November 2002 Archives

Big snowstorm today. Made driving really bad for my car (sans snow tires). I'll have to get them put on sometime this weekend.

Did the arty thing, and spent last night chillin' at the Moody Blues Café (or the "Café Café", since the sign on the front of the house says as much). Great place. It's the main floor of this house on Regina St. that sells books, coffee, cakes, and a huge assortment of teas. The tea is scattered about on the main table, each blend in a different, unmarked container. The owner is best described as a little hepcat German lady, who's always wearing a beret. She often talks quietly about crazy things she used to do in far away lands, and about living in "the commune" with a bunch of interesting people. It's a mostly University crowd there, and once or twice, I thought I was trapped in a dream, much like in "Waking Life". Sometimes people get there and are compelled to talk like pseudo-intellectual students. Myself included. Sometimes you can't help it.

Also picked up this neat mixer from Numark. The EM-360 has 3 channels, and a Kaoss effects pad for adding a little extra sound. It can flange, sample, scratch, echo, etc. Pretty cewl thing, and I was able to snatch the special demo model for cheap. Now all I need is some practice.

Getting really cold out these days. Going to have to get those snow tires on soon. My current tires are going to be replaced anyway, since there's not much tread on them now. The car has a hard time gripping in the rain, let alone snow. We've already had some snow up here, and the weather is being very inconsistent - snow, rain, sun, snow again. I hope it finally stabilizes on something before December.

Finally got me a Gigaport AG for the laptop. It's a multi-channel sound card which has eight 16-bit analog outputs, and one lightpipe (whatever that is). The trick is you need to use PCDJ Red, v5.2 before it will give you a multi-channel mode, and make the Gigaport worthwhile. They don't tell you this on the forums, and you pretty much have to figure this out for yourself. I was going crazy trying to configure the laptop sound and the Gigaport drivers, before I realized you needed to upgrade the PCDJ version. Don't get me wrong, the Gigaport is great, and PCDJ is the best DJ software out there. The good folks at Visiosonic have a great support site, and plenty of newsgroups for their customer base. However, the customer base is largely made up of Wedding DJs, and I haven't heard much about the club scene by reading the newsgroups. Most of these guys fight over what makes a better "first song", "Old Time Rock and Roll", or Pink's "Get this Party Started".

Wow, it's been a long time since my last post. I guess I've been busier than I thought. This is what happens when you get a life, I guess.

So why am I posting now? Currently, I'm stuck in a place where I have to stay for a while, and I'm getting bored doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm always good at procrastinating when I've got a job to do, and don't want to do it. Which explains why I haven't posted in so long.

I am working on deploying the pics from the Hell-Mouth Halloween Party, and will have the SpamRock 2002 pics online when I receive them. Those who were there will remember that I didn't have my camera with me, and was unable to take pictures of all the great trailer-trash costumes. Also, I am aware that some of you don't want your picture online, so best let me know before I get them deployed, or I'll just mosaic your face.

I'm also rebuilding my Zuckerprime unit, and upgrading the OS from Win98. I hated having to reboot the machine every other day, or having it reboot for me. Sheesh. I removed the SCSI card and the two CD drives, and kicked up the RAM to 512Mb. Now the only problem is all the software that was compatible with Win98 no longer works. Ditto for some of the drivers too. I'll have to scour the Web for any updates.

Yeah, I know this is a pretty factual journal posting, but I'm not in a very creative mood right now, and I'm more interested in getting the news out than emoting all over my keyboard. I'm still not sure where I'm going and what I plan on doing with my life. Nothing's changed there.