Vince Pecoraro & Dog Park Riot Blog All the things I am interested in including Dogs, Dog Parks and my studies to learn Web Design and Development.

I will be taking my dog and camera to a new dog park in Mesa this weekend called Countryside Dog Park. It has been awhile since I’ve had anything new to add to my site. Maybe this will motivate me to get my re-design of the site started. I was going to wait till I had some Flash ready but I think I can make it look better with the skills I’ve picked up this year.

I’ve been hitting Chaparral Dog Park just about every night with Sugar. There are only a few regulars but there always seems to be at least twenty dogs running around after dark. I really like the vibe and my dog is very happy.

I am studying like crazy so next semester goes easier than last semester. Computer programming hard(Buffy reference). I am getting the feel for it though. It comes down to knowing how to bring up commands that are in the programming language. Syntax is critical but you’re not re-inventing the wheel each time you write some code.

I start my first Interactive Media job on Monday. It’s an internship and pays what I was making in 1995 so my slide into poverty hasn’t been halted yet. It will be an interesting experience to see how design and programming mix in the real world. I was told I have to wear ties at work so I bought a couple today. When did fat ugly 70′s style ties come back in fashion? I still have some ties left from the last time I had to wear them back in the early 90′s and they are half as wide.

Well that’s it for now, peace out.

This post isn’t about The Stooge’s incredible Fun House album. This is about my favorite Television shows over the years.

When I was a kid in the seventies we only had three Networks, PBS and if you could get a signal, a couple UHF channels. I had access to many good shows from the past, The Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, The Munsters, The Addams Family, Star Trek, Lost In Space, Bewitched, The Dick VanDyke Show, Twilight Zone and the original Outer Limits. Not to mention the early Japanese imports Speed Racer, Astroboy and Kimba the White Lion. I loved TV from the moment we met.

The eighties sucked in so many ways but network television sucked the worst. Dallas,  Miami Vice, The Cosby Show, The Facts of Life and Different Strokes ruled the airwaves. There were two notable exceptions that came out in the late eighties, Crime Story and Wiseguy. I highly recommend both of these shows for their attempts at doing just a little more than the other guys.

I drifted away from television for a time until I heard David Lynch was doing something called Twin Peaks. I had been a fan of his since seeing The Elephant Man when I was in High School and he had shook me up with Blue Velvet so I was delighted when I read a preview of TP in the L.A. Times. What a revelation that first episode was. The weird thing was that it became a cultural phenomenon. My friends and I talked about it all Summer as we waited for it to come back in the fall. I know many people dropped it after Laura Palmer’s murderer was revealed but I stuck with it to the end. After TP we would get the occasional smart, quirky drama like Northern Exposure or My So Called Life.

The Father of Post Modern Television: David Lynch

Television seemed to be getting better in the nineties and I was starting to settle down and stay home on weeknights so I watched more of it. The next show to shake up my preconceptions of what could be done on TV was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I found it about halfway through its first season and for awhile I didn’t know what to make of it. It was horror and action but was loaded with jokes and maintained an extremely consistent mythology. It took me a couple years to learn that Joss Whedon was the driving force of the show and I’ve been a loyal Fanboy of his work since.

Since then TV has remained consistently good and it could be argued that there is better talent working in Television now than in Cinema. I really like what the premium channels put out like The Sopranos, Weeds and now True Blood. I’ve also enjoyed many cable shows like The Shield, Battlestar Galactica and currently Warehouse 13, Breaking Bad and Mad Men.

I already watch most of my TV on the internet since I can carry my laptop anywhere and I look forward to surfing the net on my TV as soon as I get settled again and can purchase the hardware. Looking forward to the return of Mad Men on July 25th!

This blog entry will be an overview of my Literary leanings. I will try to keep it short.

My parents were first generation Americans and did not attend college. My Father especially felt that finding a trade was more valuable than higher learning and guided me towards my career in printing. My parents read contemporary novels but were not interested in Literature. Luckily I was raised in Wisconsin which has a progressive educational system. I took to reading very quickly and went to the library every week.

