Work has stunk the last two days. Nuff’ said.

Got a call from my buddy Cameron this morning telling me he had a spare ticket to the Prince concert this evening in B’ham. I took him up on the offer since I didn’t want to waste a perfectly good $70 ticket… (WOW.) Prince’s band had a drummer I wanted to see; John Blackwell Jr. There was also a VERY pleasant surprise! Candy Dulfer, a sax player I’ve liked for years, was going to be playing and singing in his band as well!!!

Made it to the concert in time for it to start. The show was good although the sound was pretty crappy at our seats. Prince’s vocals came through well but all the bass stuff was extermely muddy. He played a few of his new songs as well as his big hits from the past. He did an acoustic version of Little Red Corvette that was pretty grooving. All in all, it was a nice way to spend a Thursday evening in Alabama.

It’s late and it’s time for bed.

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Confusion reigned Monday at work. Here’s the situation, trying to get a customer site up in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. By “up” I mean on the wide-area network or WAN. Here’s the legend to the conversation : C1=Customer One (the people in Ft. Lauderdale), C2=Customer 2 (corporate HQ person), T=Data line provider or phone company, M=Me, E=Engineer (the one I dispatched to the site)

T tells C2 and M that the circuit in Ft. Lauderdale will be ready as of last Friday. M arranges to have E on-site noon today. E gets there a few hours early and moves equipment from old office to new (the whole purpose of this exercise) killing the OLD network connection and connecting it to the NEW. As noon approaches, I call T to check on the status of the data line. I find out that something fell through the cracks with T and it’s not ready. I break the news to C2 who freaks out because C1 has been on him to make this happen. T is not sure when the circuit will be ready but C2 wants me to commit to getting E back on-site on Tuesday. I tell C2 that if we don’t get confirmation from T by 2:00 PM my time that the data line will be ready on Tuesday, I’ll schedule E for Wednesday. 2:00 goes by and I set up E for Wednesday as his Tuesday is already full. C2 gets a message (at 3:45) from T that the circuit will be ready on Tuesday but gets confused and thinks it’s ready now. C2 calls M to see if I can get E back on-site today. “At 15 minutes till 5:00 local time? No way.” I try to help and talk C1 through cycling the power on the network gear just in case I can get them running since E already hooked things up earlier in the day. No luck. I call T to see what might be wrong. That’s when I found out that C2 misunderstood and that the line wouldn’t be ready till sometime Tuesday. I call C1 and explain the situation completely. She’s very appreciative but you can tell she’s mentally exhausted because it’s the end of their month and payroll stuff is due, etc. I tell her that we’re ready for Wednesday but there’s a chance that we can try what I attempted this evening sometime tomorrow and could possible get them going before the Wednesday appointment but no guarantees. She understood.

Left the office and met up with the Guad Squad. Had a great time with everyone. I even split an order of fajitas with Stacey. As it turns out, Stacey eats *ONE* fajita then starts whining about being full. I end up bring 5 lbs. of food home “for later”. Next stop was Dillard’s where we raided the clearance racks again. $5.99 ea. for some really nice stuff! I picked up 3 more items. Next we headed down to EBGames where I picked up a new racing title, TOCA. I haven’t tried it yet because I haven’t had the time or motivation to find my PC steering wheel. I’ll get to it eventually. Sears was next on the agenda. Saw Tania and the incredibly unreliable John. Kev & Stacey got hung up buying a canister vac and the rest of the crowd, including me headed home.

Hit the ground running Tuesday morning. Called up T to see what the deal was with Ft. Lauderdale. The circuit was failing testing. GREAT. T calls C2 and he freaks out. I check with E to make sure we’re still good for Wednesday. We are. Later in the morning, I discover (on my own) that the data line is working. I login remotely to their router and take a peek around. Everything’s looking good. I call C1 and have her try some things. Her network connection WORKS and now she tells me she loves me and that she’s single. I’ll need to see a picture first before I go down that road. Anyway, I call T and let her know I got the site up on the network but not to tell C2 yet. I call C2 and leave him a voicemail to tell him I have bad news. C2 promptly returns my call. I tell him that it looks as though the circuit turn up won’t be happening on Wednesday. Silence. I wait to see if he breathes and he doesn’t. Then I tell him “because I already did it this morning”. He freaks out of course but is very thankful. I even got an email as proof. That was funny. Gonna be expensive for them for sure though because I’m not makin all these calls for free you know.

I spent the rest of the day on other complex issues although not quite as far out as the one I’ve been talking about. Kudos to you if you were able to follow all that dialog.

After work, my folks and I headed over to the Burn’s for a crab dinner.Dave and Dana showed up briefly to say hello then we got to eating. Got stuffed. Kevin played a little keyboard and a little guitar. Mom tried unsuccessfully to get Stacey to sing. Kailyn warmed up to mom by the end of the night. After dessert, headed home. Now it’s late and I need to go to bed. What a full day.

