Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Dr. Milo T. Pinkerton III's LiveJournal:

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Friday, July 25th, 2008
12:32 pm	And on to the weekend... Right now I'm trying to figure out where to book our big 100th C.O.G. Lecture. One Eyed Jacks? The Republic? The Hi Ho Lounge? The Howlin' Wolf? I'm open to ideas here! (If you have a preference, please let me know ASAP! Gotta book that sucker immediately.) Well, last night's 'Green Jelly' show was pretty ridiculous... probably the silliest trainwreck of a metal concert I've ever witnessed! Still, you only live once, and I can now say I've seen them perform. Sheesh! Speaking of only living once, on the way over there Jeannine and I were joking about what would be a fitting epitaph for me. She suggested "Huh?" I countered with "Wha' Happened?" (Fred Willard's catchphrase from 'A Mighty Wind') Ehhhh, who am I kidding, you KNOW it's gonna be "Bow to the C.O.G.!" So... what do YOU want on your tombstone? Tonight I'm likely to be found at the House of Blues mixing for my friends in the not-quite-comedy metal band Brah, who are opening for Sebastian Bach. Tomorrow I'm doing equipment rental for a film crew and Saturday night will likely be spent at TikiBilly's 80's party. I leave you now with some of the most ridiculous attention grabbing headlines, torn from today's spam email. Enjoy! ( Read more... ) Current Music: Patsy Cline - 'Crazy' (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
10:47 am	Comedy metal TONIGHT Stoked to see Green Jello Jelly tonight. (They're playing at the Howlin' Wolf, but I won't hold that against them...) Aside from that, I hung out with Beth Patterson and her band on Tuesday, had a nice family dinner with my parents and 96 year old great aunt yesterday (Chinese food, yum) and have just generally been recovering from last weekend. Gotta stop taking it easy and get back to work! Well, in the meantime I have been investigating some interesting software technology to replace one of the really old (18 year old, sheesh!!!) Amiga 3000 computer the C.O.G. uses for the live stage show. By next show I intend to have radically improved backscreen graphics. A lot of work to redo everything, but it'll be worth it in the end. (Incidentally, to replace the old computer, I need something ~1.5Ghz or so that is less than 16" square and less than 5" tall. Anybody got an old Dell compact desktop they could sell me?) In my copious spare time I'm also trying to knock together another edit of a Beth Patterson song for YouTube, from a concert of hers I shot in May. Long overdue... Oh, by the way, the second installment of Dice Jockies is finally up. Geek out! Current Music: Beth Patterson - 'Blue Blazes' (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 21st, 2008
11:17 am	Do the Creep, visit the Lab, get a Placebo at Babelcon! Well, that was how a con C.O.G. concert was supposed to go down! (now, if only we could go back and perform THAT show at DragonCon!) Lab Girl Trixie's inaugural lecture was a great success, and we rocked a small but very devoted crowd well into the night, until everyone was pretty well exhausted. That might well have been the lengthiest C.O.G. show ever performed! The usual technical problems didn't ruin the experience, but I wish I hadn't been so distracted by them; I didn't even think to run back to the car and get my video camera, but neither did anybody else. I'd love to see what we looked and sounded like in action. RATS. Also, I should have had the video transmitter up above the computer rack; the computers added way too much interference to the picture (but fortunately didn't ruin the view completely, like at DragonCon.) Big thanks go out to: - Filbert for lending us his powered speakers (there's no WAY we could have made it through that gig without them. The con's PA system was barely adequate for stage monitoring, and the C.O.G. PA is WAY too bulky to bring on the road.) - Cos Solo for the tireless roadie work. - Chris for contributing a whole extra covered pickup to haul equipment & the extra roadie effort, and his wife Amy for photography. - Tiki Billy for the lend of the really tasteless looking (but easy on the fingers) keytar. - All of you who came out and rocked with us, especially those of you who were inspired enough to BOW TO THE COG!!! The good: Lab Girl's singing & Z and Rachnid's playing (when we're well rehearsed, we can work wonders!) My new Theremin and Vox amp. Being told by a personal friend that it was the tightest C.O.G. peformance he'd ever seen. Being asked by new rabid fans "why haven't I heard of you before?" Making great merchandise sales - better than the last few gigs! The bad: Small stages that don't permit enough movement. Horribly heavy & bulky equipment, including our main computer rack, Z's bass speaker, the lights, and Rachnid's amp case. Surely there's a more streamlined way for us to put on a show! And of course, things that I intend to do something about before next show - such as our lighting (not enough light on our faces, not enough bang for the weight) and our backscreen video (based on unwieldy/ridiculously-antiquated computer equipment.) The geeky: