Posts

Posted on

busted with spots of boon

Feast.Monday evening and I’m writing from my folks’ place up in Oregon.

One bright spot about having them way up north is getting to stay with them when work takes me up to the local sawmill up here.  Didn’t bring Sharaun and Keaton along this time as the visit is a quick one and wasn’t a good candidate for a weekend-buildout.

Yesterday you may have seen a spurious blog posted here for a few hours.  And, today, you may see the usable bits of that mistakenly published entry recycled here.  See, I schedule all my entries to auto-post at midnight on the day I intend to publish them.  Sometimes, if I’m fairly far along with a draft, to the point where I’m pretty certain I’ll be able to put the polish on it and make it a real entry, I’ll go ahead and schedule the midnight posting.  Occasionally, even being fairly well developed, I may not ever get to the polish and then subsequently forget about the scheduling.  Such was yesterday.

Sorry about that.

Today was the meeting that was the main motivator for me coming to Oregon this time around.  And, luckily, I scheduled other worthwhile activities tomorrow to coincide with the trip… because… today’s meeting, while having a couple worthwhile moments, was by and large a bust.  Well, I should qualify: Considering the sawmill-funded trip as a sawmill shareholder, today was a bust; considering the trip as an opportunity to do what “marketing” types do, today was a boon for “building rapport” with the customers.  I’ll leave it up to the shirts to tell me which of the two honors my salary more.

As I write, I’m listening to a record I “discovered” last Friday called Two Dancers by a British band called the Wild Beasts.  Not my typical kind of album, but I’ve become completely addicted to it.  It slinks and swaggers and the singer’s voice is high and odd… the combination works perfectly though.  The record isn’t out for a few weeks yet, but you can preview some of the leaked tracks over at the Hype Machine‘s aggregator.  I would recommend it, were I you.  Yeah, been digging on that and the new Mew record… finally some new stuff to listen to…

Oh man I’m sleepy.  Nothing much more to write today anyway.  I’m just going to call this a night and talk to you guys tomorrow.

Love ya, goodnight.

Posted on

just more pictures

Happy Friday internet.

Just pictures today; was all I could do to get these up before crashing.  Not enough sleep this week.  So then, continuing the scanned-hisoty exposé… enjoy:

[nggallery id=31]

Goodnight.

Posted on

sights and sounds

Seeing and hearing.Thursday, huh?  Great.  I guess that’s almost Friday.  Right?

10:30pm and I’m just now sitting down.  Fresh back from our standing Wednesday night gig and sleepless since last night’s 1am return from the Coldplay show… it’s a wonder I’m even attempting to knock out an entry tonight.  But, I wanted to get some more flashback photos posted and I captured a hilarious bit of audio on the drive home that I just had to edit and share.  So then, without any unnecessary flourish, those two things.

First up, here’s another batch of vintage images from our recent photo scanning masterplan.  Some good ones in this bunch, but I’m still finding it hard to choose from the 1,500 we had scanned.  I’ve got another batch queued and almost ready and hope to get to them this week.  Yes, for me this is kind of a big deal… Enjoy:

[nggallery id=30]

Lastly, before I go I wanted to share a little audio clip I took tonight in the car on the way home.  It’s Keaton singing.  She sings a lot, actually… and mostly songs which have been drummed into her brain from the radio’s ten-song playlist.  Tonight, she was singing the Ting Tings’ song, “That’s Not My Name.”  Bordering on novelty, the track is actually pretty dang catchy… and I even find myself singing along with it when it comes on in Sharaun’s car (which is our only car, at the moment… so it’s been often).  Anyway, I just loved the way she sings it.  Check it out, I even edited out the road noise for ya:

[audio:notmyname.mp3]
I mean… they call me huhh…

Did you guys hear how she totally stopped and restarted the song so she could pronounce the word “her” with a strong British accent?  Listen to  it again.  She sings it all American as “her” and then restarts and sings it as “huhh.”  Now that’s some attention to detail; a little music lover just like me.

Goodnight.

Posted on

free pants

Money!What a crappy Monday.

I picked up the bug or whatever it was that Sharaun was kicking around on Friday.  While not debilitating by a long-shot, it’s certainly annoying.  Seemingly centered in my sinuses and making my head throb and ache and dizzy.  Anyway, it’s not got me down and out… just more like down.  Boo.

I’ma tell a story now.  It’s kinda good.  You should read it.

Sharaun had to teach a class at our church’s Sunday morning “second service” this weekend, which left Keaton and I alone while she stayed at the building. Since she’d secured a ride home, we took off with designs on a lunch together at home after a brief stopover at the local big-box store to get some $15 jeans and shorts for me. With the recent weight loss, nothing I own fits to my satisfaction anymore, and the el-cheapo duds that the warehouse stores sell for pennies are just right to fill out the empty closet and drawers.

