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

[ << Previous 20 ]

Monday, November 9th, 2009
1:46 pm	Recovery from vacation... whew. What a vacation! The Arcade Expo this past weekend in Houston was fantastic, as you might have guessed from my going on in the previous post. For once, I didn't get to play all the games in the place! In fact there were several old favorite pinball machines I wanted to play but didn't have time for. But in the end, I had my share of the fun, and discovered some new arcade addictions (like Bally's 'Medusa' - WOW, what a game. That's going on my shortlist of games to get, when I get the space.) I managed to tape some footage of the expo, and interviews with some key people, on my good camcorder as well - to be edited later when I get the time. Saturday afternoon we also found time to visit the Fine Arts Museum, and take in their 'Moon' exhibit. Having just read about Alan Bean's artwork, it was a treat to see some of his pieces firsthand - for those not familiar, Alan is the only Apollo astronaut to also pursue oil painting, and his (very well done) canvases combine oil paint with lunar dust and pieces clipped off his own spacesuit... amazing... The real treat of the night was yet to come. We stopped at the Continental Club, which was close enough to the museum to merit a casual inspection (I had wanted to check out a number of clubs.) At the Continental Club was a poster promoting what was going on later that night - Dash Rip Rock opening for... holy shit, Mojo Nixon!? Unbelievable; Mojo had retired from live rock'n'roll 8 years ago to settle comfortably into a radio career (shortly after C.O.G. opened for him at the Howlin' Wolf in New Orleans), with only a single brief live appearance promoting oddball Texas candidate Kinky Friedman for governor a couple years ago. What an opportunity! We left for dinner with a Houston area friend (some great BBQ at Goode's) then returned to the hotel to play some pinball. At 10:00pm we returned to the Continental Club for the show. It was a three band bill, all Psychobilly acts. We caught the middle of the New Duncan Imperials set - they were absolutely great and I didn't hesitate to buy their CD. After them Dash Rip Rock appeared and ripped the place up. In between bands, I spotted Mojo and got a chance to talk with him briefly... Mojo was apologizing for his lack of memory, his age, his lack of hearing, eyesight, etc. (52 years of hard living will do that to ya) I told him to buck up, if Alice Cooper can still do it at his age, Mojo has NOTHING to complain about! Mojo got all wound up at around midnight and let loose with a short but sick set, culminating in his hit 'Elvis is Everywhere', and the coup de grace, an encore of 'Burn Down the Malls', the song that originally inspired me to listen to Mojo. Needless to say, I left satisfied and returned to the hotel to play games until I could no longer stand up (still managed to get the high score on 'Lord of the Rings'!) We returned to Louisiana via Reserve, where we were treated to a really nice dinner by old friend Ron Keller. Arriving home, we were greeted by our enthusiastic cat Bitsy, who enthusiastically welcomed us home with a tribute offering of a big freshly killed squirrel right in the bedroom. Hey - it's the thought that counts! Current Music: Mojo Nixon - 'Destroy All Lawyers' (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
2:09 am	Wow I'm currently in the largest arcade I've EVER been in, there are many RARE games in here dating back over 60 years, and EVERY game happens to be on free-play! Almost every game is in primo condition, shiny, new and playing correctly, and RUSH is blasting out of the PA system. Is this some kind of pinball-induced delirium? Or have I perhaps died and been reborn in videogame Valhalla? No, it's the Houston Area Arcade Expo, and it's happening RIGHT NOW! If all this sounds like your kind of thing, and you can make it to Houston, do yourself a BIG favor and come on out here. Here's proof (I promise I'll shoot and edit a better walkthrough tomorrow, but this should give you an idea of what you're missing!) Games I played Friday night: Quantum (real one's easier than my emulation at home) Sally (still hard as hell) Kings & Queens (Legendary electro-mechanical [E.M.] Gottlieb game) Mayfair (LOTS of stuff going on for a 1965 EM! Damned game almost plays ITSELF.) Slick Chick (totally restored... lots of fun! Can't wait to get mine repaired) Banzai Run (used to LOVE this one when it was new, still love it) Black Hole (mega challenging but I got to multilevel multiball after a few plays) Black Pyramid (run of the mill early 80's Bally) Medusa (total dark horse, WOW what a game... if I ever run across one I'm picking it up.) Apollo 13 (great game, didn't make it to 13 ball multiball) Lord of the Rings (played