October 14, 2008

• News and Notes: New roommate/media room makeover

  

  MEET MIKE: My new roommate moved in the last week of August and has now been sharing my rented house for almost two months. His name is Mike Hatt, and we’ve taken to calling ourselves “a couple of Mikes”. I plan to engrave that on a sign to hang over our door. Mike is a 23 year old aspiring musician who brought in a bunch of musical gear, both instruments and recording paraphanalia. He plays keyboards and drums, and is into mostly electronica, but for someone so young, he has a vast knowledge of the musicians from my era and before, and even collects vinyl records!

  

  When I first moved into the South Bay in the early 70s, I lived in a rented apartment on Arlington Street in Torrance, which becomes Narbonne Street the very next block westward at the Lomita city border. Mike was born about a block away from the apartment building where I lived. As a child, he frequented the “Chicken Lickin’” restaurant which was located next to the apartment building in which I lived. I might even have seen him when he was young since I ate at the same restaurant a lot. He attended the elementary school which bordered my apartment building.

  Mike was born completely blind. He has never known what it is like to be sighted, but you might not even know he was blind if you had a conversation with him or hung out with him for a while. He grew up attending public schools, and while he did have a tutor, and is handicapped, he is able to operate in public as anyone else. He uses a white cane, and has never owned a guide dog. He reads braille, and even has a “typewriter” to create braille labels for record albums, etc., but he hardly uses it and rarely needs to read braille. He listens to audiobooks and his cell phone and computer keep him connected to his vast array of friends.

  

  I had lots of buddies when I was 23, and living with Mike brings  back a lot of memories of my own youth. I wasn’t a musician, but I had lots of musician friends, and I used to record my buddies when they played in thier bands. Mike is an accomplished drummer and keyboardist, and has lots of friends, both aspiring musicians, and just good buddies who help him out. Since he obviously can’t drive, he depends upon a network of buddies to get around. Some of his friends are quite young, as young as 17. In the two months Mike has lived with me, he has had a bunch of friends over, sometimes three or four at a time, but he is never loud, and I can live my life in peace knowing he is respectful of my wants and needs.

  Since he is blind, Mike receives state benefits, which he uses to pay the rent, and he gets spending cash from “flipping” sound equipment on Craigslist and eBay. He answered my Craigslist ad for a roommate within an hour of my posting, and after I talked with him twice I knew he would be my roommate. He comes across as a much older person than he actually is, and is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. I already consider him a friend as well as a roommate, and I’ve met about 15 new people in the two months he’s been living with me. He stays up pretty late, and goes to lots of clubs and raves in the evenings, sometimes playing in the club bands. During the day, he has our house to himself, and can drum to his heart’s content when I’m not around. He’s always nice to ask me when I am around if he wants to play music in the evenings. He never does this for long periods of time, usually only 10 minutes or so, so I let him play if he has a need. He’s also befriended another musician in the neighborhood, and sometimes plays drums over at the other guy’s house.

  I was a bit hesitant at first when Mike told me he was setting up his vintage 70s drum kit in his bedroom. As you can see from the photo above, he has not only the drum set but a full recording rig in his room. I had nothing to worry about, however. And sometimes I don’t even know that Mike is in the house!

  The bed is almost incidental to his room. He moved everything around himself, hung quilts on the wall to act as insulation for the sound, and is very organized. He has filled my newly cleared garage with boxes and boxes of old tape decks and receivers. Within two weeks of his moving in, he had connected a complete audio/video stereo system in the living room, so I can listen to vinyl records (on some massive and great sounding antique speakers) watch laserdiscs, DVDs, or DirecTV, and listen to CDs. I used to have a complete set up in the living room, but cut it down a couple of years before Joel died, moving some of he equipment to the media room, my personal living room in the back of the house. I’m quite pleased with how Mike set up the media section in the living room, and I’ve already spent lots of hours relaxing and listening to some of my old vinyl records, a pastime I haven’t engaged in for many years.

  

  MEDIA ROOM MAKEOVER: Heck, I hadn’t even “finished” the makeover on the main part of the house, when my HDTV in the media room stopped functioning last month. I immediately purchased (on credit, natch) a new Mitsubishi DLP 1080p 60″ projection display device. The photo above shows my lazyboy and an unretouched view of the monitor, showing a travel documentary of British Columbia. I couldn’t take photos direct from the screen on my older TV. There was a light bar across the middle of the screen when I snapped photos. I think I will be able to shoot brighter stills from the image on the screen on this one.

  Needless to say, this “toy” is still new, and I’ve been watching lots of new shows here in my media room, and also recording lots of HD movies and renting bluray DVDs. I watched Iron Man last week and expect to get the new Indiana Jones movie today. I set my chair in the middle of the room and the HDTV is up against the wall. It’s all screen, and doesn’t have a stand like the other HDTV did, so I’ve got it sitting on top of a couple of Mike’s older speaker cabinets right now. Eventually, I will have it sitting on a cabinet which will contain the DVD player, receiver and DVR, which are now in a cabinet to the left of the screen behind the fan. In the future, I expect to either buy or build an all inclusive rack for the wall around the HDTV, for storing DVDs, books, collectibles, etc. Getting the new TV has sort of forced my hand on redecorating the media room.

  I can’t believe time is going so quickly. Each week I set aside time for a “project”. Last week I turned one of the rack cabinets in the living room into a record rack for Mike’s vinyl collection. I haven’t alphabetized his records for him (he usually has friends look through and identify the records for him) and I still haven’t looked through Joel’s record collection or alphabetized it, but my records are all organized, and I’ve been spending some time listening to them. My hopes are that I will be able to get my stereo in the car fixed (possibly with Mike’s help, since he’s a “sound guru”) and afford some new music next year!  

  I’m still having problems with my website. The hosting company finally got it back online, but I deleted some of the pages in order to upload some new ones, including the index, and my ftp program is not working presently, so the index to allthingsmike is gone, a blank page in it’s place. I don’t know whether this is because of the new router which is connecting Mike’s and my computer to our home network, or if it is still a problem from the hosting company. I can connect with the site, but my files won’t upload. I’ve tried turning on and off the firewall, and using passive and active ftp but so far no luck. I intend to call ValueWeb, the hosting company, again, to see if they have an answer to this problem.

  CONCLUSION: I’m a bit upset about  the problems which sometimes occur, but I’m happy for the postivive things that happen as well, and I know everything will work out in the end. I’ll pay lip service to the “financial crisis”. I’m always in the midst of a personal one myself, and I’m afraid my 401(k) funds have all but disappeared,  but I’m not really too worried. I’ve seen market fluctuations in the past. Heck, in 2003 I predicted the U.S. was going to be bankrupt by 2005 and we’d be trading in euros by now. That hasn’t happened yet.

  I’m taking each day as it happens. Work is still busy. I’ve got a large backlog of entertainment on my various media devices. I’m happy with my new roommate, and hope he gets some inspiration soon so that he can make some more music. I haven’t been Xangaing much, but still take the opportunity to post at least once a week, so I don’t totally disappear, and I don’t visit as much but I still tend to get around some. I’m still waiting for a referral so I can get tests taken on my hip. Until the operation, I’m using crutches, and I’m getting pretty good on them, so I hardly notice the inconvenience. A litttle of the bad, and little of the good. That’s life, and That’s it for now.

  • 10:16 am
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