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Saturday was a good day all around. I kicked off some domestic duties first thing in the AM so that I could spend the majority of the day in relative leisure. Saturday is my only REAL discretionary day as if I don’t plan anything for it, then I actually will have nothing to do! Watched the F1 qualifying to see how the field would be lining up for Sunday’s race. Congrats to Jenson Button of BAR Honda for his first ever pole position! I’m really happy for him. He’s a good guy.

Headed out to get a can of electrical contact cleaner to try and remedy some noise on a volume control knob on one of my electronics. Found what I needed at Lowe’s and came back to work on things. My folks took off around lunchtime to head down to Bessemer where my dad will be teaching at a church in the morning. Took a nap then spent most of the afternoon working on drumming stuff. Watched a good bit of TV also. Stayed in for dinner then called it a night.

Got up bright and early Sunday to watch the F1 race. There was excitement all over the track! All in all it was an enjoyable race. Michael did win again as usual but the drama behind him is getting pretty interesting. After that, loaded up my stuff and headed to the church. Got set up and plugged in the new IEM system. Heavy E hung off of my transmitter and shared my in-ear mix. His was the first IEM receiver to come in for the rest of the band. It’s a different model running on different frequencies but it does have the very cool option to run in a wired mode. I just let him hook to one of my loop out connections and he was live live all the way live. The rest of the IEM system for the band should be here by this time next month so I’m sure that will be much appreciated, especially by the vocalists. Speaking of vocalists, Eli and Amber did a great job this morning. Everything went really well, the music, the message… everything.

A big crowd headed over to Logan’s for lunch. It was here we discovered that Kailyn would COMPLETELY FREAK OUT when she saw crutches… Brian “The Gimp” Baer had underwent surgery Friday for a heel spur and needed crutches to get around. Kailyn came unglued at the sight of them. The weather took a serious downturn while we were eating and it was POURING outside. Went home and tried to watch some of the Talladega race but my eyes got heavy and I took a nap. It was the best nap weather… raining and gray outside, cool and quiet inside. After waking up, it was time to cruise over to the Burns’ for our weekly small group meeting. Lot’s of folks there! The Morgan’s, The Baer’s (well… Brian and his attachements), Chuck, David, Eli, Kyle and Me. Pizza was the cuisine of the evening - it was good and filling. Watched some TV then shared prayer requests. It’s during this time you become thankful for what is/isn’t going on in your own life. It also puts problems in perspective. Got some folks going through some tough times for sure. Wow.

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Had some bonehead action on the was into work this morning. A woman in a Chrysler product was plodding along in the left lane doing 50 or so. People behind her were honking and flashing their lights. I saw a gap and took off. I looked in my rear view mirror and saw that I was only one of two people that got away. Sheesh. Push bars should be standard equipment on vehicles that you can pay extra to have or pass some qalification to own. But I digress.

Dinked around on my monthly server report and got it sent out finally. That a lot of data to move around but my buddy’s Excel wizardry does most of the work for me now. I just have to copy and paste in graphs it creates into a report template than change the wording to match the data. It’s not complex. Just boring.

Got my “Package from Jesus” call around 9:00. Went to FedEx at lunch and saw Mike again. He’s used to seeing me so often now that he doesn’t need my ID anymore. Got my goodies and stuck them in the trunk. Bernie and I went over to Bellacino’s for lunch and hung out. Back at the office I finished up the rest of my day then went west to go home.

After eating dinner with the ‘rents, I headed up to the church to meet the fellas and hand out goodies. Some small parts were missing but I’ve already arrange to have them sent out on Monday. I think we’re all extremely pleased with our new toys. I hope Eric’s IEM receiver arrived as it was supposed to. He’ll be one cranky bass player Sunday morning if it didn’t.

Rolled over to Home Depot with Kevin afterwards to stock up on some 9V batteries. Kev fueled his lamp fetish by acquiring another floor lamp. Stacey showed up a bit later and took over Kailyn duties. Not much happened after that.

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Headed off to band practice Wednesday after work. There was a big turnout! In addition to the folks on the schedule, Amber showed up as did Jeremy and Allison. We spent a good bit of time at the beginning trying to figure out why things sounded like crap. One big thing discovered was that my kick drum was “off” on the sound board. SIGH…. Once that was fixed, things began to improve. Still have to work on the stage volume though and the solution to that, while in the works, got delayed again.

Amber’s got a set of pipes on her for sure. She just needs to get over whatever it is that keeps her from singing with us regularly and just do it! Wow. What a great voice. Turns out Allison was like the stealth bomber of singing. She grabbed a mic later in the evening and kicked out some notes as well. YA’LL QUIT SANDBAGGIN AND GET WITH THE PROGRAM! Heh!

