Spring break! Vacation in Arizona, March 2012 (where the temp in Chicago was warmer than Arizona most of the week). Jen had never been to the Grand Canyon, and I don’t need an excuse for Arizona in March for some spring training baseball, so there we go… let’s rent a yellow Ford Fiesta and take a spin around north/central AZ!

Walking the Grand Canyon South Rim. Chilling in Sedona. Oak Creek Canyon scenic drive. Jerome mining town high atop a mountain. Camelback Ranch White Sox spring training baseball. Crammed a lot into a short stay in Arizona. Only wish we would have had a chance to see the Harmeyers. Perhaps next time!

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Who needs MTV any more to play music videos when you can dial up whatever you want to see right there on YouTube.  Spent some time the other day talking about some classic old videos, and tonight I dug back into some of the ones I used to come home from grade school in La Grange Park and park myself in front of the TV and watch while waiting for dinner.  Here’s a few… more to come in future posts I’m sure.

Buggles – Video Killed the Radio Star
First video played on MTV, first video posted here.


Slade – Run Run Away
Not sure why, but I really dug this song as a kid.

Men Without Hats – Safety Dance
A dwarf, some kind of RenFair-like parade, and a great tune… what’s not to like?

Dexy’s Midnight Runners – C’mon Eileen
Cheers to the Tossers for re-introducing this tune to me back in college @ Otto’s in DeKalb.

Flock of Seagulls – Space Age Love Song
No 80s video list is complete without some FOS hair.

Nena – 99 luftballoons
something something Captain Kirk.

Bow Wow Wow – I Want Candy
Toe tapper then. Toe tapper now.

a-Ha – Take on Me
Still think this video is cool after all these years.

Yaz – Situation
Some Yazoo to class up the joint.

Human League – Don’t You Want Me Baby
And a final synth-pop tune with a storyline. I think.

Jen txt’d me the news tonight. From her iPhone to mine, “Steve Jobs died.”

His failing health over the course of what seemed like several years shouldn’t have made this a surprise. Watching his body become more and more frail over time was truly sad. When he finally stepped down from his day to day duties running Apple, one could only assume that the end was approaching. Today it came, and still knocked the wind out of me.  He helped change the course of my life, even though at the time I didn’t even know who he was.  It was a product of his vision that pointed me in the direction to where I’ve landed up today.

I was not raised in a home with a personal computer. I recall writing papers through high school by hand, with pen and paper. In high school I took a typing class. A whole class devoted to learning where the keys on a keyboard were to be struck. The keyboard of a typewriter. With an ink ribbon.

My senior year of high school English class at Lyons Township High School started to focus us on how to write and research a proper term paper. College prep indeed. I remember typing those papers out at times at my mother’s office at the YMCA, because not only did we not have a personal computer at home, we didn’t even have a typewriter. Double spaced & wide margins, so as to provide the illusion of a longer paper with more sheets of paper.

Off to DeKalb. From Undeclared to Journalism major at Northern Illinois University. More and more writing to be done. Some of my classes taken in campus computer labs, learning early versions of word processors on pre-Windows work stations. It’s what I learned on. It’s what I got used to using.

Sophomore year, a neighbor on my dorm floor and soon to be girlfriend for a brief duration had a Mac. Definitely one in the minority, Macs were rare at the time. Not enough games to play on them. Certainly no Doom. But the graphical interfaces, the clickable windows, the ease of use… things on this machine were different. Easy. In some cases, even fun. I was soon seeking out the Macintosh computer labs around campus. No more PCs. No more DOS commands.

Shortly thereafter I bought my first Mac. A Performa, consumer model purchased at a Best Buy if I do recall. It had an 80mb hard drive. It was the first of many Macs I’d buy over the years. You had to start somewhere I guess.

