a gthing science project

Posted by sam at June 28th, 2004

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Posted by sam at June 28th, 2004

    We played, if I do say so myself, and incredible show last night.  We had the stage set up a little different.  Oli played drums on the right side of the stage, and Danny stood back on the drum riser.  I stood on the left.

    We put up a projector behind and between Danny and I.  For some reason the projector only worked for two songs.  It was pretty cool though, we got some videos ready and on que with the songs and it worked out pretty well.  Even when the projector wasn’t working it was showing blue and looked pretty cool.  Cory started doing all sorts of cool lights and it looked really good with the lights coming from behind the projector.

    A bunch of people showed up.  Rumor has it that even the old bassist showed up with like 20 people.  There were a ton there.  It felt so good to see some fans, and some people jammin to the music - even people that none of us knew. <

Posted by sam at June 26th, 2004

    It seems as though Murphy’s law; “everything that can go wrong, will go wrong”, is a gross understatement. 
   
    We are trying to prepare for a show we are going to play tomarrow and we are running into all sorts of mishaps.  We bought a new PA in time to use it for the show.  Corey at Muse Music was not excited about us bringing it, but we convinced him.  We took the PA, and all of our equipment up to Danny’s cabin in sundance to reherse and mess with the settings on the PA.  We arranged to have Kris come and do sound for us. 

    Kris never showed up, and would not answer his phone.  This is just like him.  If he doesn’t want to do something, he will tell you he wants to do it, but then he just won’t show up and won’t answer his phone.  Now we have to find a new sound guy in the matter of one day.  Holy crap.

    While we were rehersing today, Danny’s guitar cab fried itself.  Yes, it no longer works in any way, shape, or form.  Fortunatly he has a backup, but it was not available at the moment, so practice today was cut extremly short.

    We are planning on playing a video along with our live show.  I was all ready to do the editing but the software I needed got stolen along with all my movies, mp3s, and other software (see a couple entries down).  So I ended it up doing it all in Windows Movie Maker, which, oddly enough, only kinda sucks.

    So it will take an unusual amount of miracles tomarrow to pull this show off without a hitch.  We also planned on giving out cds.  I burned 25, Danny was supposed to burn 25, and Oli was supposed to print 50 labels.  I did my part, but Danny and Oli have done nothing so far.

…

    While I was at work today I went to pull a paper off of a clipboard which was hanging on the wall.  As I pulled down, my finger hit a clipboard below it and opened up a pretty good sized gash.  I swung my hand around and blood went EVERYWHERE.  And I do mean everywhere.  It was all over the floor, walls, door, counter, coworkers, and even the ceiling.  It was totally sweet.

    Only problem is it’s my bass playing finger so it damn well better heal within the next 16 hours. 

Posted by sam at June 24th, 2004

    I would like to complain once again how the EPA took the only allergy medication that ever worked for me off the market.  And boy, did I miss it today.  My allergies acted up tonight worse then they have been in many years.  Yes, I feel like crap.

Posted by sam at June 23rd, 2004

    I got a GPS unit the other day.  My friend Jake at work had one that can attach to a Palm V, but his palm V broke.  I offered to buy the GPS attachment for $50 and found a palm Vx for $20 at the pawn shop.   I figured $70 for a GPS with map software and everything is a pretty good deal.
   
    Now, some of you may be saying to yourselves “Why a GPS?”  Well, I will tell you.  Actually, I will show you.  Go to www.geocaching.com and you will see why it is so great to have a GPS. 

    Geocaching is basically like treasure hunting.  You get coordinates off the website for a treasure box (”cache”) and put them into your GPS.  Then you just follow the arrow until you find the box.  You can take anything from the box, but the idea is that you leave something in return.  My crew back in Colorado used to do this a couple years back when it just started out, but now it’s gotten huge.

    There are like 100 caches within 10 miles of my house.  I set out on my skateboard and found the nearest one in about ten minutes.  I left a toy truck and took a jack in the box antenna head thing.  There will be much more of this happening, although none of my friends seemed very excited about it. 

…

    So a few weeks ago my wirelesss card disappeared.  I was pretty upset about it, but I have integrated wireless on my main laptop (the card was for my other two laptops).  Anyway, I have a hard time with believing that it could have been my room mates who took it. 

    The plot now officially thickens.  My CD book full of movies and software was taken today.  Both my room mates said they saw it under the coffee table this morning.  Matt and Steve were both gone all day.  Matt thinks that maybe our neighbor , Kage, might have come over and taken it.  He’s a shady character to begin with, and our landlord made the mistake of keying both apartments with the same key.  So far nobody else had figured it out, or so I thought.  That needs to change.