Pirate contingent arriving just in time for 'Bucket of Blood'. Green harem arriving just in time for 'Funky Fresh'! Massive applause for our cover of 'Doctor Who'. (I suspected that would result if we pulled it off, and we did!!!) Now back to work... time to pick up with all the people I had put off due to the impending gig. Gotta mix a reggae track for Will and cut a live video for Beth. Also, it's time to rebuild my cel phone again (the damned screen went off just in time for the weekend trip! Good thing I'd memorized most of the necessary numbers.) More good news - I finally got the Vectrex that I've been wanting for years! Got it for a song too... it just needs a little tweaking (and possibly a cap kit.) But the screen's good and bright and it's very playable. Nice! Current Music: Vectrex bleeps (23 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 18th, 2008
10:33 am	Time keeps rushing forward! Wow, the next C.O.G. show's tomorrow night in Baton Rouge! VERY EXCITING!!! This is the first stage show with Lab Girl Trixie, and I'm hoping she gets a warm welcome from a good audience. Hope you're there!!! Aside from that, progress has been made in other areas - like my laptop; the replacement motherboard came in from an ebay liquidator and I'm back up and running for $27 plus shipping. Can't beat that! Awaiting a fresh battery for the thing too. That's been needed for a good while now. Also got my replacement Scooba battery in and hastily cleaned my office for an appointment that never showed up. *sigh*. It's kind of depressing; this is the 2nd time I've been stood up on a meeting with a new salesperson. I really need to get a salesperson or two into the mix soon or else I'll be having to work another gig. And I'd hate to lose my comfy little office. Still, all is not yet lost. More on that later. Been spending a bunch of time programming show stuff for the C.O.G. show, of course, and it occurs to me that replacing the ancient Amiga computer that serves up our backscreen material is long, long overdue. I'm currently investigating replacing it with a PC running some very interesting software written by one of the guys from the band Klaatu (remember them?) The brutally lengthy 2 hour show list we had to assemble for this weekend precluded my getting any good research done on THAT, so for this show the trusty old Amiga continues to creak its way along. But hopefully I'll have our backscreen video system changed over for the big 100th C.O.G. show in a month or so. (that and maybe I'll also finally sit down and do DMX lighting cues for our scan lights.) Should be possible with a more reasonable, limited set list. Fingers crossed... Current Music: Klaatu - 'Calling Occupants' (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
11:24 pm	COG-Cast 1 OK, here's our first stab at a Podcast! Short but sweet. This contains a couple songs excerpted from Monday night's rehearsal, which we're going to perform Saturday at Babelcon. Please tell me if this podcast works correctly: CLICK HERE for COG-CAST 1 P.S.: If anybody's going up to Babelcon from New Orleans and has space for an extra passenger, please contact Skamperdanskity. Thank you! Current Music: The Consortium of Genius! (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 14th, 2008
12:20 am	Fun weekend ...started Friday by exercising my audio chops running sound for my friends in Love Zombie and Brah at One Eyed Jacks. In the process I also won some additional respect from Jay Holland, the club's sound man. Nice time spent running a big system - a massive Yamaha board from the late 80's. It's been a while since I ran a system with VCA groups. Very sensitive faders on this rig, boosting guitar solos required no more than 1/8" of fader movement. Since Brah had just bought a whole new lighting rig, I decided to bring my big HDV camera and videotape the entire show. The tape will prove valuable to them in honing a really pro looking new light rig. Man, I've gotta get C.O.G. some more intellibeams! (I also really should get down to programming the ones we have, not just letting them free run all the time.) Friday I also got my mic boom stick (now I can yell "This is my boom stick!!!" and mean it) and a proper mic shockmount. Never had the proper equipment before now, and I'm certain it's going to make a great deal of difference. It's a fairly lightweight aluminum boom from K-Tek, and the suspension is Audio Technica to match my shotgun mic. (I made sure to get one that would also work well with my big AKG condensers.) Next I need to get a fuzzy windscreen (known in the industry as a dead cat) and a portable mixer. Much of the rest of the weekend was spent working up two new songs we're debuting at BabelCon next weekend. I showed Drumbot how to play our new NIN sounding opus 'Too Many Atoms' and the theme from 'Dr. Who', and programmed lights for the two as well. Today I threw together some backscreen stuff for 'Atoms' but didn't have a chance to do anything for 'Dr. Who'... hopefully there'll be some time to get that together, as well as maybe some Drumbot intro patter. Which would help. Oh, I also figured out what was locking my main computer up... it wasn't the memory DIMM. It was the damned SOCKET the memory was in. In other words, one of my mainboard's sockets produces memory errors no matter WHAT memory DIMM is in it. Unfortunately that's nonrepairable, so I bought a 1GB stick to get me through while I figure out whether there's any warranty recourse on this board (probably not with my luck.) Monday night - a dress rehearsal w' our first C.O.G.-Podcast, and a chance to get the last few bumps ironed out of the setlist! Current Music: Rush - 'Bastille Day' (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 11th, 2008