Preloaded on the Performa was America Online. One day, I plugged in the 2400 bps modem and signed on for the first time. Took forever to download graphics on that thing, but it was a whole new world, something beyond the 80 megs of hard drive space that was taken up mostly by a bootlegged version of Microsoft Word. I’d spend hours hooked into that thing, reading sports stories. Music stories. Downloading brief sound clips of Star Wars and Seinfeld dialogue. Chatting and emailing. Custom folder icons. Desktop wallpaper. There was something fascinating about this world. And a spark was lit.

I continued down the path of earning a B.A. in English. I spent too much time in school to quit without a degree. But more and more time was spent in books not of a novel nature, but of a “teach yourself HTML” text book kind of way. I loved it. It was a hell of a lot more fun than technical writing or editing, which is what an English degree would have gotten me into since I’d given up pursuing a teachers certificate.

Post graduation, it was me and my Mac in my parents basement. Learning HTML. Learning how to use a bootlegged version of Adobe Photoshop (version 2 I believe at the time). I tried making an Elmhurst YMCA web site from their class program schedule using a scanner, Photoshop, and SimpleText for my first web site. I took odd contract/temp jobs to get experience with real gigs doing design and production work.

Seven months after graduation, I got an ad creator job at the Chicago Tribune. It was my first full time job ever. I thought it would be a good place to get my feet wet, spend a few years building a portfolio, and then moving on to something bigger and better. 14 years later, I’m still at the Trib.

And none of it would have happened if I didn’t fall in love with the Mac back in the day in college. It pointed me in a direction, and I’ve been following that ever since. The Mac helped me to start a career. A career that has fed me every day. Allowed me to travel over mountains and oceans. It helped me buy real estate and cars. It’s helped me with everything I have, and a lot of who I am.

It didn’t end with the Mac. iPods. iPhones. Movie animation. Ad campaigns you wouldn’t want to fast-forward the DVR through. Product design. Packaging. Keynote speeches. Blue jeans. I admired Steve Jobs, for what he brought to this world. His products had a warmth to them, a personality, an aura. Never sterile. Never ordinary or average.

I’m writing this on a MacBook Pro laptop.  I go to work and work on a Mac Pro desktop.  I have an iPhone in my pocket at all times.  My entire music library listen to and movies to watch, tools to connect with friends and family at any time, practically any where.

I never looked forward to watching keynote speeches by a CEO before, and I can’t imagine there will be another that comes along that excited people the way Steve did when he was introducing a new product that as soon as you saw it, you thought to yourself you had to have it.

Thank you, Mr. Steve Jobs. Your creations helped inspire me and shape me to who I am today. You will always be one of my heroes.

And you will be missed greatly.

That’s right. On the Wednesday, September 14th episode of the Colbert Report, it was announced to the world that Craig Parshall is a Hero in the scrawl during the segment about the financial troubles of the US Postal Service.

Contributors to the Colbert Super PAC “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow” are the Colbert Nation Heroe$ that have been recognized on the scroll call at the bottom of the screen. I like seeing my name on Comedy Central, although I kindof wish Stephen was in a better pose than something along the lines of a doctor about to tell me to turn my head and cough.

Summer of 2011 Jen and I decided to take a vacation down to South Beach and a cruise to the Bahamas. Neither one of us had been on any type of cruise before, so that was something we thought would be good to try.

We flew down (FYI: screw Spirit Airlines) and spent the first couple nights in South Beach. I was chased by a giant fish while wading in the ocean (honest, it was huge. don’t listen to what Jen says about it).

After surviving the heat and humidity of South Florida, we made it to the boat. We sailed on Norwegian out of Miami toward the Bahamas. First day was on Grand Bahama Island, docking in Freeport, second day was on Great Stirrup Cay (Norwegian Cruise Line’s private island), and the third day docking in Nassau on the island of New Providence.

It was my duty to choose our excursions for each day, which may have been a bad idea. First, I picked a 12 mile bike ride on Grand Bahama Island the first day. I figured it would be cool to ride a bike along the coastline next to the ocean. Unfortunately we barely got to the ocean at all, as most of the 12 miles was inland, on roads, in traffic, in ridiculous heat and humidity. We had an entertaining tour guide with the group (Mario), but really, it wasn’t much fun at all.