I know that very early on I recognized that there were writers who were better than average and began to seek out stories by Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. When I was twelve I was given The Lord of the Rings box set as a birthday present. It changed the way I looked at reading and I began asking around and looking for literary classics.

I had one Uncle who collected records(vinyl LP’s) and one who bought and sold vintage auto parts. I would tag along with them to rummage sales and swap meets and in my late teens I stumbled across a box of vintage paperbacks from the 1950′s. I had always assumed the ’50′s had been like the sitcom “Happy Days” and was a time of innocence. What I learned from these paperbacks is that a dark streak of sex and violence existed back then and was reflected in the pop fiction of its time.

Here are three of the books I found in that box:

I started buying vintage paperbacks and occasionally would read one but found the quality of the writing was not that good. In my early twenties I dated a lady who was friends with some contemporary mystery writers. They were rediscovering the hard-boiled authors of the past, many of whose books were published as paperback originals. She helped me focus my reading and I consumed Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, David Goodis and many others.

I grew bored with the relentlessly downbeat writing of these authors and their contemporaries by my late twenties and turned to reading  a new group of Sci-Fi Authors who were calling themselves Cyberpunks. This was my last period of massive amounts of fiction reading.

In the last decade I have concentrated on non-fiction, history, biographies and text books. I now collect facts in my head instead of snippets of well written dialog. I still read actual books but I no longer collect them and sold off the last of my Vintage Paperbacks and First Editions on Ebay a few years ago. I am looking forward to purchasing my first reading tablet. Books are great but difficult to justify lugging around when they can exist in the virtual world taking up no space at all.

Music has always played an important part in my life. I know we often judge each other by the music we listen to so here we go.

I became aware of music at an early age. I would watch reruns of The Monkees TV show on Saturday mornings and I saw The Beatle’s A Hard Days Night and Help on TV when I was seven or eight. My Father only listened to Classical and my Mom liked Broadway Musicals. I grew up disliking both.

My older sister started bringing home albums in the mid-seventies and I first heard Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie then. I had an ear for Pop and used to listen to Casey Casum’s top 40 show each Sunday carefully tracking each songs progress. I was into dramatic music and got obsessed with songs like Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up In Blue, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

When I got into High School I rebelled against my parents and the preceding hippy generation by getting into Punk Rock and New Wave. The early to mid-eighties were about as fractured culturally as we are today. You might have friends into AOR like Styx and REO Speedwagon and friends who only listened to Hardcore like Black Flag or the Dead Kennedy’s and many of us were rediscovering the early lo-fi roots of rock by listening to 50′s Rockabilly and 60′s garage rock. There was also a lot of navel gazing electronic music like Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and the Talking Heads and some people were heavily into Funkadelic and early Hip Hop. “Pop” music and the top forty became irrelevant by the late-eighties as only music marketed to either young kids or poor urbanites filled the airwaves. All the good music was found through word of mouth and college radio stations.

By the early nineties I owned no music except for some Beatles, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, a Joy Division album and some mix tapes I had laying around when I saw the video for Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit on MTV. I was shocked to hear a song I instantly liked after years of junk. I began frequenting the local Best Buy and discovered not only a new generation of bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the Stone Temple Pilots but that the record companies were emptying their vaults and digitizing long lost music. I remember picking up The Rolling Stones Complete London Singles Collection, a Syd Barrett box set and The Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds all in one heady shopping trip in 1993. I became a fan of rock music again.

The “Grunge” era died quickly but by then I had the internet and I was discovering I could order just about any CD being produced in any country with a click of my mouse. I rekindled my interest in all music from Robert Johnson and old blues field recordings to all eras of Rock and Roll music.