1:06 pm	Waiting... ... is the hardest part of getting anything done. Waiting for parts to come in so you can fix your laptop. Waiting for that boom mic setup to arrive as well. Waiting for your tire to go completely flat (just happened). Waiting to see what the cat drags into the house next (baby bird, just this morning. Bitsy didn't want to let go of it either!! She's become quite the huntress, but unlike her distant lion cousins, is quite spoiled by the air conditioning.) Rehearsal last night was great. I'd like to start recording parts of rehearsals to share with you all... will probably attempt to do that on Monday. The way I figure it, I'll never think to do a regular podcast otherwise, and aside from our studio output, it might be the only way some of you get to hear what we're up to. And now, for your enjoyment, meet the PUNK ROCK ROBOT AUDIENCE. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
3:19 pm	Fixing This is the kind of week to be fixing stuff! All kinds of stuff... computers, like my mother's (power supply), my main computer (bad DIMM chip - under warranty), my drowned laptop (ordered new motherboard unit for that today from ebay - $27!) Looking forward to having a working laptop again. Also looking into rebuilding the battery for my Scooba robot, but have a fresh battery on order which I promise not to abuse as much as its predecessor. Sheesh. Yesterday, I received by mail the certificate for second place in a film and video contest in which I entered C.O.G.'s 'Rock City Morgus' episode we finished earlier this year. So, though we were rejected by DragonCon's film and video contest for whatever reason, we at least placed in the prestigious Nunez Community College "Pelican D'Or" film festival - something I think anybody could be proud of! Tonight - more rehearsal. Gotta get two hours of music tight for BabelCon weekend after this... also, Rachnid's considering changing over from the Line6 POD XT to his old Roland VG-88, and I'm looking forward to hearing the Roland's sound through Rachnid's beautiful tube amp. Current Music: Timelords - Doctorin' the Tardis (yuk!) (Comment on this)
Monday, July 7th, 2008
3:47 pm	A new week! A new week is a good goal for starting new projects, or at least picking up where I left off. I've finished a few personal projects - the Garaj Mahal ADAT tape transfers, assembly of Jeannine's new BBQ grill, and the prototype of Ralph's remote Stedicam focus control project. Finally finished watching the 2008 season of my favorite show, Doctor Who (and what a big, loud, silly end to an overall good season.) Sci-Fi channel viewers will find out what I mean in a couple weeks. BTW we're learning the theme to the show for concert performance!!! Now it's time to gear up some new projects, like the new material for the upcoming gig, and BOOKING a New Orleans gig for our big 100th Lecture (BTW, I did a little accounting, and the Babelcon gig will be our 99th, NOT our 100th.) Do I go for August or September? Cool weather will probably not arrive till late October, and by that time, we'll be into our annual House of Shock season. I need to finish modding my Theremin for the upcoming show (sunk the main antenna down into the case, and need to do something about the volume antenna as well, also I need to add blue landing lights for it!) I need to freshen up some backscreen concert graphics as well, as we're performing a bunch of songs we haven't performed onstage in years, and some of them have Dr. A Pentatonic in the background scenery! Today I finally ordered a new battery for my beloved Scooba cleaning robot, as the old battery bit the big one (I did tear the old battery apart, and need to look into reconditioning it, which will be tricky as the cells are a pretty odd form factor.) Current Music: Doctor Who theme (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 6th, 2008
1:53 am	Heh. Just heard from BabelCon, where we're performing in a couple weeks. They said that they didn't realize, when the booked us, that we played METAL. Heh. Heheheh Mwahahahahahahahahahaha!!! Ahem. I think we're in for one hell of a night, kiddies! ... In other news, Dr. A Rachnid passed the red and black Dethklok tour bus on his way to Destin yesterday. Dude, I know, he should have stopped!!! Current Music: Dethklok - 'Thunderhorse' (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 4th, 2008
