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Mexico Vacation
I just returned from my first real international travel. I've spent time in Canada which has no cultural difference for me, and Cancun Mexico, which was like Vegas with a beach. This trip took me beyond the culture and lifestyle I'm accustom to.
My traveling companion was Radha, an ex-girlfriend with whom I maintain a great friendship. Radha spent Summers in Mexico with her grandmother as a child, and was an exchange student during high school. She speaks fluent Spanish and knows the culture. She loves the people and they seemed drawn to her, despite the giant gringo she kept in tow.
Mexico City: We landed there and took a cab through an insane rush hour to a bus station. Compared to the US where traffic is very structured and procedural, there traffic is organic and dynamic. Vehicles flow like liquid, filling empty spaces and favoring the path of least resistance. When the flow on the freeway slows or stops, vehicles spill over the curb onto the frontage or side streets. Horn use is frequent and almost as sociable as a wave, usually announcing one's presence rather than displeasure.Mexico City initially intimidated me. After our last night in Mexico however, which we spent eating one of the best meals of my life, night clubbing, and staying at a very stylish yet inexpensive hotel, I'd love to explore this city further.
Transportation: The transit systems were very effective and inexpensive. I see no reason to rent a car there. First class buses are very comfortable with big reclining seats. Greyhound is a farce by comparison. Taxis are cheap and I found them very entertaining. The front seat is usually offered, they laugh if you put on a seatbelt. 'Combis' or 'micros' are a taxi/bus hybrid, usually a VW bus, that run routes between two towns picking up or dropping off passengers along the way. They stuff them full of passengers. Someone may get on with a container of goods they are taking to market. One woman we rode with was transporting a giant, uncovered serving dish of hominy soup.
Acapulco: It's a resort town. Giant hotels. Tons of tourists. Fortunately we stayed at a small hotel at the other end of town where Mexicans come to vacation. We did venture out to some night clubs and a tourist island where we had heard correctly about a secret cove where we could snorkel.Petatlan and La Barrita: My favorite place was Petatlan. A small town nearly completely off the tourist radar. We bussed in, checked into 'Hotel California', and went for dinner at a wonderful little restaurant on the town plaza. As we ate the plaza filled with families and teenagers. Radha explained that Sunday evenings are a customary time for social gathering in small towns. Kids were playing soccer in the basketball court, boys and girls were flirting or circling the plaza on motor scooters or farm pickups, boys teasing and mock-wrestling each other, girls holding hands as they walked, parents and seniors strolling around. It was a happy, trusting sense of community, and a surprising good time.
The next day we met Steve, or 'Esteban', an expatriate from Oregon who had been living for 35 years up the road near La Barrita, a tiny resort area with one small hotel and a few restaurants on the beach under palm ramadas. We spent the afternoon there and enjoyed it so much we stopped again and stayed a night during our return trip.Hotels: We stayed at hotels ranging from about 300 to 700 pesos, which is a little less than $30 to $70 US dollars. The nicest hotel was only $35 in Mexico City; very modern, stylish, and comfortable. The more expensive hotels were the in resort areas. My favorite hotel was the bungalow we got in Zihuatanejo. It was on the beach with a view and $60 was a bargain. Hotels often had some minor problem: No hot water, AC or TV not working, elevator out of order. In one room we lost power and had to move to another.
Zihuatanejo: I loved it. It is touristy, especially coming from Petatlan, but much more pleasant than Acapulco. The sound of surf and the breeze blowing through our bungalow room on the hill above the beach was perfect. Toward town on the beach front was the expected tourist shopping district, but a few blocks inland things quickly felt more authentic. I loved the beach there and caught some pretty big waves body surfing.We walked into an arcade and I was quickly challenged by a group of local boys to the best arcade game ever: A punching machine. It cost only one peso for four punches. It had a thick pad on a short lever that would sense the force or velocity when you punched it. It was a riot taking turns wailing on this machine, cheering and moaning with these local boys. It took the kid who appeared to be the resident champion a while to beat my high score.
Laguna de Mitla: On the return trip we spent a night at a small hotel near Coyuca with the lush Laguna de Mitla on in back and a beautiful beach in front. We body surfed, kayaked the laguna, lounged...
The vacation aspects, good food, sunny beaches, no worries, all wonderful and effective, but I can have a great vacation here in the US or Utah any time. Meeting such people living so differently was the real thrill and it has changed my perception and perspective.Check out the photos.
Another blog. Just what the world needs.
I started a blog for our 24 Hours of Lemons team. All my post regarding racing and cars will be made on The Verbose Beater-car Racing Chronicle.
