseball bats next to us.

At 2:00, the lights came on for 5 seconds. At 4:00 AM, they came on for good.

We got up at 7:00, and looked around the house. All of the bookcases up stairs had fallen over, and our study was a mess. Other than that, we had no other damage.

Claris was open that day, but we did not have hot food, since their water supply had not been cleared.

A couple of side stories:

Our house in Milpitas had frequent power outages until they got the power back on that night; the transformers were all old, and evidently one would fail after fixing another until they were all replaced. A few weeks before the quake, I had a date with a woman. We were to go on a Hornblower bay cruise. I was to pick her up at 1:00 PM. That morning I was washing clothes, and the power went out, so I did not have anything nice to wear. I wore a sweatshirt and jeans. She was visibly disappointed...

Anyway, after the quake hit, her phone lines did not work for 2-3 weeks. Once I did get in touch with her, she had started dating somebody else.

Unlikely she would have continued to date me much longer anyway, but I blame Loma Prieta for that failed relationship!

One more:

My father decided that October to take a train vacation. He rode the train from Houston to Chicago, and then went west to Seattle. His plan was to ride down to San Jose, spend a few days, then get back on the train to LA, and then Houston.

He was in Seattle when the quake hit. He got in touch with me a couple of days later. Asked me if I knew if Amtrak was running. I had no idea. He called back a couple of hours later and said that Amtrak said that they were running.

I met him at the San Jose train station on Saturday after the Tuesday quake. He looked white as a sheet. The color started coming back to his face as he looked around, and grinned ear-to-ear when he saw me. Hugged me real hard.

"You looked like you had seen a ghost when you got off the train," I told him.

"Well, the train stopped in Oakland, and the station was in ruins except for our platform, and the collapsed highway was visible from the windows of the train. You don't know how happy I am to see you, here, with everything safe!"

Today, I figured I would take it easy since I knew I was going to the Blue Note Tokyo to hear some jazz. Besides it was raining, and did not feel like fighting the elements and being a foreigner all at the same time. I ate breakfast at the buffet, spent time reading a book in the lobby, did some writing, and took a nap.

When it was time to go to the club, I decided rather than walk and take a bus (which is what Apple Maps recommended), I would take a taxi. 10 minute drive.

I think that this was a really good choice. I stayed dry. It cost me about $20. Totally worth it.

The Blue Note Tokyo is a real jazz club in a real city. I miss that ever since moving to Austin. The Bay Area has Yoshi's (two clubs), and I really miss it.

There are some really good acts scheduled for the club this summer. I just missed Eliane Elias. Mike Stern is coming next week. Tower of Power will be here later this summer. There are some acts on the bill I have never heard of, but the excerpts of them they played on the video screen sounded great.

Tonight's act was Maceo Parker's Ray Charles Orchestra. I had no idea what to expect, but it certainly wasn't Maceo Parker doing a Ray Charles tribute with local musicians filling out the big band. He even put on dark glasses when he sang! I found that a bit cheesy. The music director evidently used to work with Charles, but I did not catch his name.

The band was great. and filled with local players. If I do come to spend some extended time here in Tokyo, I need to bring my horn. It would be fun to play with these cats. They are good. Some are quite a bit better than I am; most are at my level. The lead trumpet player, who also evidently was the contractor, was absolutely awesome. The bari player was the only Western fellow in the band. He was pretty good, but I did not feel outclassed.

The woman next to me knew most of the band, and had a really good time. She and I were grooving to the music, and I wish we could have danced! We had a really good time.

The food was good. The music was good. The club itself was awesome. I miss having a real club in Austin. Haven't been to Parker's yet; maybe it's this good.

Unfettered weekend in Tokyo

I am in Tokyo as part of a work trip. That is going well, and I am happy to be here.

I am fortunate enough to be able to stay over a weekend, so today I decided to do something I have always wanted to do: go to a Japanese baseball game.

There are at least two teams in Nippon Professional Baseball located in Tokyo, the Yomiuri Giants, and the Tokyo Yakult Swallows. Both of them were in town today. The Giants are the equivalent of the New York Yankees in popularity and success. Japan's biggest star, Sadaharu Oh, played for them. Surprise, surprise, they were sold out.