While rooting through the tableful of denim I spotted a pair that looked good and advertised my current dimensions. I picked them up and unfurled the length of them so I could see how long they were (my #1 gripe about mens jeans is that they are too long and look all bell-bottomy at the end; call my unfashionable but I actually prefer a somewhat tapered leg that doesn’t bunch up in balloons of fabric around my ankles). As I let them hang, I heard another customer say to me, “Woah, you dropped something there.” And, looking down, sure enough, at my feet was a sprinkling of bills… cash… money… dosh.

Befuddled, I looked at the man who’d alerted me to the greens. I looked back to the jeans. I looked to my own pocket, where I knew my cash was safe and secure inside my wallet. I looked around. Finally I replied, somewhat confused, “I… I think that came out of these jeans…” “No way,” the other guy responded. His daughter then piped up, “Oh yeah,” she said, pointing at the jeans still dangling from my hands, “Look!” And there, peeking from the right front pocket, was more cash.

Flabbergasted, I simply grabbed the money out of the pocket as the other guy bent down and collected the spilt cash on the ground. We laid it all out atop the pile of jeans on the table and did a quick count: a little more than sixty dollars. I must have made some comment about not knowing what to do with it, because the guy replied, “There’s not much you can do; it’s fair if you take it, they’ll never find who it belonged to.” Not needing a ton of convincing to begin with, I agreed. In return for him spotting the stuff, I offered to split the findings – he declined, but, when pressed to take at least a third or something, acquiesced and allowed me to give his daughter five bucks.

So, I left the store sixty dollars up from when I walked in. Pretty crazy.

Goodnight.

Posted on

mostly about old stuff

Vintage.Happy Monday folks.

Sunday night and we were all just kind of sitting around doing nothing.  Sharaun had the TV on for a bit, but none of us were really paying attention.  Since I hate that kind of time-sucking activity, I called a stop to it and instituted some family banana-bread and popsicle making (two separate activities, mind you).  A double batch of bread (lots of overripe bananas hanging out in the freezer) and some still-freezing lemonade popsicles later, and everyone agreed it was much better than stinky ol’ television.

This week, I’m going to try and post some pictures from our recent scanmyphotos.com experiment each day.  Personally, I find near all of the 1,500 images interesting in one way or another (which is good I suppose, since I chose to pay to have them digitized) – but I’m trying to pick and choose some which might be the most fun to post on the old blog.  You can find those later down in the post, but now I’m gonna talk about music.

Y’know, the more I think about it… the more excited I’m getting for the upcoming release of the remastered Beatles catalog.  Finally, the powers that be have awaken to the fact that the current CD masters are outdated and poor-sounding, and on September 9th (09/09/09, how numerologist of them) we get the entire catalog, in both stereo and mono, by way of two elaborate (and wholly separate) deluxe box sets.

You may think it odd that someone would buy, then, perhaps in the same click of a mouse, turn around and re-buy, all the Beatles albums just to get both the mono and stereo mixes… but it’s something that us Beatles fanatics have been doing now for years.  In fact, the bootleg marketplace is awash with  different needle-drop remasters of the original vinyl releases… you’ve got the “Mirror Spock” releases, the “Millennium Remasters” versions, there’s “den0iZer,” “Sir Esquire,” “Silverking,” and “McCanno.”  Most, if not all, of these grey-market releases have improved sound (and some sound far better) over the 1987 mixes on all  commercially available CDs.

But, probably the most famous of these many grey-market needle-drop masters are the so-called “Dr. Ebbetts Sound System” versions.  Over the past ten plus years, those folks who live double lives in the world of underground Beatles’ recordings have come to adore the Good Doctor for the amazing sonic pieces he’s able to produce.  Like the other needle-droppers mentioned above, the Doc gets his stellar results by simply recording, then “doctoring,” pristine pieces of vintage vinyl.  I, too, collected the DESS versions of the Beatles’ canon, and also rejoiced in the amazing “warmth” that’s plainly missing from the current CD mixes.  Oh, and, lest you doubt… they really do sound better than what you’d buy on CD today… even you could tell the difference, I promise.

I bring up Doc Ebbetts’ efforts here for a reason.  See, the other day, the Good Doctor announced his retirement from the homegrown Beatles’ remastering business.  And do you know why?  Well, apparently he was able to hear a sneak preview of the forthcoming September remasters and he decided that, because they sound so damn good, his work is no longer needed.  And, for all the Beatles purists who put the DESS remasters on a pedestal above all other mixes – this is fantastic news.  Since so many folks consider the Doc to be the fella who’s been able to make the Beatles sound just about as good as they ever have (albeit only by re-showcasing the warmth and presence which has been in the recordings all along), to hear him say he’s  been outdone is like a promise of heretofore untold sound quality to come.

Better then the Ebbetts stuff?  Yeah… I’m getting more and more excited – and the Doctor’s retirement is like a big log on that fire.  I better start saving money now… to buy these CDs twice ain’t gonna be cheap..