it practically in my sleep at 1:30am, got #1 high score. This game is too easy) Gorgar (original talking game, not in good shape, couldn't hear speech over the din) C.S.I. (Stern's newest game is MUCH better than expected) F14 Tomcat (I used to kill at this game, unfortunately couldn't even get to multiball) Spy Hunter pinball (never played this before; much better than expected) Simpsons Pinball Party (great game, and I made it to multiball; difficult on this game) Varkon (rare vertical pinball - wow... need to play this one some more) Pinbot (lousy condition playfield, but it played really well) High Speed (amazing restoration, with some really cool 'custom shop' touches and BLINDING lighting) Earthshaker (great restoration, but I didn't like the look of the LED lamps the owner had used.) World Poker Tour (I always liked this game despite the BAD artwork & poor reviews.) I also played some great Williams EM's that weren't at any past expos. Unfortunately I can't remember the names... LED lighting seems to be the new trend, and there's a bunch of companies selling the aftermarket bulbs. These bulbs are brighter than the incandescents they replace and put out less heat than their predecessors, which is great for reducing wear on the game's transistors and heat damage to a game's plastics and paint. However, on a couple of these games, the light is TOO blinding - distracting in areas that never had so much light output, and MPU controlled lights (feature lights) tend to exhibit an annoying stroboscopic effect, as LED's have no filament and therefore no 'phosphor lag' - so you can see their refresh rate. This leads to a 'digital' look as your eye follows the ball around the playfield (sort of like the LED taillights on cars these days.) Nevertheless, I think I will be treating my games to some LED's on the more inaccessible areas of the playfield, next time I do a major shop job on them... Current Music: Rush - 'Jacob's Ladder' (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
8:14 pm	Long time no post! Sorry for the lack of info. I've just been really really busy... doing the backstroke in a really complex flow of projects, plans and evil schemes! This week, I'm simultaneously working on: Writing new music (Evil is Fun!!!) I'm making Wednesday nights our new 'music writing' night. Having a regular night for this will accelerate things... Casting the perfect Lab Girl (still searching...) Also casting another backup musician; everybody needs a backup. Possibly even me! My vow for next year is NO GIG TURNED DOWN. Fooling with electronics (fixing Z's old Western Electric telephone, an old Peavey amplifier, the C.O.G.'s PA system, and the usual pile of computers.) LOVED the old school telephone BTW - gotta get one to go with my old school (1974) modem! Yes, it actually works... Working on making my day gig last by upgrading my company's products' compatibility with Windows 7 (actually with Vista & 7, although I haven't had to really worry about it until now due to Vista's extreme unpopularity with the I.T. crowd.) Cleaning up some more 'Morgus' TV footage for his forthcoming first DVD (I already did this 4 years ago - but I have learned a lot about video since then. Also I can now do MUCH better color correction with this nice Macintosh and Final Cut Pro.) The coming weekend will be a real break from all that, as I'm going to be hitting the Houston Arcade Expo. Yeah, I know I had vowed that my next trip to Houston would involve a C.O.G. performance, but fear not. I've got an Evil Plan to make that happen soon... soon as I line up a good band to perform with over there, or a con that will play along with my plot (still looking for THAT too unfortunately...) P.S.: New 'Sarah Jane Adventures' was lightweight fun, but I'm stoked for November 16th, for some REAL 'Doctor Who'. (Anyone else think K-9's acting kind of schizo lately?) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
10:43 am	Thumbs DOWN from Pinkerton Let's see... the C.O.G., having been ostracized from Voodoo Music Fest for the 7th year in a row, confronts a choice: do we meekly apply for next year, or do we DESTROY VOODOOFEST? What was that? We're EVIL BASTARDS? Oh yes, I almost forgot! In that case, Filbert, plug in the WeatherTron! Time for me to have some FUN... Current Music: Rod Serling interview (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