The second day’s excursion on Great Stirrup Cay was more fun, as Jen and I shared a kayak and paddled along the coast. Saw some starfish, conch shells, a sea turtle, but no dolphins or sharks unfortunately. The kayaking was a good workout, better to be in the water than on land stuck on a bicycle. And I’m sure some day soon Great Stirrup Cay will be a fascinating place, when Norwegian is done renovating it.

Third day I was really looking forward to parasailing near Nassau. The first two excursion days we were up bright and early and off the boat at 8am. This day, we decided to sleep in and take our excursion at 10:30. When we had breakfast, it was a bright sunny day. As we left the boat, the clouds started to gather. We got to the boat that was going to take us out to the parasailing boats, and halfway out into the water we say the front come rolling through, and they decided to take us back. If we would have gone out at 8, we would have gotten the parasail in. But I guess it wasn’t in the cards for us as we were caught in a heavy downpour and our trip was washed out. Bummer!

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For some reason, Jen & I decided to spend the Saturday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend up in Lake Geneva Wisconsin at the Lake Geneva Canopy tours zipline course flying through the trees on a wire.

A few years ago I really wanted to go ziplining in Vancouver up on Grouse Mountain during my Blackhawk hockey weekend in Canada, but unfortunately I didn’t get the chance. I heard they had a zipline set up over Fremont Street in Las Vegas, which would be fun too (not sure if that’s still up there any more). Lake Geneva may not be Vancouver or Vegas, but it was still a fun trip.

After you check in, they take you up into the woods and give a brief instructional demonstration on how to ride on the ziplines, break with your hands, and climb back on the wire should you stop short of the other side of the zipline.

All told I think there were about eight ziplines. They started out short and low to the ground, and gradually got higher and longer. Throw in some wobbly suspension bridges and spiral staircases here and there, and it was a nice trip through the trees.

If I had one problem with the course, it was that you had to pay attention to when you needed to start breaking on the line to slow down. The guide would give us a signal when we should start to slow down, so you had to keep an eye on him, which took away from doing too much sightseeing along the way.

The best part was the final zipline, dual racing lines at the end of the course. Started pretty high off the ground in a man-made structure, and once you were harnessed in you had to take a running leap to get going off the platform (awesome!). By far the longest and fastest of all the ziplines on the course, and this zipline had a breaking system so you could take in all the sights along the way without having to worry about slowing down and breaking on your own. Evidently you can skip the rest of the course and just buy a few racing zips. I’d go back just for those alone!

After a few years on MovableType, tonight we move on to WordPress.

I mentioned to Jen a few cities that I wanted to travel to and see the Blackhawks play. Montreal, Toronto, Boston, New York, and one other of those cities is Detroit. Jen, having connections in the Detroit area, hooked us up with some FANTASTIC seats. And hey, it was Jen’s birthday weekend, where else would she rather spend it than in beautiful downtown Detroit watching a hockey game with me, her friend Tina, and my Uncle Willard (who drove in from Cleveland to meet us)?

Was a decent game, Hawks won 4-1. But the highlight was being 8 rows behind the Hawks bench. Able to hear them yell on occasion, watch the line changes, watch the equipment guys throw stuff back and forth, and see my 2nd NHL arena outside Chicago. Fun trip.

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Wanted to do this for years. Thanks to a Groupon discount, I finally got around to it. Although, whatever i saved on the drop reservation, I gave back to them with the video package. But hey, figured I’d only do this once, so might as well take as much away with me as possible, assuming the parachute opens up and I land on my feet and walk away.

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Sure, after the jump my ears wouldn’t fully pop until five days later, and it gave my girlfriend Jen whiplash, but it was AWESOME!

Tribune Media Group hosted a Press Pass day at Soldier Field on Tuesday, October 5th. Much like the Sox Park Press Pass day, it included a stadium tour through the fancy seats, the visitors locker room, on the field, and a dinner & panel discussion. This one featured Super Bowl champion Keith Van Horne and current Bears QB Caleb Hanie. Fun night.
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