That left the Swallows. Turns out, they were sold out as well. I went online to try to get tickets, and the only website in English that I found had no tickets available.

I then remembered that I am in a great Western hotel (the Westin Tokyo), and they had a concierge! The concierge helped me get a ticket. He used some reseller website in Japanese. The confirmation got sent to my Inbox, but it's all in Japanese. He told me to go to the 7-11 around the corner and they would print the ticket for me. He even called ahead so that they would know what to do in case they spoke little English. The 7-11 is just across this little bridge (called the "American Bridge") which runs over the train lines. I got the ticket, and then braved said trains to get to the ball park.

From here, you walk to the Ebisu Station, and take the Yamamote line to Shibuya, where you have to change trains to the Tokyo Metro. Took me 15 or 20 minutes to figure out how to do that, and then 5 minutes more to put more money on my train card.

Meiji Jingu Stadium

The stadium (Jingu Stadium) is two stops away from Shibuya. And then it is about a 15 minute walk.

It was crowded. My seat was down the left field line, next to the foul pole.

Home plate is over there somewhere

So, the seat wasn't the best. Plus, it had no back:

Not ideal, but hey, I was at a Japanese baseball game. The Swallows were hosting the Orix Buffaloes. I was sitting in the Orix section.

In Japan, each team has a serious rooting section. They have drums and trumpets. When their team is at bat, they have custom songs they sing for each player. This goes on the entire game. It reminded me of two things: college football student sections, and the Moneyball Oakland A's drummers and bleacher creatures, who came up with custom songs for each player (The Tejada Mambo was my favorite!)

There were two players I had seen the major leagues, Nori Aoki, and Wladimir Balentien. Aoki had a successful MLB career, but was just terrible for three teams in 2017, and did not get an offer in the US for 2018, so he came home. Balentien is a failed power-hitting prospect. Never put it together in 4 seasons in the US, and has been in Japan for 9 years now.

The Swallows fans had umbrellas that they would put up and shake up and down and twirl. It was great fun.

I tried to score the game. I use the Project Scoresheet/Retrosheet scoring system. It's complex, and I have several additional notations I use. However, it's been a long time, and I was rusty. My pen wasn't behaving. And then, there is the difficulty of being in Japan.

Orix's team was only ever announced on the scoreboard in Japanese. Even the non-Japanese players had their names spelled in katakana, which is not helpful for me. They did display the positions by number (1 = pitcher, 2= catcher, etc), but they did not include uniform numbers.

The home team's starting lineup had little posed video clips of everybody, with their names on the back visible, and then superimposed titles with the names in Japanese and English. If you missed the starting lineup, you were out of luck.

None of the relief pitchers ever had their names displayed on the scoreboard. The pinch-hitter for Yakult did, but not the pinch runner. And they were all way too far away to read their names on the back of their jerseys. I could make out the numbers of the right-handed batters, and the relief pitchers for Orix. Given that I could understand at least some of the names in the songs, and that the Orix fans were all wearing jerseys with their favorite players names and numbers on them, I did managed to get 3 or 4 names. And the numbers of the relief pitchers. For Orix. Oh, boy.

And there is no designated hitter in this league. Pitchers hit.

Scoresheet is a big mess. I'll keep it to laugh over the years.

The game itself was like watching a game in the mid-80s. There were steals, sacrifice bunts, and hit-and-run plays. There was lots of scoring early, so both starting pitchers left early. Both middle relievers got to bat; one of them more than once. The manager of the Swallows screwed up a double switch late, but it did not really hurt him, as the Swallows won 7-3.

The crowd with me in it then made its way back to the train station. All of the little street food vendors that had been out when I was going to the game were gone. So my plan was to go to Shibuya, and find something to eat around that neighborhood.