11:11 pm	Busy last few days... I certainly do live in interesting times... it's just one thing after another around here. With brief periods of relaxation and/or interesting musical research (like earlier this evening, 4th of July at Mel Graziano's place - great food, fireworks and music around the piano.) Earlier this week, however, was more 'interesting'. Such as Tuesday, on which there was a sudden torrential downfall in the afternoon, leading to more localized flooding (none in my office, thankfully), in which my hapless sister in law was nudged off the road into a ditch. She ended up the the entire front end of her pickup submerged, with only a foot of water below the ceiling of the cab. Luckily both she and her dog were pulled from the truck in time. I took it upon myself to try to get all the water out of her Gateway laptop. I think I succeeded, but left the battery at her work so I had no way to verify whether it would come on afterwards, and I think the thing was in hibernation when it took a swim, so there was evidence of corrosion. Hopefully no water got in the hard drive... that's the real key with cases like this. Unfortunately the damned thing was fairly modern, the hard drive was a mini-SATA and I have no adaptor for laptop SATA drives. Waiting to hear back from her regarding her fortunes... her truck unfortunately looks like a total loss, but she had a lot of unbacked-up work material on that laptop. Also earlier today I bade farewell to my friends Tyson and Michio who had spent a week in our guest room while they were staying in New Orleans. It was great hanging out with them after being out of touch for so long. My musical reminiscence continues with some unreleased material I recorded for local prog-pop band Garaj Mahal, 15 years or so ago... (man, I've got to stop fooling with these old tapes and concentrate on the upcoming concert at BabelCon!) Current Music: Garaj Mahal - 'Brand New Thing' (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
5:00 pm	Death to the Angel of dead... ...batteries. All around me, batteries are going dead. Why? First it was my Scooba cleaning robot. Damned thing just wouldn't hold a charge (I'm trying to recondition that battery now...) Then one of the computers in my office starts forgetting the time and its CMOS settings. Time to pop in a new lithium battery. Then, yesterday, just as Jeannine and I are trying to get out to the theater and see Wall-E, the car won't start. After taking the truck there and then returning from the (great as usual Pixar) film, I determine that, yes, it was the car battery. (Well, on the other hand, it could have been the alternator, and THAT would have sucked a lot worse!) And now my cel phone's bleeping at me that it desperately wants a charge or it will go on strike too. *sigh* Methinks machines are turning against me! Or at least possibly holding out for better w or something. My computer has certainly been cantankerous lately, requiring an OS refresh last week and skipping during a weekend recording session. I guess it remains for me to find out whether drumbot will rebel against the C.O.G. tonight at rehearsal, or whether my DVD/USB video player will choose to lock up while watching this weekend's Doctor Who! (speaking of which, did anybody manage to grab the commentary podcast to LAST week's amazing episode - "Turn Left"? If so, please let me know, as I missed downloading it while it was up!) Current Music: Dead Rebecca - 'Crying Over You' (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
4:10 pm	Developments... As my blast from the past week continues, my old high school friend Tyson Vaughan has returned from living in Japan (having recently moved to in Ithica NY, to work on a graduate degree at Cornell) and he and his wife have dropped in for a visit. We'll be putting them up for a few days. Should be fun showing her the good side of the city - she's already taken great delight in the gumbo at Charlie's Seafood, around the corner from the Secret Lab. Aside from that, I fixed my recently (see previous posts) flood-damanged office fridge (yea!) by replacing a little $12 part (a thermistor - the only electronic part that was even remotely touched by water.) That just leaves my laptop... unfortunately there's little you can do to fix a complex circuit that's taken a swim while powered up (no it wasn't plugged in - but laptops have batteries, so they're never completely powered down.) Electrolysis is NOT your friend in a situation like this, and surface mount stuff is hard as hell to repair anyway. On the other hand, the laptop is quite old and is now worth something like $112 on ebay... Aside from that, I hung out with VidVicious last night and we experimented with HDV editing in Final Cut Pro 5 (he's got a dual 2Ghz 'Cheese Grater' G5, so he can't really run FC Pro 6 very well. I heard it was a slug anyway...) Test was pretty smooth until we got to trying chromakey compositing, at which point performance took a nosedive. Methinks I'm gonna have to get a real modern (8-core, anyone?) Mac to pull off that level of work. While I was there, he also showed me this wonderfully stupid Brooklyn based amateur TV show called 'Electra Elf and Fluffer'... it was so horrible it was great! Hypnotically bad!!! And very much a Krofft ripoff, so I know exactly where his influences were based - the same Saturday morning cesspit I used to wallow in myself! While we were at it, I told him about Channel 101, which amazingly he'd not heard