I got up at 5:30a to be 2 hours away by 11:00a after not sleeping until past 3...only to be told 15 minutes ago that the ''meeting'' has been ''pushed back to 1p''.

And now it's raining. It must be my Monday.

more co-incidence

I just learned of this cat while searching "savannah cat" last night.

I just turned on the tv today and show called "Speed of Life" was on Discovery. The title intrigued me. All that was on the screen was two people wearing head lights and I wondered what that had to do with the title.

So, guess what the segment I turned to just happened to be on.

My life is weird in strange little ways.

motodreams

had a dream about having a moto-bike with cut handlebars this morning...

suspicious I've been having dreams about them and not remembering.

I thought my bike itch had been scratched by having a shifty car now,

perchance I was wrong.

perchance it is merely Spring beckoning?

Gerald A. Lawson

Gerald A. Lawson, a Pioneer in Video Games, Dies at 70

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: April 13, 2011

Gerald A. Lawson, a largely self-taught engineer who became a pioneer in electronic video entertainment, creating the first home video game system with interchangeable game cartridges, died on Saturday in Mountain View, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Santa Clara, Calif.

The cause was complications of diabetes, said his wife, Catherine.

Before disc-based systems like PlayStation, Xbox and Wii transformed the video game industry, before techno-diversions like Grand Theft Auto and Madden NFL and even before Pac-Man and Donkey Kong became the obsession of millions of electronic gamers, it was Mr. Lawson who first made it possible to play a variety of video games at home.

In the mid-1970s, he was director of engineering and marketing for the newly formed video game division ofFairchild Semiconductor, and it was under his direction that the division brought to market in 1976 the Fairchild Channel F, a home console that allowed users to play different games contained on removable cartridges. Until then, home video game systems could play only games that were built into the machines themselves. Mr. Lawson’s ideas anticipated — if they did not entirely enable — a colossal international business.

In March, Mr. Lawson was honored for his innovative work by the International Game Developers Association, an overdue acknowledgment for an unfamiliar contributor to the technological transformation that has changed how people live.

“He’s absolutely a pioneer,” Allan Alcorn, a creator of the granddaddy of video games, Pong, said in an interview with The San Jose Mercury News in March. “When you do something for the first time, there is nothing to copy.”

Mr. Alcorn was the first design engineer at Atari, whose own cartridge console eventually dominated the home video game market.

At 6 feet 6 inches and well over 250 pounds, Mr. Lawson cut an imposing figure. A modest man but a straight talker who was known to one and all as Jerry, he was among only a handful of black engineers in the world of electronics in general and electronic gaming in particular.

Gerald Anderson Lawson was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 1, 1940, and grew up mostly in Queens. His parents encouraged his intellectual pursuits. His father, Blanton, was a longshoreman by profession and a voracious reader of science books by inclination; his mother, Mannings, was a city employee who was also president of the PTA at the nearly all-white school Jerry attended. There he had a first-grade teacher who changed his life.

“I had a picture of George Washington Carver on the wall next to my desk,” he said in a2009 interview with the publication Vintage Computing and Gaming. “And she said, ‘This could be you.’ ” He went on: “This kind of influence led me to feel, ‘I want to be a scientist. I want to be something.’ ”

As a boy he pursued a number of scientific interests, ham radio and chemistry among them. As a teenager he earned money repairing television sets. He attended both Queens College and the City College of New York, but never received a degree. In the early 1970s, he started at Fairchild in Silicon Valley as a roving design consultant. While he was there he invented an early coin-operated arcade game, Demolition Derby. Along with other Silicon Valley innovators, he belonged to a hobbyists’ group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. Two of its other members were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, later the founders of Apple.

“I was not impressed with them — either one of them, actually,” Mr. Lawson said in the 2009 interview, and though he didn’t say why, he declined to hire Mr. Wozniak for a job at Fairchild.

After inventing Demolition Derby, Mr. Lawson was put in charge of the company’s video game division. He and his team came up with cartridges that could be loaded with different game programs and then inserted into the console one at a time. This allowed the company to sell individual games separately from the console itself, a business model that remains the cornerstone of the video game industry.

A crucial element of the invention was the use of a new processor, the Fairchild 8; another was a mechanism that allowed for repeated insertion and removal of cartridges without damaging the machine’s semiconductors. Video hockey and tennis were programmed into the F Channel console; additional games available on cartridge included Shooting Gallery, Video Blackjack and Alien Invasion.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1965, Mr. Lawson is survived by a brother, Michael, of Queens, and two children, Karen and Marc, both of Smyrna, Ga.

After he left Fairchild in 1980, Mr. Lawson founded a company, Videosoft, that created games, and worked as a consultant.

“I don’t play video games that often; I really don’t,” he said in the 2009 interview. “First of all, most of the games that are out now — I’m appalled by them.” Most are concerned with “shooting somebody and killing somebody,” he said.

