compy

Move to Denver / Return of the Blog

Posted by audiosquid on September 9, 2007
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The return of the blog! Thanks to a good friend, and a friend of his, the old G3 has found a new home and is back connected to das intervebin for more blogging fun! While there is much catching up to do in the blog department, just a bit today on the drive to Denver, and more to come in the near future!

Farewell to the fond and totally ready to crumble in the next earthquake home in San Francisco. Early morning I grab the 10ft box truck and with the help of some good friends it’s packed in no time and I’m ready to hit the road for my 3 day trip to Denver. A sad farewell to Katie, Kelly, Kevin, Mark and Jason and I’m on my way. On my way into traffic that is, as San Francisco tries to hold on to me. Good time to chill and check out the skyline for one, well, not last, but one more time. Honking my horn as I pass another friends house, and then then past the Maritime Hell, oh, excuse me, Maritime Hall, and then over the bay bridge to Berkley like my old commute to the Berkley Square.

From there onwards the bear and I had a pretty smooth ride. Up past Sacramento and up to and over Lake Tahoe, down into Reno, and finally into Winnemucca for a nights rest at the ever so cheap and simple Motel 6. Luckily they left the light on for me. πŸ˜‰ Oh yea, and the first rainbow of the trip, a good omen hopefully.

Next day more wild wild west travels down to and through the winter white salt flats of Utah, and more good omens from rainbow #2. Another stop for the night, this time in Rock Springs, WY. Note to self (cause I didn’t seem to remember this from the last couple of times doing this drive), don’t bother stopping at the Little America off of 80, it’s just not worth it.

Finally I take a turn and head south down I-25 into Colorado and eventually off in the distance the city appears and I return home, Hooray! My stuff goes into storage and I stay with a good friend as I hit the streets and look for a home. Searching around Denver there are tons of places available, but as I go looking about in person nothing catches my eye. Then on my good friends b-day I get a call for possible work, and all of a sudden my home search is put on hold. A couple of days of waiting and I’m confirmed for the tour and hired to mix house sound for Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals in fancy theaters across the US.

Shortly thereafter I head out to Burbank for rehearsals, back to my temp home in Denver for a day, and then conveniently I get to meet the bus a block away from where I’m staying to start the tour, with an in-store performance at Twist and Shout in Denver.

I hope to have some pictures from the trip and from the tour up soon. I was working on sticking photos in this post, but things were being odd and slow, so I’m now looking into some other methods of posting and it’s looking like there will be some sort of photo gallery system added to the blog soon. Till then, my schedule is on my work page and hopefully there will be more posts to come soon.

My G4 Powerbook gets fixed

Posted by audiosquid on April 4, 2007
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Finally I take my G4 powerbook to the apple store here in San Francisco to get fixed, hopefully for free with applecare. Last August the powerbooks’ screen started flickering in and out. If I moved the screen a small bit I could get it to stop. It was acting like there was a loose connection somewhere… As this started I had to head off to London for a tour of the EU. Upon arrival at the hotel in London I came upon two very sad realizations. One, that I have seemed to have left my cell phone in the taxi, and two, only the top half of the screen will show me anything. This is very sad indeed. With no time in the UK to take care of it I’m off to Reading and Leeds festivals. Then we went to Berlin, where luckily we had a bit more than a weeks time for me to work on it.

First I tried calling applecare, I found numbers in the EU, but was having some translation issues. Then I tried calling applecare US with skype, but found myself on hold for hours on end. Searching around on the web to find local applecare approved repair does not look to promising. And during working on all this I’m using the bands computer to make the calls, and continue on advancing shows and whatnot, booting via target disk mode, so everything is as I expect and I don’t mess with the bands computer too much.

Eventually I decide that I’m just going to have to get a new computer and work on fixing this one latter. Keyboards are a bit different in the EU, a bit too different than I liked, so I had my friends at Powermax in Portland Oregon ship me one of the first macbookpro’s. On with a long tour with the intel as the not pro macbook (amateur?) sat on the bus. Using the intel I lost the gumption to take care of getting the other one fixed, as I didn’t have an immediate need for it and the applecare was still good for a couple of years. Finally with time to spare I make an appointment with the genius bar at the apple store here in San Francisco…

After about a 15 minute wait I show my G4 to a genius, the problem was pretty obvious, and he tells me it needs to be sent in and here sign this and here’s your tracking number and off I go. This was on Friday.

