A.R.M. ([info]kinkyturtle) wrote,
@ 2008-05-14 20:20:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Chicago, day 2
Ugh, last night I felt sick, probably from eating a late late dinner at Denny's. Fortunately I didn't throw up.

In the morning, I felt better, and drove over to the suburb of Wheeling to see the Westin North Shore, where Midwest Furfest will be moving to this November. It's swankeh! (Caution for those arriving by car: there's major construction on I-294. It's passable but tricky and highly congestion-prone.)

Then I went looking for a place to have lunch. I thought I knew where all the restaurants were, but I guess I didn't remember my custom Google map very well. I was hoping to find a Subway... Instead, I found Potbelly Sandwiches, and I'm glad I did, because the sandwich was good, and there was a folksinger, named Jeff Wolf, with an acoustic guitar providing music for the lunch crowd. I heard him sing "Slow Boat To China", "White Rabbit", "Sloop John B", and oh yes, "Puff the Magic Dragon" with an extra verse he wrote himself (so it wouldn't have a sad ending). It goes:
Puff got into rehab,
Took twelve long steps to see
That Jackie Paper never had
The answers or the key.
Puff's gone middle class now,
Has a wife and family
And lives in San Diego
And runs Puff's Pottery.
--Jeff Wolf

After I left there, I drove downtown. I have two questions about downtown Chicago: 1. Is it ever not cold and windy there? 2. I am never driving into downtown Chicago again. Okay, that's not a question. If I ever want to go to downtown Chicago again, I'm either taking the train or asking someone who drives around there every day to take me. I went to Millennium Park again, and got to see Cloud Gate a.k.a. the Bean again, and I got to see the Crown Fountain with the huge glass-block monoliths that display pictures of faces.

But I wasted so much time and sanity traveling to and from downtown that I didn't have time for anything else. Also, the CD player in my rental car has a problem: it can't play some of my CDs. At first I thought it just didn't like Mika, but there were others it wouldn't play. One thing the unplayable discs have in common: they're all new. But there's one new disc it was able to play: "Funplex", by the B-52's. Anyone who knows how the music industry works, and who loves puzzles, want to try tackling this?

Discs the machine played:
They Might Be Giants, "Cast Your Pod to the Wind" ("The Else" bonus disc)
Cake, "Comfort Eagle"
Elvis Costello, "The Very Best of Elvis Costello", disc 1 (not to be confused with "The Very Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions")
The B-52's, "Funplex"

Discs it couldn't play:
Mika, "Life in Cartoon Motion"
OK Go, "Oh No"
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, "Love Their Country"
R.E.M., "Accelerate"

Anyway, I eventually got back to Schaumburg, and went to Woodfield Mall for dinner. I had a steak sandwich at The Great Steak & Potato Co., and a scoop of tiramisu ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. (Yummy!) It was nice to see the mall without its Christmas decorations up for once. :}

Tomorrow: Columbus, Ohio!

(Post a new comment)


[info]strredwolf
2008-05-15 02:00 am UTC (link)
My bet is that the CD's are supposedly copy-protected and the CD player is a digital player, not an analogue one. One of the reasons to get a MP3 player.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]kinkyturtle
2008-05-15 02:13 am UTC (link)
Ummmm... aren't *all* CD players digital?

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]strredwolf
2008-05-15 02:39 am UTC (link)
No, not in the way you'd think. Most regular CD players are analogue, my guess being they are doing a direct level conversion in the audio department and thus able to deal with some of the junk Sony et al try to throw in just to protect the CD. Technically, those "copy protected" CD's have a broken format on them -- but the analogue players just don't care.

The digital ones throw a fit and spit the CD out, because the format is broken -- an out-of-spec CD.

Some more research into it will help. My memory may be faulty over how they did it a few years back. They should have a copy protection warning on those CD's, though.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]kinkyturtle
2008-05-15 02:50 am UTC (link)
It's not spitting out the CDs it can't play, though; it's spinning them without playing anything, and every now and then I hear some tiny fraction-of-a-second slice of recorded sound.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]strredwolf
2008-05-15 03:20 am UTC (link)
And you hit against my memory. I'm not sure if some spit it out or some try to play and hit against the format wall. Ether way, I think there was some stink about it.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]mycroftb
2008-05-15 03:40 am UTC (link)
I get what he's saying, though the proper terms may be "dumb" and "smart" instead of digital/analog. You're right that all CDs are digital.

"Dumb" players are simple, they read the CD data and only look for things the recognize, such as the table of contents that tells it how many tracks there are and where they start and stop. If it sees something it doesn't recognize, it just ignores it. This was intentional, as they figured when they made the spec that anything else on the disc was probably just a scratch, and it wouldn't need to waste time re-syncing or re-analyzing or anything, just play what it sees.

