Still recovering from SXSW...but my pictures are busy on the Internet!

Like a lot of people, I'm still recovering from SXSW, specifically the SXSW-crud.
Putzing around on the internet in my feverish state, I found some of my pictures were on a site called the Flickr Hive Mind.
Who knew?

It also turns out that one of my pictures (of a famous pig statue) is used to illustrate this gallery walk in Riga.

And illustrating an article on "Where to Eat Tourist Free" during SXSW.

I also found a link to a story I wrote in 1999 about the Estonian artist Juri Arrak, but it's behind a Baltic Times paywall. This reminds me that when I was writing the story, I took a gazillion pictures of Arrak posing with his dogs and his paintings in his studio. Maybe I should scan those pictures and put them on Flickr?

Latvia: The Land of 24 Hour Party People...that I met at SXSW.

Riga graffiti.

It's strange the impact that South By Southwest can have on our lives, in ways that sometimes go far beyond the music.

View of Riga.

In 2006, I did a story for The Baltic Times about the Latvian singer-songwriter Goran Gora, who came for a SXSW showcase that year. He played at the now-defunct club Spiro's (on Red River) to a crowd that I could've comfortably fit into my living room. Since I'm a terrible interviewer, I asked if I could shadow Goran around the festival for the article. I inadvertently bonded with Gora's posse, something that's never happened with other sources.
Mix that accidental bonding with some quickly-expiring frequent flier miles, the offer of a place to crash, and the fact that I briefly worked in Estonia, and you have a hell of a road trip. Especially when it's a road trip I now seem to take on a very regular basis.

Stone face in Old Town Riga.

I freely admit that that this sort of road trip is unusual. When I confess I’ve visited Latvia the last three summers, I usually get a double-take like I’ve revealed I’d repeatedly been to Rumpelstiltskinland, Oompa-Loompastein or Unicornworld. I'd get fewer strange looks by claiming routine jaunts to the moon.

Since fairly few Americans get to that tiny Baltic country, I’m a bit unusual there. Combine my relative exotic-ness with the fact that many of my Latvian friends are the “make the party happen” folks in the region—and you have a recipe for a certain amount of craziness. And frankly, it’s a place with an absurd amount of craziness to spare. After all, the bars in Latvia aren’t even required to close, as long as they have the right license!

Vintage Treasures From Deep Inside My Brain.

As a few of you may have noticed, my proper web site has recently had a redesign. As part of this, I spent some time delving through my hard drive, looking for saved copies of a few things.

In doing so, I found some seriously vintage items I'd forgotten about. Some of it--like a journal from when I was 19--were kind of horrifying.

Luckily, I also found a few things from a pre-digital era that I thought I would share with you, including a poem or two that I actually still like, and what was a Medievalist meme that was passed around on paper in the mid 90's.

Yes, there was more stuff in there, but I'm sparing you most of it.

Who knows, there may be more vintage treasures to come!

Time to Return to the Well of Elvis Costello-ness.

Just days after I moved to Austin, I walked into the now-defunct Sound Exchange on the drag. It was so long ago, that Daniel Johnston hadn't even painted what was to become the iconic frog on the side of the building! In what turned out to be a transformative moment because that's where I first heard Elvis Costello playing over the store's speakers.

Over the next few weeks, I snatched up used cassettes of most of his albums. Among the albums I either never got --or never really listened to--was Truth. Not surprising, since I was 18 at the time. Rob Sheffield has recently encouraged me to revisit this album.

 I was a little surprised that I never saw what Sheffield saw in this album. But you know, I'm open to new things, or rediscovering old things from artists that I really, really like.

Here's a video of one of the songs from the album:

Apple Fixed My Three Year-Old Laptop For FREE!

Brokeback MacBook

For the last couple of years, I've been living with a hairline crack on the right side of my 13-inch MacBook.  This didn't surprise me, because my MacBook lives a hard life: it's been to more airports and countries than some laptops half its age. It's so full of pictures that tech support had to insert more memory to make it functional. In short, it works for a living, instead of lying around as a pampered and spoiled laptop.

In order to deal with this worsening problem--and being someone with a gift for sweeping issues under the rug--I had placed a cute tiger sticker over the crack when I was in Japan in 2009. If the defect got worse, I didn't want the plastic piece falling off and getting lost!

The broken corner, January 2011.

This past January, the sticker fell off. To no one's surprise, not long afterwards,  the plastic corner piece finally fell off. It happened when I was staying in Boston. I spent at least a solid hour looking for the missing piece in my little niece's very tidy bedroom, even shaking her Hello Kitty sheets to see if I could find the missing piece! No luck, the tiny plastic triangle was gone forever.

The jagged edge was slightly uncomfortable on the inside of my wrist, as well as being hopelessly tacky. With SXSWi coming up, I didn't mind being the girl with the near-vintage laptop at the tech-toys festival...I minded being the girl with the visibly broken vintage laptop. There are limits!

When I ducked into the heated Apple store on NYC's Fifth Avenue on a cold day-- to see if I could buy a replacement for the top piece of plastic--I was told that this cracked corner was a known issue  and that I should make a "Genius Bar" appointment. So when I got back to Austin, I did just that.

Visiting The Doctor

When I took my laptop in--and they told me it was really three years old--I expected to be laughed at. When the dude at the Genius Bar added that he's never seen a crack exactly like mine.... I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Yet, when he plugged my laptop into the system and looked at the history, it turned out that my laptop was covered! He even grabbed another brittle bit from next to the camera (a defective part I hadn't even noticed) and pulled it off! He told me that they'd be replacing all the plastic on the inside of the computer (including the keyboard and trackpad), that it would take 1-3 days and that I wouldn't have to pay anything.

Ta da! The corner is no longer broken!

When I picked up my repaired laptop, my sweetie noticed that the replaced pieces (i.e. basically all the plastic on the inside of the laptop) are slightly gray in tone compared to the brighter white of the original keyboard/trackpad etc.

I wish I'd known about this Apple repair earlier! I lived with an annoying crack/sticker for a long time, when I didn't need to.

When I picked up the repair, the girl who helped me said that she had the same model of MacBook, and that she'd had her own laptop's parts replaced twice!

Who knew?

Umm, actually Apple knew. And they didn't bother to let me know that my problem might be covered.