11:53 am	C.O.G. invades Houston? A friend in Texas writes in: "Did the Houston remount fall through?" This question probably deserves to be addressed in an entire post. For the moment it's been pushed back, yet again. The problems are twofold - first, my current band lineup objects to doing a show without a guarantee and consequently taking a loss, just to get a foothold in a new city. Understandable, but I can get around that. The thing that really needs to happen to get C.O.G. to Houston (or any other city outside Louisiana for that matter) is connecting with a compatible band, or a promoter, who can help get a crowd in. There is no sense in us transporting hundreds of pounds of equipment hundreds of miles to play to 20 people. Unfortunately, to clubs, the intensity of fan support is only expressible in number of bodies. This is due to the simple fact that clubs stay open by selling alcohol. As some people have pointed out, a con might also work, but the problem with cons is that they're generally underequipped to handle a live band. I'm unwilling to haul a PA system (an entire extra truck's worth of equipment) that far, and most cons would be unwilling to rent a PA system (which can easily cost more than they would even be willing to pay the band.) However, if anybody knows of a con that might be willing to talk about making it happen, I'm all ears. My favorite Houston band, Black Math Experiment, is reforming to play a show in early December, and we had made overtures about getting on this show, but the promoter was skittish about putting an out of town band on the bill. I aim to open for them the next time they perform, likely to be spring, but that's not been booked yet. If anybody knows a drawing (and compatible) Texas band that would be willing to perform with us, PLEASE let me know! I really want to make this happen, finally. We just need some smart ideas and connections to blast 'reality' out of the way!!! Current Music: Pinball 101 DVD (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 26th, 2009
12:13 pm	The Future My aching body is slowly recovering from last night's onslaught at the House of Shock. Fun night, albeit small crowd... one of those nights where the frustration of waiting to go on made me say 'fuck it' and rock out till I couldn't speak once we finally got the 'go' signal. Even if there's just a few people getting really into it, it's possible for me to channel my energies their way and make an impression. We rampaged through the first set after starting at 10, and, knowing that we'd only get one set in, just continued onto the 2nd set afterwards, until I totally ran out of wind (following a great rendition of 'M.I.L.K.' 45 minutes into the set, it was practically impossible to hit the high notes in 'Black Plague'.) Guess I should have paced it out better, but how was I to know we'd be allowed to keep playing? (Also - warming up by singing Rush probably didn't really help either! But it certainly felt good.) BTW, 'Die Barney Die' with new video backgrounds worked a LOT better than it did last week without! Well, at this point I've got nothing booked, though I'm working on a couple in-town shows (as well as a Mardi Gras secret project...) What I'm really interested in doing now, however, is following up on recording some new material. We're far behind on recording of our next album, and really need to pick up the slack there. I'm gonna start working on recording/writing on a 2nd night of the week - probably Wednesday - and having that be a regular thing in addition to our normal rehearsal night. It's the only way I forsee getting the CD done. Also got another promising Lab Girl audition coming up next Monday... (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
11:06 am	Heavens to Mergutroid! What a crazy week... I must confess, it's been so hectic, I haven't had time to post anything. Even now, I'm typing this while rendering video backgrounds for the old C.O.G. favorite 'Die Barney Die', which we're performing again tomorrow at the House of Shock. (Last week's appearance was fun and profitable enough, but I'm hoping we can play more than one set this week!) After that I'm delivering my 10th MAME arcade cabinet! The customer, who is the booking guy at The Republic club (who purchased my previous MAME cabinet, and where we're aiming to play sometime soon), has wanted a MAME cabinet optimized for fighting games, and it proved to be a most difficult proposition. It took me several months to acquire another Mortal Kombat 2 cabinet, and another month to settle on a software solution. However, after fighting the software for a while, I finally settled on a 2002 version of AdvanceMAME (this one's about 14MB - most current version has bloated to 40MB!), with ArcadeOS as the front end (natch). This proved to be a nice balance between load times and compatibility. The software runs from an 8GB CF card in a Dell 2Ghz desktop computer. Sound is provided by my usual SB 4810 PCI card (onboard amplification is the way to go.) Control interface is the ever-reliable Ultimarc J-Pac. Thanks to AdvanceMAME's wonderful monitor utility, I was able to get horizontal AND vertical games running quite well on the cabinet's stock 25" horizontally mounted Wells Gardner monitor, with tops and bottoms only slightly