When the iPod came out I refined my musical tastes into a few categories that perform different tasks for me. I have work-out music which is mostly guitar heavy, upbeat music like Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam and Neil Young. I have chill out music like Fairport Convention’s Liege and Leaf, The Carpenters and seventies Pop. I have angry music for shutting out background noise like the Pixies, Joy Division, Bauhaus and numerous Garage rock comps like the Nuggets and Pebbles series.

There are several albums that I can only listen to from beginning to end because I feel I need to listen as they were intended to be played. In our short attention span times I rarely find time to devote 40 minutes to just listening to music but this is my list of those albums:

Bob Dylan – Every album from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to Blond on Blond.

The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper, White Album, Abbey Road, Let It Be(I prefer the naked version from a few years ago.)

Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced, Electric Ladyland

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Deja Vu

David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust

Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here

I believe the best Rock song ever is Like A Rolling Stone and I’m evenly split between whether Bob Dylan’s version from The Bootleg Series, Live ’66 or Jimi Hendrix’s version from the Monterey Pop Festival is better.

I will make future posts about pieces of music that blew me away over the years but this is very probably the last time I will try to recall all my musical influences. My mind is focused on other things. I no longer read any Music magazines and only check out a new song if the video’s gone viral.

My WordPress Blog is now connected to both of my domains so I will no longer be focusing on just Dog Park news. This blog will now be an outlet to let anyone who is interested in my thoughts follow me. I am particularly interested in potential employers getting a clear idea of who I am and what my strengths are. I have made my previous employers millions of dollars in profits over the years by using my intellect and strong communication skills and I hope to support my claims in this forum.

I started my Career by attending Milwaukee Area Technical College. In my second year I chose the Printing and Publishing program for two reasons. I had taken a Design class which I really enjoyed and I was deeply into collecting books and comics and thought I might get to work at a Publishing House someday.

Computers were just starting to make it into the Printing Industry. I wanted to work in Prepress but I was hired as an Estimator. I took to it instantly because no one else seemed to be able to use the new integrated office software and grasp the complexities of putting together the man-hours and materials required for print projects.

I quickly became a Project Manager and worked my way up to the top of the industry. This caused two issues which I am currently dealing with. The first is that I didn’t continue in my schooling to get my Bachelors degree because I thought I would spend the rest of my life in Printing. The second is that because I was making very good money during the critical period when the Internet was becoming a major Marketing tool I didn’t think the printing industry would decline as rapidly as it has since Fall 2008.

I am now in transition. I have taken my somewhat atrophied Graphic Arts software skills back to college to learn web design and I am working on picking up enough programming to be a competent Web Developer.

That is who I am as a potential employee. As far as who I am as a person I will attempt to get into in future posts.

This came in a few days ago and I wanted to feature it as a post to this blog. I need to investigate costs but I would definitely recommend getting your dog some indoor play if you can’t make it to the park before dawn or after dusk during the Summer.

Thank you Jolene@dogtrainingphoenix!

Hey there. I just came across your blog and think that keeping us owners informed on the Phoenix dog parks is cool. I noticed there hasn’t been a post in awhile…but it is summertime and that usually keeps us dog owners and dogs inside. 

But that doesn’t mean we are left without a place to play. I found out about a new place in town that you can take your dog(s) to. It’s called Arizona Dog Sports, affectionately dubbed a “gym for dogs” and it’s a 3,000 square foot air-conditioned indoor facility. Although they specialize in dog training in the Phoenix and Scottsdale area, they also rent out the space for owners who just want to give their pups room to run.

I used it with my girl Haley and she loved it. She played on an obstacle course and got in some good exercise.

The owner is really nice and very knowledgeable about dogs and I could tell really cares about them. I feel good about recommending them based on the experience I had there. My little girl means the world to me and if they can care for her like I do then I want to pass along the recommendation.

Thanks again for the info about the dog parks.

I have been doing a lot of research on which dog park to make my regular. RJ Dog Park has won out for two reasons. Number one is that it is only a 15 minute ride which my pup likes and number two the dog park is in an isolated corner of the park and I can kick back and relax.