of. Over the last few days, I've been making discreet inquiries into entering 'the biz', as my office job's been REAL slow lately. Having done music studio style sound work for two decades and high level amateur videography for the past 9 years, I've amassed a good deal of equipment that's almost good enough for pro level sound work. I really should make the effort to change that to better than 'good enough', and get some sound recording gigs. Sound has always been my first love - I just avoided trying to do it for a living because, well, musicians are generally broke! TV and movie producers generally have $$$, making it a much safer bet, and there's work everywhere. Sound for picture is a thankless task, but it's something I'm good at (and more concerned with than lots of videographers I know...) So we'll see. More on this later, I'm sure. Latest 'working computer found on side of road' for me turns out to be an 800Mhz P3 on an ASUS CUBX mainboard - a heavyweight in its day, it sports 4 IDE headers. Must have been a server or something. Best thing about it though was the free hard drive - a 200GB (yay!) Maxtor (boo!) Hard drive had an 8GB partition with XP home installed on it. (?) Ahhh well, I'm sure I can find some use for it - maybe with a fan to keep the Maxtor's heat under control. And finally, for all you DEVOtees, this hilarious tidbit comes courtesy of CT-project. Current Music: Chad Vader training film #1 (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
12:47 pm	Busy weekend... The weekend was non-stop! But then, fun work IS how I relax. ;^} Started Friday with some more ADAT transfers and some studio work on an old C.O.G. cover that we're exhuming - 'Green Slime' Should be fun, although I note with disappointment that I can't play the Theremin part all the way through the song, as I'm busy singing at the same times, and it's virtually impossible to do those two things at once! Saturday was spent backing up songs on my main computer (hadn't done that in a while, and it was quite overdue.) I also learned the hard way that Cakewalk cannot save a BUNdle file larger than 2GB. Badly needing to back up the full length C.o.G. concert mix I did last month, I ended up cleaning out the WAVEDATA directory of everything BUT the concert audio, then just saving that directory and the PPJ project file onto a DVD. Worked like a charm. Next will be archiving the video portion of that project... THAT's gonna be a bunch of DVD-R's. Saturday night was enjoyed with Jeannine's sister Michelle and her friends at her birthday party in Covington. Some of her friends are musicians and I passed the time quite enjoyably with some great conversation about drums, drummers, and drumming. (Most intense part of the conversation was from her friend Edvin's observations about being a musician living in Bosnia during their civil war. It's sobering to speak to somebody who's been through such an experience and reflect on just how good you've got it and how much you take for granted. Makes one want to aspire to greater heights, just out of sheer gratitude to your own good fortune!) Sunday afternoon was spent shooting for the second installment of Charlie Brown's D&D themed 'Dice Jockies' comedy shorts. We developed a bunch of great script additions in rehearsal and blocked out some more physical stupidity on the set. Great fun working with those guys again... my character is so geeky it's hilarious just coming up with material for him. I'll let ya'll know that's online to check out. Sunday night, after eating some yummy steak from the grill and watching last week's Doctor Who, I capped off the weekend with a visit from some old friends, the singer and drummer from the old New Orleans metal band Dead Rebecca. I have many fond memories of working with these guys, and their drummer Mike actually taught me much of my original live sound mixing techniques. Singer Will Fey had moved to Hawaii after Katrina, but had still maintained contact with some of his old bandmates, who ended up forming local metal cover band Brah. Will, Mike and I met last night at the C.O.G. Secret Lab studio and actually worked on some of the old unfinished recordings from the last installment of Dead Rebecca - instrumental parts had been recorded, but not vocals, and the storm put a stop to everything. After a couple hours of metal, we worked on a bit of Will's newest passion, reggae - recording an entire song in 30 minutes. It needs a bit of production polish, but it was amazing easy for us to loop up a great sounding reggae groove in no time flat. An easygoing end to a great weekend. Oh, one last thing - I think I fixed my office fridge. Yea! The PTC thermistor had disintegrated. Hopefully I didn't mess up the compressor running it without the thermistor working... got a new one on order. Fingers crossed... Current Music: George Carlin - R.I.P. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