    A suggestion was given to me to go over to Kage’s place when he’s not home, let myself in, and search around for my stuff.  I don’t think I could do that.  I’m pretty sure I would not like to stoop to a thief’s level. 

    So I am taking counter measures.  I set up a webcam pointing into our main room where it can see people who come in and out.  I put some software on my computer that will detect motion and then record a picture every second to the hard drive.  I’ll leave it on for the next few days and see what it comes up with.  I think it’s a pretty sweet idea.  I could buy like 5 webcams and wire up the whole apartment.  Some may call me crazy.  Maybe I am crazy - but I’d rather be crazy with all of my possessions intact then sane and possessionless.

Posted by sam at June 18th, 2004

    I got a new bag the other week and this is it, except that mine has some red trim on it.   It’s a really cool bag because it has a neoprene laptop pouch inside that is suspended so your laptop won’t hit the ground when your bag does.  Congradulations to Savier for being smart enough to think some skater kid out there might actually have a laptop and a need to transport it.  A+ choice for a laptop bag.

    Work was crappy today.  This lady came in and talked for 2 1/2 hours to me about her colors and painters, and about everything you can think of.  She kept saying “mix me this and that”, so I would go to do it and she would stop me with another story.  Then at the end she seemed confused that I had not mixed her paint yet.  I think she might have been insane.

    Danny called me today from Monaco.  I don’t even know where that is, but it’s someplace in Europe as he was in Switzerland a few days ago.  He’ll be back tomarrow which is cool because I’ve missed band practice.

    In other news my guitar playing has gone way down hill lately.  I guess I don’t practice enough but I’ve also had a hard time singing (or squeeling as it may seem.)  So I’m takin gmy guitar to work tomarrow and I’m going to practice.  I gots to be able to impress the ladies should the oppritunity arise.

    Last sunday I went to the bishop after church to ask him why I had not yet received a calling.  Right then the first couselor pulled me aside and called me to be the gospel doctrine teacher.  Woah.  I must say I’m a little suprised.  It’s not official until next sunday, so I guess I’m not supposed to talk about it, but nobody reads this anyway.

Posted by sam at June 16th, 2004

This show on MTV about the guys who go around and piss off animals is so stupid. I don’t even know what it’s called, but i’s on the TV right now and I’m too lazy to change it. These are the guys who were too lame for jackass or the bam show, so they fly around and put dangerous animals on their asses. Wow, I’ve been waiting for a show like that.

Posted by sam at June 16th, 2004

Posted by sam at June 14th, 2004

    So XP failed to work properly (suprise), which is rather frustrating since the current installation is only a few months old.  Usually I can get at least 6 months out of an installation.  I decided to entirely scrap my hard drive and start over from scratch (previously I had done fresh installs, leaving everything on my hard drive).

    The hardest things to back up were my media files.  I had about 12 CD’s full of music videos, and about 9 CD’s full of MP3’s (read: all legal backups).  Then there were about 4 cd’s full of misc programs and settings and whatnot.

    So I decided I would install linux instead of windows.  My hope was that I could get more then 6 months out of a linux install, and could move away from windows alltogether. 

    I started with the latest version of SuSe linux.  I tried the live CD, the network install, and even downloaded the cd images but no to avail.  Each CD gave me a kernel panic (read: aint no way in hell this cd is booting).  So I tried gentoo.  I borrowed the full CD’s from my friend (which he bought) and their installation was no streamlined for linux beginners.  It wanted me to start off my compiling a new kernel.  So I tried fedora core 2.  Fedora installed but did not detect my devices properly.  After trying and trying to get it to work I gave up and installed XP.

    The XP CD loaded fine, installed fine, updated fine, detected my devices fine, and seems to be working just fine.  I even managed to restore my mozilla profile (mail, passwords, etc.) with only a little trouble.

    So I guess I’ll wait for a few more versions of linux to come out before I try again.  I think it will be ready once I don’t have to compile kernels and type in really long command lines to make it work.

Posted by sam at June 13th, 2004

    This girl who keeps calling me is really annoying.  Here is one of our conversations:
[my phone rings]
me: “Hello?”
her: “Hey, what are you doing?”
me: “Nothing.  WHat about you?”
her: “Nothing”
… long silence….waiting for her to tell me why she called me.
her: “sooo…”
me: “…”
her: “whose all over there”
me: “Steve, Tyler, Chris, and I”
her: “whose Chris?”
me: “He’s a kid that Steve and I know”
her: “yeah, but who is he?”
me: “His name is Chris.  What do you want to know?”
her: “Well, like, who is he?”
me: “I really don’t know what information you want.  His name  is Chris Harrison, he lives in Provo, he plays guitar in a band…”
her: “oh.”

She calls me all the time and says nothing.  What does she want?  Does she want me to entertain her?