Dr. Milo T. Pinkerton III's Journal

Catching up...
Wow, things are certainly humming along nicely over here.

Friday - Busy day at the office, during which time my auction of an old microfiche reader went from $6 early in the day to $102 at the final minute. Wow. I just can't understand sometimes what drives people to pay that much for old junk (and sometimes I understand completely!) What can I say, but starting an auction, any auction at $1 with no reserve is the way to go. Next up on the block is my old DMX lighting board... completely unneeded now that I've got my USB->DMX box and that custom software I wrote.

That night I did sound for Filbert's band 'Love Zombie' at 'The Bar' (formerly known as the Ski Lodge) in Fat City. Surprisingly good turnout, surprisingly good sound, good performance, cool people to hang out with, etc. Great band went on afterwards too - a wildly evocative duo called 'Black Snow' which consisted of a drummer with a LOT of drums and a bassist with a LOT of pedals playing what could only be described as 'lead bass'. It was DIFFERENT, and I like different!

Saturday - Just about finished putting together our little followup video to last week's 'Doctor Horrible' admission submission. It's really stupid, and I think you'll like it! Right as I was finishing it, a 'singing' idea occurred to me for the punchline, and I'll probably try that before I finish and post it.

Also fitted the C.O.G. show computer with the solid state flash drive (8GB CF card in an ATA adaptor frame), which finally came in. Fascinating results... these solid state drives are really slow on the write end, but fairly OK on the read (and this particular one allowed DMA access.) More importantly, they're amazingly fast on the access time - basically there IS no access time. So when I go to trigger the next song in the show, it just immediately starts with no lag at all. Wow, I could get spoiled on that! I'm a little leery of the notion that the swap file will eat away the card's rewrite cycles (flash memories have a limited number of writes in each of their bits, but it's on the order of 300,000 or so.) But this is Windows 98 we're talking about here, and I suspect during the course of a normal show, it won't hit the swap very much. On the other hand, I could load the computer up with RAM and turn off the swap like on my main computer... at any rate, early testing revealed the system trustworthy enough to use onstage tonight (though I also have the old drive along as backup.)

Yesterday evening Jeannine and I went by her sister's place, where her family was having a get-together - the occasion: her uncle Andrew was in town. We hung out for an hour and gorged on amazing food that various members of her (Italian heritage) family had brought. Then we darted out of there and met up with our friends Burgin and Sheri in the French Quarter... they had finally tied the knot (after twenty great years!) in a secret ceremony, and invited all their friends to celebrate with them. We celebrated at a Thai restaurant (Suko Thai) around the corner from Jeannine's studio in the Marigny and then took it back to their hotel courtyard where we all sat around with good drink and conversation until the wee hours.

This morning I awoke with new music ideas running through my head... to complement ideas I was already working on from Friday. It would seem my muse is slapping me upside the cranium for having gotten through the entire summer without writing anything new - a bad precedent that I intend to do something about. The song I'm writing currently is tentatively entitled 'Crud'!

LOTS of stuff coming up for me in the next two weeks... aside from C.O.G. at the House of Shock tonight (the 19th) and next Sunday (26th), I've got sound jobs to run each weekend, a camera rental, and a video shoot at VoodooFest. Busy is good!!!

Current Music: C.O.G. - 'Crud'

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