1:06 pm	Progress! I've certainly come to know there's no time to ruminate on past regrets. After all, every time I try to use the Time Door to fix a past mistake, I introduce two more alternate mistakes into the time stream! You just can't win that way, folks. Take last weekend's very localized flooding for instance... on the downside, I lost my beloved office fridge and slightly less beloved laptop, and the water devalued some of my arcade games. On the positive side, tests today indicated that they won't have to gut out my office walls again. The dehumidifiers and fans worked, and that's a really good thing! My laptop's hard drive survived, and there's a good chance both it and my fridge will be taken care of by insurance. Good deal. Rumor is that the flooding, which affected businesses all up and down the street, was exaggerated by the in progress work on the drainage system, as part of the new road construction which has been ongoing for more than two years. In other words, it's WORSE now than before Katrina. Those construction crews had better get their asses in gear before we see more major weather action! Meanwhile, I think I'll just pick everything ELSE up off the floor now... Meanwhile, C.O.G. is signing on to perform at BabelCon II in Baton Rouge next month. A minor con, to be sure, but an opportunity for us to perform in Baton Rouge, which we've never done, and enjoy another con. C.O.G. has played many sci-fi cons over the years, including our first show! Barring another show before then, this will be our 100th stage lecture. Should be fun! Meanwhile, I'm continuing to seek an in-town gig as well, but no dice so far. Aside from that, I'm coming up on rehearsals for another episode of Dice Jockies, and possibly another non-C.O.G. video project... more news about that soon. In the meantime, here's an excellent picture of a favorite Dr. Who villain who's scheduled to re-appear on the show next weekend... Davros!!! Current Music: Rancid - 'Ruby Soho' (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 16th, 2008
11:46 am	Everything is NOT alright AKA Mandatory Spring Cleaning, New Orleans Style After a great, late Saturday night mixing some friends' bands (see previous post) and a relaxing Fathers Day spent barbecuing with my dad and mum, imagine my dismay when I got a call from the office at 8:30pm asking me to come by there and unalarm the zone for the cleaning crew. Why? Well, apparently the downpour that I slept through Sunday morning had also introduced 3-4" of water into the building. Yikes! In a virtual replay of events two and a half years ago, I was greeted by the sight of a disaster mitigation team perched right outside the exit doors, vacuuming water out of the building with large hoses. I quickly entered my office to survey the damage. Hmmm, well I've seen much worse. Hurricane Katrina had brought a foot of water into the office and an inch of it into my home. This time out my home was dry and the office had 1/4 the previous amount. Another important difference - I was already somewhat prepared. A month ago, a squall had blown in and was threatening to dump a foot of rain on us again. Fearing the worst, I had picked everything up off the ground before leaving for the evening. The wind changed direction that night and the storm front blew north, right as the water seemed ready to sluice into the building. Luckily, I still had a bunch of stuff picked up this weekend, including a fine Gibson Explorer project that still hasn't been finished. But not everything was safe. My laptop was sitting on the ground in its bag. Damn. So was a box of old science fiction books and some old legal papers. Well, no great loss there. My videogames had seen worse. My new Star Trek project didn't suffer that much, and my Omega Race had a big of swelling near the bottom - nothing that couldn't be disguised. But there was one heart stopping thing I had overlooked - a black bag filled with a friend's old ADAT multitracks. These are audio masters stored on videotape. The bag had been sitting on the floor since he dropped it off last week for me to transfer to hard disk - you see, he doesn't even have an ADAT machine, but I still keep one handy for computer transfers, and had offered to do the transfer for him. RATS! The tapes inside weren't soaked but they weren't dry either. Fortunately though they hadn't DRIED. I caught them just in time. You can still save videotapes (and certain other magnetic media) in this state if you're careful and work fast. After picking more things up and starting a dehumidifier going in my office, I brought the 9 tapes back to the Secret Lab and employed a technique I thought up after Katrina, and had been curious to try out. Opening each cassette shell, I removed the tape spools, taking care to absorb as much water as possible with lint free paper napkins. Water was visible between the spool and the tape, leeching its way via capillary action into the reel. All the water could not be drawn out this way, but I got as much as possible to start. Then, with the tape threaded into a new shell (with the tape guard removed), I fed the cassette into an old VHS deck with a lint free napkin wrapped around the tape (this is an old style deck that doesn't keep the tape wrapped around the rotating head all the time.) Next I set up a hair dryer about a foot away on high airflow/low heat, aimed at the exposed tape where it emerged from the shell. I then fast forwarded each tape, running it through the napkin, all