“To me, a game should be something like a skill you should develop — if you play this game, you walk away with something of value.
”

FYI:

So, I saw this

while on the way to rehearsal,

while listenting to CRU: Da Dirty 30,

which I haven't done in, at least, the 6.5 years I've been periodically milling about NYC.

A strange concurrence of highly un-likely events.

P.S.:

"Pronto" is one of the most ridiculously glaring wastes of a grand, grande beat ever to have been laid to reflective disc.

The rest of the album is, largely, time wasted as well. Oh, that glorious period in the 90s when 20 tracks and double CDs became perfunctory-if-not-compulsory.

I blame Tupac.

Pants On the Track

Mas Arte del Subway

On a while in the Union Sqr Station near the Arruh.

JW

Tonight I was told it was an honor to work with me; that talent compares to that of Jeffrey Wright.



Can I put that as a skill?


hm..

Persistently stubborn concidence

I do a fairly bad job of documenting the amount of coincidence and serendipty I experience.

So here's an immediate sample:

i've been reading graphic novels pretty consistently for the past couple years. While looking back at ''watchmen'' (I think it was), or looking for books by Einstein to read, I came across the quote ''reality is a stubbornly persistent illusion''. I searched to find the context, hopefully literary, for the quote and came across a book by Stephen Hawking titled with the quote. I've since checked that book out but not yet begun to read it.

A series that I just decided to return to after reading some of it a few months ago is ''Powers''. I'm currently working on the vol. 3 deluxe hardback edition. In it, a main character named Christian Walker (yes, as in c. Walker) meets Albert Einstein. I just read a panel were the Einstein character says:

''people like us, we believe that the distinction between the past, present and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion.''

8-/

(eyebrow raised)

I just realized I've never been in Randall's Island.

How stank is that?

Road bike trip.

don't Bite

{inspired by a rare fb spit session, originally first he was previous contributor's initials}

ver 1

(thoo) (thoo)

Oh, I'm sorry, baby - but you'll have to blame him ->
He made the atmosphere a little chilly,
now I find I'm fulla phlegm
Cold enough to justify dippin in some Timbs
Shoot, I'm expecting lotsa ice -
watch for falling limbs.

Avalanche snow + cat 5 winds
= you caynt see us, so huddle witcha friends.

You try to stay warm,
face down thinking it'll end..
Yet blown away by the force
of 4 Elemental Men

The cold blaze is glorious - you look, stop, then look again,
Know it stings your eyes, but can't help but take it in

Eye of storm nowhere in sight -
Then it starts to settle in,
"Is this Armegeddon - should I repent for my sins!"

Too late -

The fire/freeze ices up your nostrils
Ices up your ribs
Ices up you blood
Crackles all your skin

Everything stops for a second
You try to breathe one last warm breath in -
But you explode with cold fusion force emanating from within

You think that you're no more, and you think about your kin
but then feel the stretch pressure in your lungs, muscles, ligaments

And you remember that when He comes back He'll
be accompanied with ember burning, stone brim

And that this cold quartet, with their steely Arctic din
just killed the devil in you

And made you live again.

ver 2

(thoo) (thoo)

Oh, I'm sorry, baby - but you'll have to blame him ->
He made the atmosphere a little chilly,
now I find I'm fulla phlegm

Cold enough to justify dippin in some Timbs
Shoot, I'm expecting lotsa ice -
watch for falling limbs.

Avalanche snow + cat 5 winds
= you caynt see us, so huddle witcha friends.

You try to stay warm, face down thinking it'll end..
Yet blown away by the force of 4 Elemental Men

The cold blaze is glorious - you look, stop, then look again,
Know it stings your eyes, but can't help but take it in

No eye-of-storm in sight - it starts to settle in:
"Is this Armegeddon - should I repent for my sins!"

Too late - the freeze is in your nostrils icing up your ribs
Icing up your blood
Crackles all your skin

It all stops for a second
"Try to breathe one last warm breath in!"
But you explode with cold fusion force emanating from within

You think that your body's no more, you see of images kin
but then feel the stretch in your lungs, muscles, ligaments

And you remember that when He returns,
it'll be with ember burning, stone brim

And that this cold quartet, with their steely, Arctic din
just killed the devil in you

And made you live again.

(original starting point:)
I can make you feel sweet relief
through the bliss of sweet release:
Just release the microphone

And bid the stage: PEACE

While reading

in the bed, I just looked down and noticed my hair resting on either side of my chest.

A strange,new sen-sa-tion.

(sp?)

(courtesy R.A.G.: Times Sqr Station)

(confirmation of wrongitude)

Groshry Sto: Math Edition

PathMark + February =

Tolerance: Harlem edition

...and....

the Mon-Star eats better than I do: proof

(no, I have not ruled out tasting one)

natural succession