cut off for titles like 'Galaga' and 'Pacman'. However, this is a small price to pay for such amazing compatibility (and the total thrill of playing Robotron on a huge screen! WOW!!!) I think the game's new owner is gonna flip the hell out when I deliver this. He's getting quite a bargain too... Next MAME project, already underway, is a vertical 19" setup in a Super Pacman cabinet. Following tomorrow night's appearance, The Consortium of Genius is taking a little break to continue auditioning Lab Girl prospects, and work on writing and recording. I also have an Arcade Expo to attend, the Morgus documentary to finish (?), and a Local Skank CD to record, all in November! So - if you want to see C.O.G. any time soon, come out to the House of Shock Sunday night! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 17th, 2009
3:02 am	Whew Great show earlier tonight! Great fun! BIG thanks go out to: Cosimo for being The Trooper - you always make gigging easier, Chopsley for turning out to be a great sound man and an immense help with loadout, Rebecca for a really yummy (and HUGE) COG-cake, Will Warner and his crew for a nice WTF interlude and alien killing machine, Anaujiram for filling in for Mad Dog at last minute, All the costume contestants - thanks for having fun with us! Filbert Snodgrass for his, ahem, INVENTIVE interpretation of COG's theme song, and of course my wonderful, wonderful colleagues and my wife for their endless patience and help! Pictures later... must sleep now... Current Music: blessed silence (Comment on this)
Friday, October 16th, 2009
1:54 pm	Unexpected last-minute drama Well, it's always something. This time 'something' came in the form of the opening act, Mad Dog, dropping off the bill at last minute, due to tendonitis in their drummer's elbow. After I spent the morning frantically searching for a replacement, they lined up their own substitutes - a hard rock outfit called 'Anaujiram', a band which they'd worked with many times before. So, now we're set! The Flying Car is all packed and ready to roll. We're in the 'Hot Picks' in the paper. The prize packs for the costume contest are all ready to go. There's a bunch of other stuff going on tonight, but only one Consortium of Genius show this evening! Hopefully people will make the RIGHT CHOICE!!! P.S.: Holy crap, I just found out we've got Chopsley running sound for us tonight!!! Chopsley you idiot!!! Current Music: Mad Dog - 'I Never Liked You Anyway' (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
8:11 pm	Great time last night, followed by an unexpected vacation... The Alice Cooper 'Theatre of Death' concert last night in Biloxi was lots of nostalgic fun! I call it nostalgic, as he stuck to his older crowd-pleasers. It was also a nostagic romp through decades of theatrics, with lots of the old illusions on display for the first time in years; Alice, doing REALLY well for a 61 year-old, treated us to the gallows, impaled a roadie on a mic stand, did some shadow strangulation, got pierced with dozens of spikes, received an injection from a giant syringe, and of course, was decapitated by the mighty guillotine (only thing conspicuously absent was the electric chair!) me changes too, including his basic black outfit, the straightjacket, the snazzy spider outfit seen at left, and the glittering Vegas style tophat and tails at the end. Songwise, it was off-putting hearing next to nothing new, esp. with his new Halloween single selling at the t-shirt counter for $50 (granted, it was autographed and came with a t-shirt but still...) I had expected a more 70's feel from the band, which would have been appropriate considering the bent of the material, but instead the mood and character of the band remained mostly METAL, as it's been for the last two and a half decades. Here's the setlist: School's Out Department of Youth 18 Wicked Young Man Ballad of Dwight Fry Go To Hell Guilty Welcome to My Nightmare Cold Ethyl Poison Awakening From the Inside Nurse Rosetta Is It My Body Be My Lover Only Women Bleed I Never Cry (But I Die) The Black Widow (instrumental) Vengeance Is Mine (a great NEW song!) Devil's Food Dirty Diamonds Billion Dollar Babies Killer I Love the Dead (sung by the bassist, as Alice was still stuck in one of the illusions!) No More Mr. Nice Guy Under My Wheels School's Out I can't help but regard the decision to simply repeat 'School's Out' at the end as bordering on sarcasm (methinks these casinos frown on new material at an event like this) but the crowd responded to it nonetheless! I would rather have heard 'Elected' or any of the newer songs, but c'est la vie; it was a good time regardless. I saw lots of happy faces that night, not the least of which were attached to some of my friends who made it... Ritchie and Heather, Ronnie and Julia, Bugin and Sherri, and Pensacola horror host