the way to the end. When it got to the end, I changed out the napkin and reversed the tape, winding it all the way back. A couple passes like this got even the wettest tape clean and totally dry (though I accidentally melted the tape case of the first one through due to overzealous use of the hair dryer.) While the tape spooled, I cleaned and dryed out each of the original tape shells before putting the tapes back in their respective cassettes. At the very end of the process I tested each tape in the ADAT machine. Success! Each tape played back perfectly. There seemed to be no issues. I guess if there's any latent problems, such as lack of tape lubrication, I'll find out later this week when I do the actual transfers. But for now at least, the tapes are safe. That process kept me up until 2:30am. Now I'm in the process of moving stuff around my steadily drying office, throwing away old trash that should have been tossed long ago. Like I said, mandatory Spring cleaning! Tonight's rehearsal. Should be a nice respite after all this. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Fats Domino - Walking to New Orleans (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 14th, 2008
2:55 pm	Staying sharp Staying sharp at something generally requires practice, and I have to admit I'm a bit rusty at live sound, which has been a pursuit of mine since the late 80's. So tonight's a welcome opportunity to practice on two bands run by people I've been working with since the late 80's - the metal cover band Brah, most of whom used to be in 80's/90's local metal legends Dead Rebecca, and Love Zombie, which is Filbert's current band. They're both playing tonight at Twist of Lime in Metalrie - a venue formerly known as the Rock'n'Bock. Ten years ago, Filbert's band was known as Igor Kitty, and we frequently shared a bill with them at late, lamented Jimmy's Music Club. I also worked sound for them and was recording their CD, which never quite got finished. Well, thanks to our mutual friend Steve, I have just finished one more little piece of that CD. Steve was in town last weekend and asked me to provide him with a disc of the finished songs, so I went about finding the old masters and multitracks from that project, and found that like the C.O.G. material, they were in various states of readability. In the process of resuscitating those recordings (and remastering them all, while I was at it), I came across a favorite song that never was completed beyond a rough demo stage - 'Sour Grapes'. This is a Nirvana-like rocker, and a song I would always look forward to hearing live. Well, I know a little bit more about recording than I did back then, so I decided to finish the job this morning, using the existing tracks and some modern plugin polish. There was only one guitar track on the demo, and I really prefer at least two guitars on heavy parts, so I manufactured a second track for those sections by cutting up the existing track and exchanging the parts from chorus to chorus. The rest of the job was much more straightforward, once I time-aligned the various drum tracks and fixed some of lead singer Misty's little timing idiosyncrasies. Enjoy! Aside from that, the only other 'new' thing (well, new for ME anyway) is a new arcade project - a 1982 Sega 'Star Trek'. This is another classic vector for my collection, not a particular favorite of mine, but it was in such great condition and the price was so right I couldn't pass it up! The only thing really wrong with it was, one of the speaker clips had come unconnected, so, no sound. I fixed that yesterday and played it until I got on the high score board. Great speech in this one, like many of the Sega vectors. Once I refurb it top to bottom, the question becomes - convert it to something I prefer (like a Sega multi-vector!) or sell it before it bursts into flames like these Sega vectors are known to do (I already bought a fire extinguisher and smoke alarm to go with this game!) Current Music: Igor Kitty - Sour Grapes (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
5:16 pm	Killer show last night Well, sorry as I am at having missed the last tour Dweezil Zappa made through New Orleans, I'm very happy to have seen last night's show at the House of Blues. Jeannine and I joined Loki and his wife for a great set by a virtuoso band. While neither Steve Vai nor Terry Bozzio were in the band this time out, Ray White was on vocals (and occasionally guitar) to represent Dweezil's father's legendary band. And represent he did! Ray carried the lead vocals all night and sounded amazing. Here's the setlist: Rock You Like a Hurricane intro - Purple Lagoon Imaginary Diseases City of Tiny Lights I'm a Beautiful Guy Beauty Knows No Pain Flakes Broken Hearts Are For Assholes Bamboozled By Love King Kong Yellow Snow St. Alphonzo's Father O'Blivion Magic Fingers Carolina Hardcore Ecstacy Lucille Messed My Mind Up Joe's Garage Wet T-Shirt Nite Outside Now He Used to Cut the Grass Packard Goose Cosmik Debris G Spot Tornado Willie the Pimp Every member of the band was a total virtuoso, playing at least two instruments really proficiently and taking at least occasional vocals, except Dweezil, who stuck to the flat