Wednesday the computer shows up at my house, and has been fixed, covered by applecare! Boots up and works just fine. There wasn’t much info in the box on what they did, seems they replaced the screen (though not the outer shell as all my stickers were still there). They also took out half of my memory, a 512k chip, which was in a plastic bag and sent back with the computer. When I bought the computer from Powermax I had them beef it up to 1Gb of RAM, and they basically put in a 512 chip. When apple repaired the screen they took this chip out, and the documentation seemed to suggest that this Ò€œ3rd party partÒ€ was either causing the issue or was not passing their diagnostic test in general. It’s really easy to install memory on the powerbook G4, four screws, off comes a plate, and there you are. So I put the memory back in, and all seems to be fine. I’ll have to do some other tests and talk to Powermax about it, but at the time I’m guessing it’s something they have to do legally for some reason, since they didn’t put it in (though I purchased it that way).

Now I just need to figure out what to do with it, as now I have 3 computers. The original G3 powerbook which is serving this blog, the G4 powerbook that I just got fixed, and the intel macbookpro that I now do all my work on. I could see using the two live if I feel like carrying two around, one for work work, and the other at FOH to play music and record and/or analyze the show, or maybe as an effect box…..

A weekend of geeking out.

Posted by audiosquid on March 14, 2007
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A weekend spent learning how to get a blog working on my server. As you might notice from past posts, I had switched from a hand made blog using Freeway Express to one made using iWeb. It was very enjoyable and simple to set things up with iWeb but I ran into some limitations. I’m not using .mac to host my iWeb site, so I had to upload the entire site anytime I changed anything. There was also some post processing I would have to do to the iWeb site to make it totally ready to post.

So I started looking into other solutions. First I created a blog on blogger and thought that would be cool, but blogger 2.0 doesn’t work with Journler (at least not yet), and I still wanted to explore posting my blog and running my own server on a computer sitting here otherwise doing nothing. Then my journey began in learning wordpress, php, and mysql. The server part, getting php and mysql to work was the trickiest. While there are some somewhat clear instructions on setting up such things on a mac client,  I still had to do allot of trial and error changing of files, installing, un-installing, re-installing things. Finally in the end I got it all to work out (I think).

So I’m back to using Freeway Express to make web pages, and I’ve updated my audiojack@earthlink site and added a new site address for the new blog. So now there is the following:

www.audiojack.selfip.net – the main portal to my “web presence”, which will automatically redirect you to my earthlink hosted site

www.squidaudio.selfip.net – the new blog, if you have the old RSS address in your reader, replace it with the one you can find here

You can even make comments on my blog now to posts! (I’ll have to test that out….) The blog still needs alot of work but that will all come in due time.

In the time this weekend I wasn’t geeking out on the interveb stuff I was working on the filemaker pro touring databases, which are getting every so closer to being finished.

Will Journler work well with iWeb?

Posted by audiosquid on November 6, 2006
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Working on changing the way my blog system works. Currently I’m using Freeway express to make my web pages, and building blogs “by hand”, moving the text about, changing links, creating the rss file… Getting a bit tedious for just putting up some quick updates. I still want to run it all per se, that is, see if I can do it without using blogger.com or similar, cause if I can why not? And I’m always a bit interested in digging deeper into something to see how it all works. Always had a thing for doing it for myself…

So, now the question is weather Journler, a piece of free-ware I have which seems pretty cool for keeping journals, not that I have ever kept such a thing before, but if I can do the blog in a couple of different formats maybe it will last a bit longer… Or maybe I’ll put some other stuff in this journal, a bit doubtful but… also, maybe Journler would work well as a data organizer for tour logistics. I’m currently using omnioutliner to keep a to-do list and data in outside of my itinerary database…

We shall see, but for now, lets see how well this moves over to iWeb, I just press that blog button up there and we shall see what happens….

Poof! and here I am in iweb, just a tiny bit of tweaking to do, add a picture (which I could have sent with Journler I think), and wa la.

Pardon my dust…

Posted by audiosquid on April 12, 2006
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I’m in the process of completely remaking the web site, about 75% there, so please pardon the dust and the pages that aren’t quite finished yet. I bought Freeway Express, as the copy of Go-Live I was using wasn’t legit, and while I was hopping iWeb would be the bomb, it wasn’t quite fitting the bill. So after much research I ended up purchasing Freeway Express for $100, and I’m pretty happy with it. I would definitely recommend it if iWeb or any other WYSIWYG site editor isn’t doing it for ya.

After some research I also figured out how to make an RSS feed as you can see from the button above. So now by subscribing with your fav news reader you can see when I update the web site.

I’ve just purchased (though not yet received) FileMaker Advanced 8. I plan on releasing some stand alone databases, probably starting with a Flyer-Miles database, then my Tour Manager Itinerary database, and I’ve also got an audio calculator in the works, but that will probably not be ready for quite awhile. When all is ready you can find the files in the file section.

eX-Girl tour starts tomorrow with a long drive up to Seattle for our first show. Looking like rain all the way. Hopefully the shows go really well. Nobody rents 15 passenger vans anymore. Or you can’t go out of state, or with the insurance it’s too expensive, or you need a trailer too and they won’t let you do that. Are more bands elsewhere in the states finding they have to own their own van these days to tour with?