Mike Ensley and his wife Heather (and YES, Pensacola friends, we DID speak about getting another show together in Florida before the year's end.) After the show's end (at a very early 9:30pm - no opening act!) we joined Burgin and Sherri for a little late breakfast at a nearby Waffle House (with waffle-music on the jukebox!) and then headed for home... I had a show to perform the next night! Or so I thought... So today, after an enjoyably languid morning and "incognito" church as Alice would say, Jeannine and I hit the Prytania where my friends Randy Perez and Matt Palumbo were screening their great little film 'Sun Dogs', when I got a call from the House of Shock, where we were slated to perform tonight. Bad news; not only was the high chance of rain threatening to slash the crowd, but there was also a power distro issue at the waterlogged sidestage where we play each year. They decided to pull the band for the night, and I was let down but simultaneously relieved. It would have been a hard call to make, with an intermittent drizzle all day, and there's nothing worse than unloading heavy crates in wet mud and running wires in puddles. However, come hell or high water, I NEVER want to cancel a show! But the decision was no longer mine to make. I used the time off to put the studio back together for Monday's rehearsal of the upcoming House of Blues show, rewrite my DMX lighting app to support random and incremental channels (which should make for some more visual excitement), and start getting some screens together for 'Android Woman', which we're going to perform Friday after a LONG absence from the set... Current Music: Alice Cooper - 'Elected' (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 9th, 2009
4:28 pm	End of the week! The week's come to a pretty good end... for one thing, our new single 'Homecoming Queen at the End of the World' is finally up on Rhapsody, if not iTunes... CLICK HERE I'll let you all know when it appears on iTunes. Meanwhile, the band's gearing up for our first night this season, this Sunday at the infamous House of Shock. We'll be hanging out there all night playing our seasonal mixture of heavy originals and cheezy metal covers! Fun for the whole family!* Saturday I'll be visiting Biloxi for an audience with the one and only Alice Cooper... hope to see some of you there! If you see me, I'll have a few cheap tickets to our big Halloween show on October 16th... Current Music: 'Homecoming Queen at the End of the World' (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
11:37 am	PROGRESS!!! I love it when progress can be achieved in a really simple way. For instance, last night after dinner, I thought again about my old idea of having drumbot's drums LIGHT UP in some way when he hits them. It'd be great to have a light at least on the bass drum, for that is the one drum that you CAN'T SEE being played! Then I remembered the EL wire ring we have around the COG 'gear' logo on front of the bass drum, and the fact that there was an unused dimmer on the lighting tree that holds up the projection screen, which is typically situated directly behind drumbot. "Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinkerton?" Eureka! (no, not the rapidly worsening Sci-Fi show.) The simple solution of course, once I changed the EL wire inverter from battery to transformer power, was to write a Cakewalk Application Language script (CAL is kind of like Lisp, one of my least fave languages...) to change bass drum events to midi lighting commands and plug the inverter power into the dimmer pack. Nice! The effect was cool and will add some nice new detail to drumbot's onstage look. Aside from progress, which always seems to capture my attention at the most inopportune times, lots of really cool things have been going on in the background... We've been going over a couple fun new cover songs, which will probably not be ready in time for this weekend but which we hope to unveil later in the month at the House of Shock, and perhaps at our show on the 16th at the New Orleans House of Blues. (One of them's 'Tom Sawyer' and most of you regular readers already know how I feel about Rush!) We're about to drop an unusual new song, VERY unusual in that we didn't write it - but it was written specifically for us (a first!) This song is a tribute to the 1984 B-movie 'Night of the Comet' and features scream queen Kelli Maroney (who was also in 'Chopping Mall', one of drumbot's favorite movies!) The song's called 'Homecoming Queen at the End of the World' and Kelli has a preview copy of it up on her website, if you want to check it out! The words were written by Charlie Mason and the music by Mans Ek. Sorry about the quality of the preview copy...but I'll let you know when the high quality version is up on iTunes (soon I hope!) Enjoy! Current Music: C.O.G. & Kelli Maroney - 'Homecoming Queen at the End of the World' (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 5th, 2009