out effortless shredding that he does so well. With 8 people in the band, the stage was littered with equipment to the point that you couldn't even see the B3 player (Aaron Arntz) who was hidden behind Dweezil's equipment racks. Despite playing through a mountain of rack gear, Dweezil's tone was great (amplified by Fuchs amps.) I also must give extra props to their mallet/percussion player Billy Hulting, and sax/keyboard player Scheila Gonzalez. Amazing!!!!! A big shout out to my friends who were at the show too; I'm sure there were more but I bumped into Brandon, Paul, and Mike, and got to meet Andre from Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes, who stood with his jaw agape the whole time... Today was spent working, mostly, but I did have a little time to finally post a clip of C.O.G. performing 'Lab Coat' in March on the morning news. Sorry it took so long to get this up, but I had to fix the mix, which was VERY poor when this was originally broadcast. Enjoy... Current Music: Frank Zappa - Hungry Freaks Daddy (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
3:31 pm	Whew, that's better. Yesterday on my way into work, the damned air conditioner was at the forefront of my attention. I had already determined that the OEM part was pretty hard to come by and would be expensive as all hell if I found it, and had reasoned out that if the home warranty DID come through for this, it'd be a while before they dispatched anyone (I imagine there are THOUSANDS of broken air conditioners across the city, the way the summer's been hitting us these past few days.) So after making a token attempt to lodge a claim on my warranty, I went into work, then took 5 minutes to walk across the street to Ideal Appliance Parts. Good thing I did. I didn't have the old fan motor on me, but had written down all the specs off its casing. The clerk knew exactly what I was talking about, and handed over a box from a large pile of boxes against the back wall. Hmmm... seems like this is a pretty common form factor for these things! He told me this was a high quality motor with ball bearings instead of crappy bushings like the old motor had. I felt a little trepidation, noticing that this motor had a LOT more wires sticking out than the old one, but the clerk reassured me that four of those wires were hooked together just to switch the rotation of the shaft, and he showed me how the starter cap hooked up. Downside was, there were no returns on electrical parts, so if anything went wrong, I was out $100. After double checking the lug spacing on the old setup, I went ahead and took the plunge. Soon after I got the thing back to my office, the authorized service center for my warranty called and said they might be able to make a visit. *$@#*! But oh well, I had taken the plunge already, and after talking with them, I found that they wouldn't really have been able to come out till Thursday. So I departed work a little bit early and, with extreme care, did the installation myself, ending just as it began to rain (and 10 minutes after C.O.G. was supposed to start our rehearsal.) Success! It always feels good to accomplish something myself (even though I realize that I'd have saved $50 or so had I allowed the warranty cover it.) Another consolation was the fact that there's no WAY any field tech would have put the extreme care into the installation that I did. I soldered and individually heat shrunk each connection instead of just wire-nutting everything like those who had been there before me. Hopefully this holds for a long time... it's gonna be a long hot summer. Rehearsal afterwards was OK. We had a guest in the lab, one of Rachnid's friends from work, who actually had a funk/soul hit record back in the 70's. He still had some guitar moves as well... I told him to bring his guitar next time he visited! Right now I'm waiting to hear back from a Baton Rouge area con next month... another possible gig. Current Music: Richard Delvy - Green Slime (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 9th, 2008
12:57 pm	Boy it's hot While the Secret Lab is still cool as ever, the adjoining house is currently a hothouse with the air conditioner condenser fan having seized up... I gave it several attempts at a lube job after it started squealing yesterday, but to no avail. The cheap bushings are dried out and once the thing heats up, a thermal fuse opens somewhere and it stops turning. Good news is, I've got a replacement motor and the will to install it (esp. since my home warranty will probably not get around to the repair for days and I need air conditioning NOW!!!) Aside from that, entertainment-wise, I've got my Zappa tickets for Wednesday (missed it last year, not going to miss it again!), the Doctor Who episode from this past weekend was fan-freakin-tastic (we're talking one of the best eps. of the last 4 years), and so was the new Venture Bros.! C.O.G. Rehearsal's tonight, and I'm also looking forward to telling everybody about an upcoming show we're scheduling for mid-July. Guest band will be Clockwork Elvis. Should be a sick night of fun for anybody who braves the heat! Current Music: Elvis Presley - 'Suspicious Minds' (6 Comments |Comment on this)