Time Lapse Tempest
My dad stopped by again and we tweaked settings for the vector monitor. It looked like it had be serviced by someone who didn't have much experience with these fairly unique monitors, and once they had confirmed it was 'working' as well as typical arcade monitor they walked away. We made some huge improvements and now the game really pops.
Time lapse photos of Tempest are interesting. Here are a few with my crappy snapshot camera. I'll post some better ones later when I can borrow a better camera.
Time lapse photos of Tempest are interesting. Here are a few with my crappy snapshot camera. I'll post some better ones later when I can borrow a better camera.
Atari Tempest: What's So Cool About It?
It works! My dad fixed my Tempest Machine!
...Continuing my previous post, let me first say that if you have tried Tempest in MAME, XBox, Playstation, or any other emulator or remakes, you have not had an adequate Tempest experience. On many versions the sound effects are horrible approximations, but the big omission is the knob controller. No mouse, stick, game pad, or trackball comes close to the feel, precision, and speed of a knob spinning a hefty little fly-wheel.
I sucked at arcade games when I was a teen in the early eighties. The irresistible draw was quickly overcome by frustration and lack of quarters. My attempts at Asteroids, Defender, Pac-man, Donkey Kong, and many others including Tempest, were always short-lived. Joust and Centipede were the only games I could survive long enough to enjoy. So I don't really have nostalgia for my youth in the arcade. Commodore 64 games like Lode Runner, Boulderdash, Jumpman, and Space Taxi have that honor.
Something about Tempest appealed to me though. The abstract, vanishing-point, vector graphics and the pulsing sounds created a psychedelic aesthetic that drew me to finally buy one, and now another one.
I made an important discovery with Tempest. You cannot excel by deliberate effort. You have to relax, adhere to the game's rhythm, watch with a broad perspective, and allow you mind to react involuntarily to the events in the periphery. It's a meditative state. This is exactly the same way I derive maximum enjoyment from biking, snowboarding, and other recreational pursuits. I have know idea weather this was intent of the designers but I have yet to see another game achieve this as effectively.
Tempest is as good as any milestone marking the end of the analog era and the dawn of the digital age. From the beginning of electronic technology until then, analog signals and wave forms were manipulated to model and record shapes and sounds. Forward from that point, the images and sounds our machines will be grids of pixels and streams of samples, all digital reproductions. Tempest sounds are synthesized. The graphics are drawn lines which only a few very early games can claim.
Tempest also marks a unique era in game design. The primitive technology did not allow any realism or much complexity. Games were necessarily abstract, concept driven, and required more imagination to design than today's games which generally model reality as closely as technology allows. Even though I think it's a blast to race cars in Gran Tourismo, and thrilling to play a soldier in Call Of Duty, I get more excited about doing something truly unreal like rolling skyscrapers into a giant ball in Katamari Damaci.
...Continuing my previous post, let me first say that if you have tried Tempest in MAME, XBox, Playstation, or any other emulator or remakes, you have not had an adequate Tempest experience. On many versions the sound effects are horrible approximations, but the big omission is the knob controller. No mouse, stick, game pad, or trackball comes close to the feel, precision, and speed of a knob spinning a hefty little fly-wheel.
I sucked at arcade games when I was a teen in the early eighties. The irresistible draw was quickly overcome by frustration and lack of quarters. My attempts at Asteroids, Defender, Pac-man, Donkey Kong, and many others including Tempest, were always short-lived. Joust and Centipede were the only games I could survive long enough to enjoy. So I don't really have nostalgia for my youth in the arcade. Commodore 64 games like Lode Runner, Boulderdash, Jumpman, and Space Taxi have that honor.Something about Tempest appealed to me though. The abstract, vanishing-point, vector graphics and the pulsing sounds created a psychedelic aesthetic that drew me to finally buy one, and now another one.
I made an important discovery with Tempest. You cannot excel by deliberate effort. You have to relax, adhere to the game's rhythm, watch with a broad perspective, and allow you mind to react involuntarily to the events in the periphery. It's a meditative state. This is exactly the same way I derive maximum enjoyment from biking, snowboarding, and other recreational pursuits. I have know idea weather this was intent of the designers but I have yet to see another game achieve this as effectively.Tempest is as good as any milestone marking the end of the analog era and the dawn of the digital age. From the beginning of electronic technology until then, analog signals and wave forms were manipulated to model and record shapes and sounds. Forward from that point, the images and sounds our machines will be grids of pixels and streams of samples, all digital reproductions. Tempest sounds are synthesized. The graphics are drawn lines which only a few very early games can claim.