OK, music-talk over.  Let’s get on to those pictures I was talking about.  Here are twelve hand-picked images from the batch.  I tried to do some minor color-correction and touch-up, but I’m no good at it (at least I somewhat removed the orange cast from some of the worst of them, albeit likely only exchanged for a bluer cast).  I took some time on the commentary for each one, so if your browser has problems flashing them up or offering the next/previous/close links let me know and I’ll change the way their posted tomorrow.  Enjoy!

[nggallery id=29]

OK folks, I’m outta here.  Goodnight!

Posted on

got our pictures back

StackedYesterday we got our pictures back from scanmyphotos.com and I have to say: I’m beyond satisfied with the results.

I ordered the “fill it up” box for around $120 (searched around on Google and found some coupons too so maybe it was a little cheaper than their list price) and Sharaun and I jammed that thing with pictures.  And, even with all the prints we had from her collection and my raid on the folks’ old albums – we were still shy of really topping off the box.  I shipped the thing the Thursday before the Independence Day holiday and I’m almost certain that, were it not for that three-day weekend, these guys would’ve had the prints scanned and back to us in a couple days (they are just south of us, after all).

Getting the photos back, we learned that they scanned 1,525 images for us.  Amazingly, out of all the images we sent, only ten were not scanned – and this was because there was a little too much residual stickiness on the backs of them from years stuck in those old albums at my parents’ place.  However, when you consider that 10/1,535 is something like 0.06%, that’s a really amazing working percentage.  Honestly, I can scan those ten loose images myself and everything will be fine.  They were also able to scan all the odd-sized images Sharaun took with that stupid stupid fake “panorama” style film that was popular back in the 90s.  You know, the ones that make prints that are like 13″ long and stupid?  Yeah those.

The images themselves are scanned at 300DPI.  I’m happy with this resolution, and having tried to scan some images myself in the past (although by no means being an expert) at higher resolutions, I know there was (at least in my experience) limited gains by scanning a printed image at 600DPI or higher.  Anyway, the 300DPI scans from them look great as far as I’m concerned, allowing for the understanding that you’re only gonna get so much from the print anyway.  You can pay extra for color-correction, having the images rotated to the correct orientation, or having them scanned in named groupings.  However, since I’m cheap and I want to flip through them one-by-one anyhow, I’m just doing any touch-ups as I go for free.

Anyway, for my money, you can’t beat this service: it’s super fast, the prints look great, it’s cheap, and you don’t have to do it yourself.  And, I mean… seriously… how else are you going to get pictures like this WTF gem into your digital collection?:

Whoa...

And folks, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Watch the blog next week for some better-written and more cohesive reviews of some of the better images we were able to have scanned.

For now, enjoy my Dad above showing (perhaps) how much larger he is than those two older ladies.  Wow.

Have a good weekend.

Posted on

¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!

Morning writing.

Breaking all the rules and writing in the morning.  Up early today before work and seemed like a chance to catch up on missed time last night.

Did the after-work wakeboarding thing again last night, rode a different board with different bindings this time and it was a whole different game for me.  Easier getting up, more controlled when up, and a bit more confidence because of that extra control.  Not that I’m even remotely skilled, but I sure have a good time doing it.  A little sore in the neck today from a backwards wipeout, but otherwise good.

Oh and, blog, I meant to tell you: I finally got that box of pictures mailed off to the bulk-scanning place.  The night before we left for our Fourth of July weekend getaway Sharaun and I stayed up until 1am filling the box with the pictures I lifted from my parents’ albums last time we were in Oregon and supplementing those with old print images from our own collections (OK, from her collection… I don’t have any at all of my own).  I think we crammed over a thousand photos in that box, but I’ll be able to verify that count when we get the DVD.  The DVD which, as my e-mail told me yesterday, is now on it’s way back to us with all our photos.  Talk about a fast turnaround.

I’m so excited to be getting all these pictures digitized, and hope they all came out OK.  Since the place is right here in California, I suppose it’s even possible that they could arrive today.  I’ve been thinking on the best way to share some of these images with the sounds familiar community… and have considered some kind of “flashback Friday” kinda feature where I pick one or two or whatever and write about them a little bit.  Could be fun and could also be a shot in the arm to my writing.  Just looking at them as we bundled them into the box for shipping got me excited to share and talk about them.  Yeah, maybe no one cares… but then again… I guess I don’t write for people caring.

The other night, Sharaun and I booked an impulsive weeklong vacation to Mexico with some friends.  A spur-of-the-moment decision, we sprung on the all-inclusive flight and hotel deal mainly because the prices were just too good to pass up (and we had such a good time in Mexico last time around).  And now, my eyes are glistening and distant with thoughts towards an October week on the shore.  Yeah I know it’s a ways off, but when you work vacation-to-vacation it’s something that’s always sitting in the back of your brain, y’know.  So come on October, “¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!”

Good morning.