Jeremy toted the congas and bongos on stage and mic’ed them up. The added sound from the hand drums gives a lot of depth to our sound. He was playing pretty hard last night so I imagine his hands are a bit sore today. Sure sounded good though.

Post-practice the usuals (Me, Kyle and The Burns) headed to Ruby’s. Good food, good dessert, hot women. What? I weilded the “power of the baby” on what turned out to be a new mom at the next table. Kyle was present during all this but wasn’t actively part of the dialog with the girl. Turns out her kid is 8 months old. Kyle did try his hand at fork-feeding the baby some of my dessert. I think he’s gonna see if he can get one at Pet Depot.

Today, I had my most ambitious lunch at Edo’s. I was by myself so I sat up at the bar and told Luis what I liked and then asked that he just whip something up. Whoa momma. I got 16 pieces of some of the best tasting stuff I’ve had in quite some time. It even LOOKED impressive. When he passed me the block it was on, people were looking over at it. “This isn’t on the menu”. It made what I usually got look pretty bland in comparison.

Work pretty much stunk but I made it through. Going to work on some things at home tonight and try to get to bed a little earlier than I have been. Lately I’ve been getting sleepy in the afternoons. That sucks when you’re actually trying to accomplish stuff.

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Monday was a good day. The nice weather continued. I also saw that Brian had finally posted his much ballyhoo’d nose hair dissertation. Great job! Very crunchy…

Nothing notable happened at the office. After that was over I headed to the house to drum a little before joining the Quad Squad @ The Guad. It was the core group (Me & the Burns) + Kyle. Kyle’s fast becoming a regular to that event now. Stacey’s gonna have to squeeze out another kid so both me and Kyle will have babies to use to cure our singleness. Kev - get to work.

J/K of course, but Kailyn is way cool by baby standards. She does have her bad moments but she’s usually disciplined quickly before it becomes too much of a problem.

After dinner, it was too late to walk down the mall (thanks Stacey…) so we all headed to the bookstore instead. I looked through some jet ski and music related magazines while the others wandered around doing their thing. Kev ended up picking up some books on sound and mixing - guess he’s going to take a proactive approach to addressing recent sound related issues we’ve encountered. You da man. Don’t forget to bring headphones Wednesday night so we can check what’s *REALLY* coming through the board. I may record our practice straight off the board as well to establish a baseline of where we’re starting from. Time to take the sound thing seriously I guess. I didn’t go to all the trouble and expense of getting my own equipment, taking lessons and practicing only to have the quality of my sound diminished.

Had a rough start Tuesday morning but felt better as the day wore on. Another stellar day weather-wise. Talked to my buddy up north - he got my check today and is shipping out our sound gear. All in all, he saved us about $2000 off of retail prices. VERY COOL. Should have the gear Thursday or Friday.

Got my hairs cut at Holly’s then hooked up with The Burns for some dinner at Zaxby’s. That’s about it!

On another note, I’m kind of excited about doing some recording soon. Kyle has the gear we need to put some tracks down on DAT. We also have a possibility of a really nice location to shoot a video. Kyle DEFINITELY has the gear for that. Well see what happens….

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Woke up to a terriffic morning. Sun was shining, birds chirping, my car covered in tree sap. Headed to the church after my morning hygine routine. Parked behind the church in the grass and realized that about a bushel of grass clippings sticks to your feet when you come in that way. I noticed that the area behind my drums looked like I was starting a mulch pile which is when I made the connection. Got all my stuff hooked up and jammed a for awhile while everyone got ready to warm up. The mic switch I did on my kick drum fixed my drum sound. It has some built-in EQ that gave my kick drum some ooomph. Turns out the ooomph was only in my IEM’s. Kyle made the comment (he was sitting in the crowd today) “Holy crap, there’s like no kick drum or bass guitar in the mix…” All he heard was vocals, snare and Kevin’s guitar. We really need to work on getting that fixed especially since the kick drum drives the tempo. I shudder to think that in the room all you hear is attack and no resonance from my kick. If our system isn’t reproducing it, I should take my shield down and let the acoustic sound of the drum do it’s work. It’s kind of frustrating since I’m completely mic’ed but the only person really enjoying the sound is me. Oh well, not my problem. I’ve done my part to present the signal from my electronics to the house gear. After that, it’s someone else’s ball. I think a solution is in the process though. Just hope it happens soon.

The music went well this morning. Only had some minor things happen. Evidently, Joel was looking at the wrong chord chart during one song and locked up a bit when he realized what he had done. I had a stick malfunction during Ancient of Days when my right stick got knocked out of my hand. No sweat though, kept everything else going and grabbed another one I had stashed. I have extra sticks in holders on both sides of me JUST for these types of things. Got it all back together just in time for a big fill in the song. Don’t know if anyone really heard it though…

Dave did our next lesson on Moses. It was very good. Even learned about a new people… the Magiptians.