Upcoming Tours – eX-Girl US West Coast / Peaches supporting Nine Inch Nails and Bauhaus

Jan 2005 News

Posted by audiosquid on January 30, 2005
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A new year! And my G3 starts getting a bit too finicky. Time to move on. The power supply died while in Spain for some promo work with Mercury Rev.

The 1/8″ audio out has been broken for ages, the plastic tab on the cd drive is completely broken, the screen is not what it used to be…

So after some research and talking with PowerMax in Oregon I find myself purchasing a brand new Powerbook G4.

The hardest part really was to say “goodbye” to the sticker decorations on the G3.

(as of Apr 6, 2006) – The G3 is still working, sits at home closed up using a usb keyboard and external monitor. Tiger is installed and seems to work better than panther. It spends most of its time calculating Seti and Einstein. (Retired in 2010!)

Here’s the new one, a 1.5 Ghz Powerbook G4, 1Gb of memory, running OS 10.3. The glowing keys are the bomb along with the scrolling track-pad.. Not anything bad I can say about it really.

The start of the year found me working with Mercury Rev more. Some radio promo in NY and Philadelphia (Sirius studios in NYC shown on the right).

And more radio promo in France and Germany, with our second visit to the Black Sessions in Paris.

When not on the road and in the upstate NY area with Mercury Rev I find myself spending allot of time at their rehearsal/recording studio.

A conglomeration of gear based around a 24chn mackie, some good outboard mic pre’s and a ProTools LE rig on a G4 tower.

A coffee shop in either direction out the front door, and some free high speed internet, what more can you ask for. πŸ˜‰

eX-Girl Tour. On the road again…

Posted by audiosquid on February 24, 2003
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eX-Girl Tour. On the road again… It’s so great to be on the road again. Crammed in a van with a band from Japan! Go to the tour pages to see the schedule, and catch the show in a town near you!

Tour Manager Files Updated. Minor update really. More venues and hotels in the databases, and small, mostly cosmetic changes in the files themselves. The biggest difference being that they will only work with Filemaker Pro 5 or higher (OS-9, X or Windows). The databases for Filemaker Pro 4 will still be available (via email) but no longer updated. Another update will probably appear after the eX-Girl tour, seems some things might work a bit better in OS-X than 9, mostly with printing. I’m hoping it makes printing itinerary books a bit easier. Stay tuned.

Welcome to 2003

Posted by audiosquid on January 20, 2003
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Welcome to 2003. Happy new year one and all! Hopefully this year brings good new exciting things and events to us all. Yes, I am a bit late with these greetings… so now a long over due update to the site…..

Resume Updated – The resume and tour pages have been updated, rearranged and such including the addition of show listings for all the shows I’ve worked at various venues and such. Go to Tour or Resume to see the trivial details.

Now running on OS X, and the Pizmo doesn’t complain too much. Was pretty easy updating to ten. I was going to say it hasn’t crashed yet, but I have the magic touch and have managed to lock it up now and again, but no where near as much as 9. A bit taxing on my processor with all the new transparencies and whatnot but I’m a happy camper overall. though putting the new OS in has put me in a bit of a larval stage checking out it’s inner workings and tweaking this and that.

Tour Manager Filemaker Pro Database – Oh yea, I did say I was going to put up a new version for FMP 5.5 and higher. Well…. I will, I swear. Updated Venue, Hotel, and Promoter databases along with the first release of the inventory database should be coming along too.

A new version is up of the filemaker tour management database

Posted by audiosquid on March 24, 2002
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A new version is up of the filemaker tour management database for Filemaker 3 or higher. And this will theoretically be the last version that will be posted compatible for Filemaker 3 or higher as I move on to FMP 5. Once I make an updated in FMP 5 the file will no longer be readable by older versions, but I will leave the old version up for awhile. In the meantime, I am learning all the new features of FMP 5.5 and revising the databases accordingly.

Another Mercury Rev tour under the belt. Had a really good time down under. A big thanks to Michael and Randy, our Australian Tour Manager and Production Manager, and a shout out to Angela who helped us out in New Zealand. We played some really nice theaters, especially the Forum in Melbourne with its many roman sculptures scattered through out. I would have some fancy pictures of the venue to put up in the picture pages section, but alas, someone thought they would make a better owner of my digital camera than me. Besides the loss of my camera the trip went well.

And now we prepare for yet another run of shows in Europe. Mercury Revs current updated itinerary can be found here, along with an updated input list and stage plot for our tour of France, Italy, the UK, and Greece in April. Hopefully I will have a new camera by the time we hit Rome, and hopefully we will squeeze a monitor engineer into the budget as Jonathan tries out his new Shure in-ear system.