5:08 pm	QUICK POLL for our New Orleans contingent: How many of you would perfer SMOKING or NON-SMOKING at our next show (House of Blues Parish, October 16th)? (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
11:22 am	Why am I upgrading again? Oh yeah, because the old one was... too old. Or something... currently getting through the Apple update on Leopard, on the new G5. So far though, it seems slower than it did running Tiger. Frame rate on the HD footage I'm checking out in Quicktime is somehow choppier than it was on the G4, which had a much slower front end bus and was running something like 800Mhz slower... that ain't right. What exactly is Leopard supposed to do better than Tiger? Admittedly I DO need to give this computer a major memory upgrade... 2x500MB doesn't cut it in 2009, no siree! Lab Girl auditions continue... thanks to the very cool EveryInchOfMe for referring our latest candidate! AND NOW, presenting my favorite new website: THERE, I FIXED IT!!! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
8:32 pm	Lab Girl Auditions OK, for those who have been wondering, Lab Girl #6 has bowed out due mostly to time constraints. It was an amicable parting, but we are now actively seeking her successor! As soon as the rumor of the open position leaked out, we had a bounty of interested parties - so much so that I did not advertise. However, I have gotten enough inquiries from curious parties that I will now lay down the qualities that we're looking for in Lab Girl #7 - she must: - Be vivacious! Infectious enthusiasm and a quick wit are a MUST. (Dancing & acting ability are pluses here.) - Have a strong lead singing voice! (Ability to copy other people's vocal styles is a plus.) - Have a natural harmony singing voice - including the ability to figure out vocal harmonies without coaching. - Have a good imagination and 'get' what we're doing (a well grounded love of popular science fiction and horror is a major plus.) Other random pluses are: a good sense of 'image' (incl. imaginative costuming), ability to play an instrument, songwriting ability / ability to 'jam'. If you or someone you know can do all these things, drop me a line at: drpinkerton@consortiumofgenius . com I'll ask for a recording of a vocal demo, any song you feel best represents your talent. If we're impressed, we'll ask you to drop by the C.O.G. Secret Lab one Monday night for an audition! (Oh BTW... Monday nights are our normal rehearsal time, and it's not likely to change.) P.S.: We are taking our sweet time with this selection. We're in no hurry... it's more important that we get the right person than the time it takes to hear each candidate. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
11:02 am	Good times, bad times LIFE IS GOOD! Got some wonderful arcade parts from Billy... 25" monitors and a blank cab. Excellent! You can't beat playing 'Wizard of Wor' on a 25" arcade cabinet!!! Got a professionally shot (well, one pro camera) SVHS tape of a circa 1997 C.O.G. gig at Jimmy's from Alfred Richard, featuring Dr. Wissenschaft and a very early Filbert Snodgrass! It's quite unsane... and it's certainly going on a DVD at some point. Wow, what were we THINKING back then?!?? Got a monstrous Mac G5 (the famous 'cheese grater') from Dominic. Wow, this this is MASSIVE! And nice looking. Lab Girl auditions are going well and getting better and better... LIFE IS BAD! Damn, I'm really running out of space for these arcade games over here... too much of a good thing, methinks! Rats, my SVHS deck has stopped working again, right after a botched import of the concert tape. (The picture's too dark and the sound sync is WAY off.) I installed Leopard on the G5 and it's not booting... the thing stops on a blue screen. We were supposed to audition another girl last night but it fell through. Honestly, if somebody can't make it for any Monday night audition, it's a bad sign; Monday is our practice night and that's currently immutable. The prospective C.O.G. gig at the Hornets Oct 30th tailgate party has unfortunately fallen through, due to (they say) lack of budget?! Ahh, the curse of the C.O.G. strikes again! LIFE IS FIXABLE! Man, I really need to get these MAME cabinets finished and out the door... perhaps this weekend I shall devote myself to that. Hmmm, last time the SVHS deck was doing this I simply waited a while and it started working again by itself. Well, at least I have this tape, and can reimport it when the deck decides to wake up. Now trying OSX 'Tiger' on the G5... fingers are crossed... and... now it's working! Woo hoo!!! Rachnid and I talked to two more really promising people for the Lab Girl role. Though we've already auditioned a really good prospect last Monday, we're not making ANY snap decisions this time. It'll be done when it's done! And last night's lack of activity opened the window for me to get over to my friend Mike Perry's place and fix his new Fish Tales pinball, which he's been quite rabid to play since getting it. Problem was a saggy (or in this case soggy?) power section, particularly the 5V power, which is quite common for a WPC game of its vintage. We also worked on the general illumination header, which was quite cooked (similar to my Doctor Who when I got it.) Current Music: Macintosh chime (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