When I got there and popped up, I walked around, and realized I was overwhelmed. I was hot, and it was amazingly crowded. I really started to not want to eat strange food, and find some place quiet. I bailed on Shibuya, and went back to Ebisu and went to the McDonalds. That was nowhere near as crowded as Shibuya, but it was still pretty crowded and noisy. Finally, I walked back to the hotel.

Sibuya at night. It was way more crowded this afternoon.

On the way, there was a food truck park next to the open air market in Ebisu Garden Place that had a gelato stand. I had a lemon/coconut/lavender gelato. It was pretty strange, but mostly refreshing. I finally got back to the hotel and collapsed, cooling off before taking a bath.

The open-air market at Ebisu Garden Place, just in front of the building where my work is

Traveling is hard, but rewarding. Tomorrow, Blue Note Tokyo.

Hard drive woes - happy ending

So, a couple of weeks ago, the 6 TB LaCie drive that I had my Plex library and my digitized cassettes of all of my school recordings died. I contacted LaCie/Seagate, and it turns out that the drive had three weeks left on its warranty. I had them send it to Bowling Green where we are spending the New Year with Jade's mother. I took my giant Time Machine backup drive, a 4x3 TB RAID 1 array from Other World Computing, with us to restore.

Once I got the new drive, it was tricky to figure out how to restore the data. It's not a boot drive, and all of the instructions for Time Machine say that you have to restore the system. Turns out the Time Machine backup is not actually restoreable as a system, for whatever reason. Does not show up in Migration Assistant. :(

I did find out that you can boot off of a Time Machine backup as a recovery partition, which is really quite handy if you have to install to a brand new drive in your machine. But I was still unable to restore a complete system.

I tried installing a new version of MacOS on the new drive, and then using Migration Assistant to restore from; same problem.

Was wondering if I was going to have to order a drive from BackBlaze, my iCloud backup. That would mean several more days lost, and given that we are traveling back to Texas soon, I was getting really frustrated.

I then looked at the file system of the Time Machine backup again. At the top level of the drive is a folder called "Backups.backupdb".

If you open this folder, you will see another folder for each computer that has backed up to this Time Machine backup:

If you open the correct machine folder, you get a list of backups.

The key is that last entry, "Latest". When you open that, you see your complete file system, organized by volume/drive.

Notice that the title of the folder is the date and time of the last backup, and indeed, matches the last entry before "Latest" in the list. "Latest" is what is called a "symbolic link". Basically, on the hard drive, it's a special file that points to another file. It is a symbolic link, because the file system sees it as a file at its lowest level. If you remove the symbolic link, the file/folder it points to sticks around.

The contents of the folder, however, are a combinations of files/folders, and what is called "hard links".

Each version of every file you own and have ever backed up to Time Machine is uniquely stored in your Time Machine backup the first time Time Machine sees it. Every time Time Machine backs up your drive, however, if it sees that your file has not changed, it creates a "hard link" to it. This kind of link creates multiple references to the same file. If you remove the file or a hard link to it, they all go away.

The upshot is that every single folder in that list represents the full contents of your file system as of the time the backup was taken.

OK, so once I remembered that, I did the following:

• Reformatted the new drive. Don't need a bootable system on it.
• Opened Terminal.
• Typed the following UNIX commands:

mkdir -p /Volumes/Bari/Users/
rsync --progress --partial -av /Volumes/Beethoven/Backups.backupdb/Syd\'s\ iMac/Latest/Bari/Users/jazzman /Volumes/Bari/Users/


Let's break that down.

"mkdir" is the Unix command for making folders (which in Unix are called "directories"). Adding "-p" to that command tells Unix to make all of the folders containing the final folder. "/Volumes/Bari" is the path to the drive I just formatted. This command then made "/Volumes/Bari/Users". The "-p" was not strictly necessary here.

