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This is about attempt # 69 to put up another blog entry. I keep starting them and never really finishing. So in my favorite, unordered list format, are quick updates:
Just got back from spending most of the evening at the rehearsal studio....just getting knocked over from the newly working amp. A couple of months ago, a co-worker of mine gave me an old Fender Bassman amplifier. It wasn't working for him and had endured a minor fire when he ran a cabinet with too high an impedance on it. He had done some fixes, including replacing the output transformer, but he was not having a good time with it, and since he was moving in with his girlfriend, he decided to get rid of it. It was sort of in pieces, although he had saved most of the parts, including the tubes.
I hate Coldplay. I always have. They've always struck me as unoriginal and I freakin' can not stand the singer's annoying voice.
So I shouldn't have let it bother me, but it put a damper on my day this morning when I had to hear their song, "Talk," first thing this morning on the radio. Chuck Powell of KEDJ, leader of the morning show that's great, unfortunately loves them, and consequently, they get airplay.
First off, all of those in the Phoenix metro area are invited to the TrashMagnet show at Last Exit, this Friday. We will be rocking!
No, I'm not dead. Just insanely busy. I spent all day at work, followed by a HOA meeting where the special assesment was discussed. It's a spendy assesment, $5800 per unit, but the money is going not only for new roofs, but quite a bit of other improvements as well.
I took today and tomorrow off from work. I had to burn some vacation time or I'd lose it going into next year. It's all good for me; I've spent some time cleaning up and clearing out some stuff. Today the SGI hardware went out the door. The guy who picked it up was not only a Linux fan, he also drove an F-body. We B.S.'ed for a bit on F-body products and open source.
I got rid of the guitar half stack today as well. I traded the amp, cabinet, and my mixer for an Ashdown 4x10" cabinet for my bass rig. It was cluttering up my living room anyway. I love playing guitar, but I'm not going to be playing guitar in a band anytime soon, even though I'd like to. For now, the raging Roland Micro Cube is good enough. More importantly, I now have an incredible bass rig, which will make hitting the stage with TrashMagnet even better now that I can really use the amp without pushing the single 15" cabinet to its limits. Those of you that come out when we play Last Exit on December 2nd won't be disappointed.
I love dive bars. I'm not really sure why. I just have more fun. I think part of the reason is because maybe most of the people at dive bars are just being themselves...it's not like it's a hook up game. You can go there, look stupid, drink beer, watch bands, play pool, or whatever and nobody gives a damn.
So when I saw that Blanche Davidian was playing a show at Hollywood Alley tonight, I knew that I had to go.
First off, I want to congratulate Les and Missy on the recent changes in their life. Good luck on the new job Les....and the kid too.
While not as life altering, there could be some changes on the way for me. Nothing is certain, though.
One thing I *can* talk about is my housing situation, or at least the lack of a stable one. Basically, I can either buy the condo I'm living in, or I can move out sometime in the next month. Personally, I like the place I'm at, and not moving would be nice.
Sorry folks....I've got to do better than this blogging once a week thing. But I'm still doing better than the Biff, right? Just kidding Biff. Although I do miss your old blog.
So what's gone on since the Winprinter stuff? Not much. I've been meaning to give my condo a good cleaning, but it's never quite happened. I don't really have a good excuse. I *did* manage to replace the six burned out bulbs in the bathroom vanity. They were those big clear globes, and they're kind of expensive in most stores ($3-4 each). Big Lot's had them for $1 each, and in a much less retina burning 40 watt size.
So I haven't blogged in a while. Not too much to report except for that I have my Minolta PagePro 1350W working under CentOS/x86_64. It took me the better part of a day to conjure the foggiest image of how CUPS actually works (RedHat had me spoiled for years with the printconf tool that generally worked up to this point). But I got it going with the min12xxw driver and some manual cups configuration.
This is going to be primarily a geeky post, so I'll keep the non-geeky stuff to the top so you don't have to read it if you don't want to. In non-geeky news, the recent Clutch album is hella good. Well, it's not exactly new, but it's still damn good. "The Incomparable Mr. Flannery" might be my favorite song. The line "Stole my Camaro, primer gray" kills me every time. Damn, I miss my butt-rock Camaro sometimes.
The TrashMagnet show went off great Thursday night. We played with The Expatriates, a local blues band. They were good; they've got a very early 70's Neil Youngish vibe to them. Then we took the stage and I was digging it. It's the first time I've played bass on the stage since Criminal Townies. What became clear to me as we played the show, and especially afterwards, are that the two Andys are wired quite similarly to myself in that we all seem to enjoy playing live more than the other aspects, such as recording or something. A big thanks goes out to my friends who showed up. I swear Neil K. might as well be my "band mom;" he's so supportive.
Just upgraded to dovecot 1.0alpha3 on the mail machine (which is an OpenBSD box). It seems weird that the author considers it *the* version to use, yet won't remove the alpha tag. You'd think it'd be a beta. Anyway, had a few growing pains in the config file (the new one doesn't care for some of the old config options) so I had to take the example config for the new dovecot and bring it up to speed. The biggest thing I found once it was up and running was with mailbox locking....I had to add the group that owned /var/mail to the mail_extra_groups line.
I'm installing Ubuntu on the Powerbook to see if it solves my sleep woes. I've narrowed down what's up (I think). The system will sleep and wake up once, and it will go to sleep a second time, but it will never wake up. The Flashing LED stops, but the screen never turns on, hard disk doesn't start running (that I can tell), etc. Ubuntu looks like it's got a decent amount of active development.
Did some Olympic sleeping Sunday. In the morning I went hiking on Lookout Mountain in North Phoenix with a friend. I got home around 3:30 and I was passed out by about 4:30. I slept until 2:30 Monday morning. I woke up, read for about an hour, and went to bed again until it was time to wake up. It was everything I thought it could be.
The past week has brought on physical activity for me, and I think that's a good thing. I've started climbing nearby Camelback mountain with some friends from work. The trail has plenty of steep parts and evil trip-hazard rocks to step over, but when I'm done I feel pretty good about things. So I'm going to keep doing it. Already I can tell that I'm recovering from the physical activity faster.
Hiking season is upon us again here in Phoenix. Today, I went further up Camelback than I had before. I think I could have finished it, but it was starting to get dark, and getting down the steep parts would have sucked in the dark.
It was a good hike. Maybe I'm just feeling endorphins, but it totally shifted my perspective after work today. I was having this day where I didn't really feel like I had accomplished anything or did much good, and at the end of the hike I really felt pretty happy.