11:40 pm	iTunes top COG songs Every few months I feel compelled to look on iTunes to see what the best selling tracks are. Hmmmm... LET'S HAVE A LOOK Weird, it seems to have changed again since the last time I looked. Throwing out the interstitial album sketches that people seem to buy as individual tracks for some reason (?) , we get the list of top 20 COG songs: 1. Science Party 2. I Have the Power 3. All I Wanna Do Is You 4. Reach Out & Touch the Hand 5. Bow 2 Me 6. Black Plague 7. Brain Wrap 8. M.I.L.K. 9. I Scream 10. Placebo! 11. Born in the South 12. Android Woman 13. Death to the Angel of Death 14. LoBoToMy 15. Bite Me 16. Just a Drumbot 17. Chati Che Cow 18. March of the Skeletons 19. Funky Fresh 20. Destroy Old Things Hmmm! An interesting showing from some material we haven't played in a while. Perhaps we'll have to rectify this oversight at our upcoming appearance in mid-October at the House of Blues!!! Yes, it's true - we are having our Halloween blowout on Friday, October 16th at the House of Blues Parish in New Orleans, with $1 off admission for anybody dressed as either a doctor, scientist, monster, or EXPERIMENT, and a costume contest midway through the night. Special guest will be Mad Dog. Time for me to step up the advertising for this glorious night of MAYHEM & SCIENCE, methinks! Current Music: Dead Rebecca - 'You and I' (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 21st, 2009
3:56 pm	Little triumphs... ...that's what the last few days have been all about. Little triumphs to elevate the mood and remove more roadblocks from the path. Last gig I had a potentially showstopping issue with my Benq DLP video projector (which has served the C.O.G. faithfully for the past three or four years.) It appeared that something had dislodged within the optical path and was casting a vertical shadow across one side of the screen. Shaking the projector had the effect of moving the shadow in or out of the image, and I was able to gently nudge the shadow off the screen, where it remained for the duration of the show. When I got the thing home I started looking into the matter further. There was no obvious debris floating around inside the thing. I did a little exploratory surgery, looking into the light engine chamber, but could find nothing that looked out of place, so I put it back together. So, I turned to the internet... and lo and behold, I was not alone! In fact, this problem appeared to be a common one for many brands of DLP projectors of a certain age. The source of the issue is the 'light tunnel', which is a tiny tube of mirrors between the bulb and the lens right before the color wheel (these DLP projectors utilize a monochromatic imaging matrix on a chip. A rotating wheel with different colored segments of glass is responsible for cycling red, green, blue, and a couple of other additive hues which add together, faster than most people can perceive, to paint a full color image. Which is why if you sneeze while watching one of these things, you'll see the image break into a psychedelic rainbow.) The light tunnel is about 3/4" long and 1/8" or so wide, and consists of 4 little slivers of mirror glass glued together at the sides to form a rectangular box, with the mirrored side pointing inward. They are boxed in by a little rectangular metal clip, which isn't able to keep the mirrors from getting unglued and falling inward, leading to the shadow problem. Once I figured out what was going on, I attempted to contact the manufacturer to buy a new light tunnel assembly. Once they got the idea from me that the thing was three years out of warranty, they didn't want to talk about anything but me sending it back to them for an expensive repair job. They wouldn't even discuss selling me a new 'light tunnel'; that is apparently NOT how they make money. So, after dithering back and forth between looking at expensive new projectors and trying to get a friend with a TV repair shop to order the part for me (they turned him down too, bastards!) I finally broke down and reasoned that I couldn't possibly do more damage to the thing by trying to perform the surgery myself. So I finally threw my hands up and came to the conclusion that there was no way I could run up the