Afterwards, a crew of us went over to Logan’s for lunch. Jeremy & Friends joined up with the usual suspects. Kyle was hoggin Kailyn again. Speaking of Kyle, he started making noises that sounded like an old glass-pack muffler from the 80’s. Apparently, this is a noise supposedly produced by cajuns. Kev mentioned that Kyle was Cajun-Asian and named off some cuisine of this new culture… Kung Pau Catfish, Sweet & Sour (forgot this one).

Next stop - Publix. Ran around the store a bit with the Burns picking up groceries for the evening then I headed home for a much needed nap. Later, I headed to their place to grill out and have our devotional time. Eli, The Wes’s, Brian & his attachments, Kyle and myself were in attendance. Had a great time together rolling hot dogs across the patio then putting them back on the grill… “whatever got on it will just burn off…” (this was Brian’s comment - watch out if he’s cooking). Jordan came over to corral all the larvae into one room so the rest of us could meet in peace more or less. Thanks Jo-Jo.

After our devotional time I headed on home to finish up some laundry. The weekend’s already over. Sigh.

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Headed out this morning for a Nashville trip with Kevin. He had a change of plans last night when Stumblin’ Stacey ended up having to head to Birmingham today instead of “doing things around the house”… which means sleeping.
Things were moving along swimmingly until we ran into some serious traffic just south of Franklin. There was some paving work going on and instead of keeping a decent speed, everyone was checking out how pretty the cones were and how big the paving machinery was. Good grief thats frustrating. Got a little nauseous from the fancy clutch-work of Special K but recovered when we were able to get up to speed again. First stop was Joe’s Crab Shack for some eats. As usual, we took too early of an exit off of the interstate. Note to self, EXIT ON MOORE’S LANE next time. I had a plate of grilled Grouper and a skewer of grilled shrimp while Kev had a 33 shrimp platter. Now stuffed and with emptied bladders, we continued on. Next stop Fork’s Drum Closet. Tried out some smaller hi-hats as well as a heavier ride cymbal. Just shopping though since I already went over-budget on the stuff I got yesterday. I did end up picking up a set of thicker heads for my main kit at home. Ended up going with some Remo Smooth White Emperors. K picked up a shaker.

Strolled next door to Corner music and looked at more stuff. K showed me the Vox amps he was interested in. Cool stuff. He also picked up some accessories - most importantly a Planet Waves cable I mentioned a while back. It will allow him to plug and unplug his guitar cable without the ***POP*** going through the PA system. Also looked at the JBL subwoofer from the same series as the main speakers we have. It was a little larger than what I expected, but that’s a good thing.

Headed north to Sam Ash. They had a lot of stuff, but nothing I was particularly interested in. There was a hottie working there setting up a keyboard (sorry Kyle, no picture…). That was about the only excitement. After that we headed back to Decatur.

Ate Jim & Nick’s chicken fingers with the Burn’s then finally got home. Go the new heads on and sounding good. They’ll go out of tune shortly since they’re new and getting settled on the shells but I can already tell I like the deeper, warmer sound of them. Going to play a game or two on the PC then call it a night.

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Due to my buddy at the sound company, I got an inside track on an employee sale going on today at their place. Now, mine and several other wallets are lighter.

I picked up another microphone as well as another IEM system… (may sell one and turn a profit)
Kev got a wireless mic (the supa-fly one)
Eazy E got a set of E5 earphones - the same ones that I and now Kevin has.

Unfortunately, the IEM system the church is wanting was not one of the items available or I definitely would have jumped on that too. Such is life.

On another note, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY IT IS!!! Warm and breezy… ah….

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As I was hurtling to work this morning, I suddenly had to romp on the brakes. Why? Because someone a few miles p ahead had a fender bender but had moved the accident out of the way of traffic. That of course did not stop the countless biscuitheads from slowing down to see what had happened causing the traffic jam. Grrrr…

Yesterday was a good day. Ate lunch with Tina and shared our stories abot what was going on in our respective offices. Swung by FedEx afterwards to pick up another package from Jesus. (heh)

After escaping from the office, I headed home to pack up my stuff for practice then went over to the building. Since I got my mini-mixer installed alsong with my new cables, my mix was off just a bit. That took some tweaking to get right. At the end of the night, I still wasn’t 100% happy but I was moving in the right direction. Somehow, the main mix got affected but I’m not sure how. All my new stuff connects to the monitor outs of MY mixer, nothing but the cables changed in my connection to the main board. What’s up with that?

It would almost be nice to hire someone that does sound PROFESSIONALLY to evaluate our setup and adjust our board to see how good it could sound. Right now, you’ve got a dozen people with a dozen different ideas of what they “think” things should sound like but its all based on personal preference, not solid acoustic knowledge.

Just my opinion though - and I don’t claim to know anything.

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