A lot of early dumb players expect the TOC to be the first thing on the disc, and only read that so far. When writable CD-R and CD-RWs came out, they expanded the spec a little to allow for "multi-session" discs. These you could write a little bit to, then add to it later on, which was achieved by writing a new TOC later, and expecting "smart" things like computers to look at the disc, read the last TOC, and go from there. And that's one of the reasons that early burned CDs didn't play well in normal CD players.

And along comes "smart" players, that read the disc and pay attention to a lot more, including the aforementioned Table of Contents. They also check data validity with checksums and all sorts of other things that I don't remember or even understand.

So when Sony and others got mad about piracy, they decided that they wanted to waste lots of money and screw over their legitimate customers (like you) by, yes, releasing intentionally broken products. (Meanwhile, pirated versions actually became more valuable, as they weren't broken.)

So one method of breaking their products was to include a multisession track at the outer edge with a new table of contents saying, "This disc is blank! Nothing to see here, move along." Dumb players would never seek that far ahead, and so weren't tricked, so you could still play these discs in most CD players. Smart players, however, would be tricked into using the "updated" TOC, and refuse to play the disc. This particular method I believe was bypassed by taking a Sharpie and covering up the last edge of the disc so the Smart players wouldn't see the new track and get it fine.

Another method (which it sounds like you have) is to write bad CRC/checksum data along with the PCM audio stream. This is normally included so that if the disc is scratched in one spot, the player can recover and continue playing the unscratched spots. Dumb players just shrug their shoulders and play what they can of it, which just so happens to be all good anyway. Smart players, rather than playing static or pops or warbles, dutifully scan ahead and behind and try to make sense of the data, operating on the assumption that the CRC info is valid and maybe the disc is just scratched a little. That might be why your player only gets bits and pieces.

I could be entirely wrong.

One way to get around this is ripping your CDs to your computer and then re-burning them as a proper standards-compliant discs. Ripping programs exist that are designed specifically to counteract the copy protection that they build into CDs. And if you're an audiophile, you can rip to a lossless data format instead of using MP3.

Another way is to not spend money buying broken things, and get proper things off the net for free. I'm sure some sites out there track which CDs are infected with this crap, or at least track which publishers tend to do it. If a CD you want appears on this list, grab a torrent and go, justifying to yourself that if they don't want you to enjoy your legitimately purchased music, then you're doing them a favor by not buying it. If you feel really guilty, write directly to the band and include a check for $.50 which is double what the band would've gotten from a CD sale anyway. Or purchase the music online from a DRM-free provider, such as from Amazon, if the artists (and/or their slavemasters) allow it.

Oh, and although it's more dedicated to eliminating even worse stuff, it's worth mentioning the Digital-Restrictions-Management-fighting group Defective By Design.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]strredwolf
2008-05-15 09:57 am UTC (link)
You hit it right on the head.

Amazon and Apple's Music Store via iTunes is the best way to go for most titles (even some obscure ones like The FuMP). Apple also releases DRM-free music, but it's up to the publisher to allow it -- you also need an iPod to play the protected music.

I'll bring my iPod Touch to AC. ;)

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]frostyw
2008-05-15 02:06 am UTC (link)
After I left there, I drove downtown. I have two questions about downtown Chicago: 1. Is it ever not cold and windy there? 2. I am never driving into downtown Chicago again. Okay, that's not a question. If I ever want to go to downtown Chicago again, I'm either taking the train or asking someone who drives around there every day to take me.

1. There's a reason it's called the Windy City. :) I think it has something to do with being on the edge of one of the Great Lakes.

2. The CTA service is reasonably decent, and I use it and Metra to get into Chicago from the 'burbs. If you're flying in to O'Hare and staying at the Westin for MFF, this will probably be your best bet.



Edited at 2008-05-15 02:06 am UTC

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]timmowarner
2008-05-15 02:26 am UTC (link)
I believe Chicago was founded when some settlers said "We'll stop here until the wind dies down."

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]frostyw
2008-05-15 02:33 am UTC (link)
P.S. For the last response I meant to reference this page's section on "O'Hare or Midway To the Westin By Train".

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]thecanuckguy
2008-05-15 02:56 am UTC (link)
Winnipeg is often called "the Windy City" as well (hell, at the start of the 20th century, it was called the "Chicago of the North", that might be a reason why), and the intersection in the middle of downtown, where the city sprang from, Portage and Main (if you're a Winnipegger, you know how to pronounce that correctly), and the intersection I happen to work at, is known as the "windiest intersection in Canada". My geography prof in university explained it this way; the wind picks up speed blowing out over the prairies with nary a building to stop it (at least any building of any considerable height). Then, when it gets to Portage and Main, the skyline abruptly changed to several tall highrises at once. So the wind is funneled between the high rises to make the intersection really windy. (There's definitely credence to that as I notice the sharp winds as soon as I enter the property of the office tower I work in, but the instant I leave the property, the winds calm down). It might have that effect in Chicago, with prairie to the west of it, and the lake on the east (especially the lake I would think, as the elevation goes instantly from zero to hundreds of feet - at least Winnipeg has smaller buildings between the open prairie and Portage and Main ... )

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]penh
2008-05-15 02:49 am UTC (link)
Perhaps the player was intimidated by your excellent taste in CDs?