"rsync" is the Unix utility which detects when files are newer and older than each other and copies them around. It's a poor man's Time Machine. Here are the options:

• "--progress" tells rsync to tell me what it's doing. It just sits there otherwise, and with a restore as long as this, it really helps psychologically to see something happening besides the blinky lights on the disks.
• "--partial" tells rsync that if this is interrupted for some reason (I stop it, power outage, etc.), to pick up where it left off. Since many of these files are large video files, losing all progress on a big file would cost a lot of time.
• "-av" tells rsync to use "archive mode" and to be "verbose". I would suggest you look up rsync via its man page or via Google to dig into the details of archive mode, but basically, it's copy all newer files, treating folders and links correctly. "verbose" means I want to see output. "--progress" also gives me a count of files left, and shows other stats while the copy is going.
• "/Volumes/Beethoven/Backups.backupdb/Syd\'s\ iMac/Latest/Bari/Users/jazzman" is the path I want to restore from. I have to quote the apostrophe and spaces in the path with backslashes because Unix command-line utilities treat those characters differently.
• "/Volumes/Bari/Users/" is the destination path. The "jazzman" folder listed above will be synced inside of this folder.

So, I set this going:

[syd@macsyd ~]$ rsync --progress --partial -av /Volumes/Beethoven/Backups.backupdb/Syd\'s\ iMac/Latest/Bari/Users/jazzman /Volumes/Bari/Users/
building file list ...
595775 files to consider
jazzman/
jazzman/Desktop/
jazzman/ISOs/
 
...

jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/logs/refs/heads/master
         175 100%    0.85kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#505969, to-check=15/595775)
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/logs/refs/remotes/
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/logs/refs/remotes/origin/
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/logs/refs/remotes/origin/HEAD
         175 100%    0.85kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#505970, to-check=12/595775)
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/objects/
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/objects/info/
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/objects/pack/
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/objects/pack/pack-4c25d7ded28170de85a7e5179cf1f2964004290a.idx
        2836 100%   13.71kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#505971, to-check=8/595775)
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/objects/pack/pack-4c25d7ded28170de85a7e5179cf1f2964004290a.pack
      187147 100%  887.19kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#505972, to-check=7/595775)
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/refs/
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/refs/heads/
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/refs/heads/master
          41 100%    0.19kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#505973, to-check=4/595775)
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/refs/remotes/
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/refs/remotes/origin/
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/refs/remotes/origin/HEAD
          32 100%    0.15kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#505974, to-check=1/595775)
jazzman/dev/sydvicious/trip/.git/refs/tags/

sent 2601869494866 bytes  received 11436104 bytes  42318360.71 bytes/sec
total size is 3644059082442  speedup is 1.40
 
I actually had to invoke this three times and stop the first two for various reasons. However, it did complete. It took 36 hours to restore 3.6 TB of data, but it's all there. When I get home, I can hook this back up to my iMac, and everything will be normal.

However, that Time Machine backup can't restore my system. That is worrisome, so I am going to have to nuke it and start over, let the backup finish several days later, and then see if I can restore a system with it. Nothing like having to perform a restore to find the problems with your backups.

Time for my annual baseball post-season history blast

I am fascinated by long-term success of baseball franchises. The fact that some teams go for decades without winning the championship is perplexing. Just intuitively, every team should win the World Series every 30 years, since there are 30 franchises. That does not happen.

I decided to create a "Championship Frustration" index to measure every World Series by. This is the total number of seasons that have been played by both teams not counting the season in question. So, the Frustration Index of the Chicago Cubs for 2016 is 2016 (current season) - 1908 (the last time they won) - 1 (not counting the current season) = 107. Still the all-time high... and it's not close. For the Texas Rangers, they started playing in 1961 (in Washington), so the index is 2016 - 1961 (or, really, we assume the year before the franchise started is the last win, 1960 - 1), or 55.