expense bill higher than the cost of a new projector. Might as well try to fix it myself! First thing I did was tear the projector down, all the way to the light engine. The light engine, which you can see in the bottom middle of the picture, consists of a metal box holding the main lens, a bunch of smaller lenses, the DLP element, and the color wheel. The whole thing is fan cooled via forced air. A small mercury vapor lamp shines into once side, but the lamp is intended to be owner-replaceable so it came out first. I had to remove the color wheel assembly too; that was the riskiest part of the whole procedure; I very nearly broke off part of the wheel. But once that was out of the way, I could get at the light tunnel itself, which was simply clipped into place. Sure enough, one of the little mirrors was flopping loose in its metal cage. I used a plastic drinking straw, which I believed would not scratch the mirrors, to push them outward to the walls of their little cage, then superglued each one to the metal box via the holes in the assembly. (Hopefully this doesn't result in the silvering just pulling off from the back; I don't know whether they're silvered on the inside or outside, or what heat will do to cyanocrylate. Guess I'll find out!) Allowing the assembly to dry, I then reassembled and crossed my fingers as I powered it up... Hooray, a pretty picture! I celebrated my good fortune by popping open a beer & watching some Doctor Who (Patrick Troughton - 'The Invasion') on the reconstituted projector, while getting to work on an old Peavey amplifier. Today I had another little breakthrough in reconstituting (much of) the audio from some corrupted Quicktime files from the 'Morgus' documentary I'm co-producing (I salvaged the audio, which Quicktime couldn't locate, by reading the files into a PC and visually scanning for audio data, which turned out to be readable at the tail end of the file.) Waiting on good news about the basketball tailgate party gig; meanwhile, later this evening is rehersal and audition of another prospective Lab Girl. Good times... Current Music: Queen - 'We Are the Champions' (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 19th, 2009
1:38 pm	PURELY HYPOTHETICAL QUESTION If the C.O.G. were playing a local NBA Basketball tailgate party around, say, Halloween, what crowd-pleasing songs would you recommend that we perform? (Preferably ones that don't make me want to throw up on aforementioned crowd?) (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 18th, 2009
3:49 pm	An intense end to Thursday with Living Colour Yesterday was quite an intense day! It started with me getting a new arcade project to MAME out (a 25" Mortal Kombat 4 cabinet) and ended with one of the best concerts I've ever seen - Living Colour at Tipitinas club. In between there were mundane concerns such as cutting the lawn and stuff. The concert was truly worth the wait, 2 and a half hours of full-on musical brawn. Living Colour represented their command of all styles, including metal, gospel, hardcore punk, blues, soul, funk, and, dare I say it - GOTH?!?? Unbelievable but true! Each member of the band got a chance to shine individually, as well as completely tearing it up throughout the set - sometimes literally (Will Calhoun busted a bass drumhead about 3/4 through the set with his powerful playing. Doug Wimbish jumped into the audience to perform his octave-up bass solo. Corey Glover almost broke down in tears during a gospel 'Katrina' inspired tag to 'Open Letter to a Landlord'. And Vernon Reid was his usual unhinged self, louder than everybody else both on guitar AND mic, and had to be reined in by Corey Glover!) The set consisted of all their old favorites, heavily favoring the first two albums, and about half of their great sounding new material from their new album 'Chair in the Doorway'. The encore was littered with great covers, 'Papa was a Rolling Stone', 'Crosstown Traffic' and even two verses of 'Hound Dog' in the middle of 'Elvis is Dead'. During the encore, they were also joined by a variety of guests onstage, including the trombonist and sax player from Big Sam's Funky Nation... and on their cover of Jimi Hendrix's 'Crosstown Traffic' they had a mid-song drummer switch, with Willie Green switching up for Will Calhoun, and then getting in a tasty drum solo himself to cap off the evening. I'm kind of pressed for time here so I'll just leave it at, "you had to have been there..." It was the best performance I've EVER seen by this band, and I saw them in their heyday 20 years ago at Tulane's McCallister Auditorium - but that show didn't hold a candle to this one. Aside from that, there are major C.O.G. shows looming, as well as Lab Girl auditions on Monday! More on all that later... Current Music: Living Colour - 'Ultimate Weapon' (1 Comment |Comment on this)