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]kinkyturtle
2008-05-15 02:51 am UTC (link)
That must be it!

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]thecanuckguy
2008-05-15 02:58 am UTC (link)
Speaking of driving in downtown Chicago, as you may know I work for NCR, dispatching service technicians. Most areas (including mine of Cincinatti) the techs are required to drive from job to job, but I've filled in for the Chicago area dispatch before, and I remember that there the technician that does work in the Loop (ie downtown) just parks his car somewhere at the start of the day and walks from job to job, it's easier (and he prays that no large equipment is required to be lugged there) And these are native Chicagoans too!

(Reply to this)

[info]babsbunny
2008-05-15 03:22 am UTC (link)
Call me when you get to Columbus!!! I get off work at 5 pm and we can hang out!

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]kinkyturtle
2008-05-15 03:41 am UTC (link)
Okay!

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]linnaeus
2008-05-15 03:43 am UTC (link)
Admittedly, driving isn't the best way to have a good time in downtown Chicago. Next time you find yourself up here, let me know, I'd be happy to show you around, particularly on a weekend or at a time when I can take a day off. Anyway, sorry I missed you tonight!

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]kinkyturtle
2008-05-15 04:27 am UTC (link)
Thanks, I'll consider it!

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]keeper1st
2008-05-15 04:10 am UTC (link)
Hee, "new words" to an old tune! Just last night I found a video of Terry Waldo doing this to a comedy song from 1917 called China, We Owe a Lot to You. I heard him sing this last year in Sacramento, but here he is singing it in Columbia, Mo. -- first the original second verse & chorus, then his modern-day verse and chorus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6eR5AVVQL4

(Reply to this)

[info]wildbilltx
2008-05-15 06:56 am UTC (link)
What kind of rental car was this? Might have been the lazer lens was dirty or miscalibrated.

My 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee car stereo is finicky with certain brands of CD-R's (Memorex and newer TDK) but plays Maxell and Fujifilm (made in Japan) fine. It also wont play CD-RW's, but blank CD-R's are cheap so I never bother with them.

Copy-Protected CD's are a waste of time and just encourages more people to use I-Tunes, Amazon or P2P.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]kinkyturtle
2008-05-16 04:21 am UTC (link)
A white Chevy Impala. And this sounds like a likely theory; see my latest post ("The trip from hell"). What the hell do Impala drivers do to their CD players?!

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]duncandahusky
2008-05-15 12:56 pm UTC (link)
The good news is that Construction Season in Chicago usually ends the first week of November, so all of the construction on I-294 should be gone by then (only to reappear the following spring). I agree, though - it's unpleasant and annoying right now!

And driving into downtown Chicago? Good lord! I've lived around here off and on for eight years and I've learned not to even THINK about taking a car down there. Besides, there's so many cool places to see that you miss if you're not on foot, anyway :-)

Glad to hear you liked the Westin, though! We've sold out the joint, and we'll have ever square inch of function space there. We're really excited about it! (as you can tell from my excessive use of exclamation points!)

(Reply to this)

[info]deckardcanine
2008-05-15 02:40 pm UTC (link)
I never read or heard all the PtMD lyrics until after this post. It leads me to question anew the appropriateness of putting the song on a children's album, with children's voices, as was done in the late '80s.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]orv
2008-05-15 04:21 pm UTC (link)
I think the drug references go straight over the heads of most kids. Kind of like the double-entendres that pop up in a lot of cartoons.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]deckardcanine
2008-05-15 07:01 pm UTC (link)
Yes, which is why I decided that that aspect was basically okay. But what about the sad ending? I guess they counted on kids being satisfied with only a few verses.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]wildfox34
2008-05-15 09:18 pm UTC (link)
Don't remind me about downtown Chicago... first time I went to Chicago for MFF 2002, I made a wrong turn going onto I-290 and I drove straight into downtown Chicago during rush hour on a Thursday. Anytime I've driven through downtown Chicago has been a pain, although I've had some decent drives on weekends through downtown on the Dan Ryan (I-94).

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]kinkyturtle
2008-05-16 04:30 am UTC (link)
I thought I could handle it because I didn't have much trouble last time I went there during MFF 2007, but this time I missed my exit (51I from 90 SB onto 290) because it was poorly signed, and I got off at the next exit, and looking for a place to stop and check my map, I found myself at Southgate Market, where I had to buy some pens at Office Depot so I could get my parking validated.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

Create an Account
Forgot your login?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…