Tempest also marks a unique era in game design. The primitive technology did not allow any realism or much complexity. Games were necessarily abstract, concept driven, and required more imagination to design than today's games which generally model reality as closely as technology allows. Even though I think it's a blast to race cars in Gran Tourismo, and thrilling to play a soldier in Call Of Duty, I get more excited about doing something truly unreal like rolling skyscrapers into a giant ball in Katamari Damaci.
Video Game Weekend
(10pm: Can I really get to be before 11 if I start this entry?)
I have a cold so I couldn't snowboard. I got in a few hours of gaming this weekend, which is a lot for me. I used to be a game junky on the id Software track, depriving myself of sleep and nutrients for Wolfeinstein, Doom and Quake, with a generous helping of Parallax Software's Descent. At some point I burned out and games are an occasional recreation now instead of a full-time addiction.
Games just aren't as imaginative as the used to be. Clever, creative, unique games still get my attention.
I spent some time playing Katamari on the PSP. I love the Katamari games.
Some old friends came over bearing an XBox 360, on which we played some classic Doom, a mile-stone in game history and a favorite to this day. Halo 3 was really good looking but just another FPS to me. I don't know how anyone plays FPS games without a mouse.
(10:25 damn I'm slow.)
Then was noticed Rez HD was available for download. This fact may sell me on XBox. I LOVE Rez and it was one of the games that pushed me to buy a PS2. The HD XBox version was gorgeous with improved resolution and frame-rate. The rhythmic pulsing controllers are an essential part of the original though and I don't know if that feature is included in the XBox version.
But the big game-geek time-sink this weekend was my purchase of a 1981 vintage upright Tempest Machine.I owned one for a few years in my early 20's. Bought it for $200 and sold it for $275 a few years later when I was married. They became highly sought in the in the late nineties and I saw them ebaying for $1600. I still see some asking that high, but they seem to sell for around $600.
On a sort of long term whim, I exchanged emails with a seller for a couple weeks, drove about 45 minutes north yesterday, play tested for a few minutes, then handed over $600 and loaded up. Once I had it in my basement I got a bout 5 minutes into the first game and it started crashing. After a few resets it was dead.
....SHIT
My dad was an electrical engineer for 20 years, designing oscilloscopes and signal generators for Hewlett Packard. He stopped by this afternoon, took a look at the diagrams that had been stashed in the machine's cabinet, and after probing with his meter for about 10 minutes he had ID'ed a failed component, had online suppliers and prices on my computer, and handed me a note with local suppliers that should have the widgets in stock during business tomorrow.
....Cool
(11:04. I'll blather more about how cool this game is later.)
I have a cold so I couldn't snowboard. I got in a few hours of gaming this weekend, which is a lot for me. I used to be a game junky on the id Software track, depriving myself of sleep and nutrients for Wolfeinstein, Doom and Quake, with a generous helping of Parallax Software's Descent. At some point I burned out and games are an occasional recreation now instead of a full-time addiction.
Games just aren't as imaginative as the used to be. Clever, creative, unique games still get my attention.
I spent some time playing Katamari on the PSP. I love the Katamari games.
Some old friends came over bearing an XBox 360, on which we played some classic Doom, a mile-stone in game history and a favorite to this day. Halo 3 was really good looking but just another FPS to me. I don't know how anyone plays FPS games without a mouse.
(10:25 damn I'm slow.)
Then was noticed Rez HD was available for download. This fact may sell me on XBox. I LOVE Rez and it was one of the games that pushed me to buy a PS2. The HD XBox version was gorgeous with improved resolution and frame-rate. The rhythmic pulsing controllers are an essential part of the original though and I don't know if that feature is included in the XBox version.
But the big game-geek time-sink this weekend was my purchase of a 1981 vintage upright Tempest Machine.I owned one for a few years in my early 20's. Bought it for $200 and sold it for $275 a few years later when I was married. They became highly sought in the in the late nineties and I saw them ebaying for $1600. I still see some asking that high, but they seem to sell for around $600.On a sort of long term whim, I exchanged emails with a seller for a couple weeks, drove about 45 minutes north yesterday, play tested for a few minutes, then handed over $600 and loaded up. Once I had it in my basement I got a bout 5 minutes into the first game and it started crashing. After a few resets it was dead.
....SHIT
My dad was an electrical engineer for 20 years, designing oscilloscopes and signal generators for Hewlett Packard. He stopped by this afternoon, took a look at the diagrams that had been stashed in the machine's cabinet, and after probing with his meter for about 10 minutes he had ID'ed a failed component, had online suppliers and prices on my computer, and handed me a note with local suppliers that should have the widgets in stock during business tomorrow.
....Cool
(11:04. I'll blather more about how cool this game is later.)
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