Here are the top-ten World Series sorted by "Championship Frustration":

1. 2005 - Chicago White Sox (won in 1917, FI 87) vs. Houston Astros (came into league in 1962, FI 43) = 130
2. 2004 - Boston Red Sox (won in 1918, FI 85) vs. St. Louis Cardinals (won in 1982, FI 21) = 106
3. 2010 - San Francisco Giants (won in 1954 while in New York, FI 55) vs. Texas Rangers (came into league in 1961 as Washington, FI 49) = 104
4. 1975 - Cincinnati Reds (won in 1940, FI 34) vs. Boston Red Sox (won in 1918, FI 56) = 90
5 (tie). 1980 - Philadelphia Phillies (had not won; series started 1903, FI 77) vs. Kansas City (came into league in 1968, FI 11) = 88
5 (tie). 2002 - Anaheim Angels (came into league in 1961, FI 41) vs. San Francisco Giants (won in 1954 while in New York, FI 47) = 88
7. 1986 - New York Mets (won in 1969, FI 16) vs. Boston Red Sox (win in 1918, FI 67) = 83
8. 1995 - Atlanta Braves (won in 1958 while in Milwaukee, FI 36) vs. Cleveland Indians (won in 1948, FI 46) = 82
9. 1972 - Oakland Athletics (won in 1930 while in Philadelphia, FI 41) vs. Cincinnati Reds (won in 1940, FI 31) = 72
10. 1987 - Minnesota Twins (won in 1924 while in Washington, FI 67) vs. St. Louis Cardinals (won in 1982, FI 4) = 66

So, let's look at the FI for all of the playoff teams:

National League:

Chicago Cubs (won in 1908) - 107
Washington Nationals (came into league in 1969 in Montreal) - 47
New York Mets (won in 1986) - 29
Los Angeles Dodgers (won in 1988) - 27
San Francisco Giants (won in 2014) - 1

American League:

Cleveland Indians (won in 1948) - 67
Texas Rangers (came into league in 1961 in Washingotn) - 55
Baltimore Orioles (won in 1983) - 32
Toronto Blue Jays (won in 1993) - 22
Boston Red Sox (won in 2013) - 2

So, if the Cubs go the World Series, if they play Cleveland, Texas or Baltimore, this will be World Series with the most frustrated fans. Without the Cubs, it won't be the most frustrating, but it has the great potential of making the top ten.

Unless we get the Giants vs. the Red Sox. Yawn.

Apple frustrations

So I have a beef with Apple and the way it works.

I find a problem with an Apple product. I get angry. But these things happen. Software is software, and there will be bugs.

When they are serious or annoying enough, I look for workarounds on the Web, and I usually find them. I find them all over the Apple Developer Forums. I find them in Mac or iPhone blogs. I find them on Twitter. I find many people who have these problems.

When I then mention them, I am told by (very nice and polite and friendly) friends who are Apple employees to file a bug. That Apple only notices when people outside of Apple files bugs.

That process is somewhat painful. It takes at least 15 minutes, and often much longer, to give enough detail to describe the bug effectively.

When the bug is filed, if Apple pays attention, I am asked to spend another amount of time, sometimes several hours, and freeze the state of my machine so that over the next few days or weeks, more probing questions about the state of whatever it is can be asked.

And then the bug is usually marked as a Duplicate. And the only visibility from this point forward is whether or not the bug that it duplicates is still open.

So. Why, as a paying customer, am I being asked to do free QA work for a bug that Apple already knows about?

I have it on good authority that the fact that a bug is filed from an outside person is given more weight that an bug filed inside of Apple. That authority is me; we certainly did that when I was there.

But I some other problems with this:

1. It marginalizes the Apple employees who do file bugs, or at least it marginalizes the QA work they already did. Apple people can find the bug much closer to when it is introduced that the general public. It could be months before any betas even ship out. It also gives a negative incentive for employees to file a bug on their own code; they are penalized for having the bug, and they never get to see it fixed until it becomes a public problem.

2. Why is it that the fact that the tech press, blogosphere, Twitter-sphere and forum audience are basically ignored on this? When I can literally find a dozen descriptions of the bug that are every bit as good as mine out in the wild, why do I have to file a bug for it to be paid attention to?

In its defense, Apple has a LOT of software, and has a relatively small engineering staff generating and maintaining it. That is what helps keep Apple as nimble as it is. But the attitude of "we'll fix it when the public complains enough in ways that we define (and are obtuse)" makes me insane.

My friends who are Apple employees, I am not mad at you. I am an Apple fanboy from wayback. I am a former employee. Thank your for your hard work.

I just wish this aspect of how Apple works would change.