October 2004 Archives

Last night was the much-anticipated DV8/Phoenix show.

Nobody came to the show.

Well, that’s not true. There were a few people- most of which were associated with one of the two bands. All in all, maybe 30-40 people there. What a disaster.

Sons Of Nothing forfeited a sizable chunk of profits from the show to go toward producing a digital multitrack recording of the performance. The band got a recording, so I guess it’s not all bad. Maybe they can add the sounds of a real audience later.

I arranged to have three people shooting digital video as well- with the intent of editing the source footage together with the mixed-down audio onto DVD. I haven’t had a chance to look at any of that footage. I hope it’s usable.

We had a guy named Dan come in and run lights for the show. He was very familiar with the moving heads at the club and the console they had in place. He brought along a couple more heads to supplement what the club already had rigged.

I spoke with Dan earlier in the week to give him a general idea of what my expectations were of the lighting. I told him I’d have a detailed cue sheet for him with suggestions on lighting for each song and various parts within the songs.

He failed miserably.

That’s the big reason why I’m worried about the video footage we got. Even if the guys running the cameras were on their marks and shooting what I wanted, if the person playing or singing isn’t lit adequately, it doesn’t do us much good to have video of it. There were countless times I had specifically indicated that Tim or Matt should have a spot on them because they were playing a solo or singing and they were in the dark.

And then the gregarious guitarist Tim had to do his offstage guitar solos for Comfortably Numb and Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Hello! How are we supposed to get video of you performing your solo when you’re walking around in the dark and not playing on-stage?!

I found myself burying my face in my hands several times through the night because of lighting problems.

It’s possible I grossly underestimated what would be needed to do the kind of lighting I was asking for. Maybe we should have tried harder to get Dan into the club earlier in the week to set things up. On the other hand, he really wasn’t being paid enough to make that worth his time.

In that case, perhaps I should have made my lighting needs much simpler and less... prone to darkness.

During soundchecks, the live sound engineer and the recording engineer were complaining about a nasty buzz coming from my laptop - where the sound effects originate. They told me there was a grounding problem in one of the cables so I ran to Radio Shack at Crossroads Mall to get a new cable. After I returned to the club and hooked in the new cable, the buzz was still there. Very frustrating. I probably should have had a dedicated line conditioner to plug my equipment into.

Yesterday, I was painfully aware of my hearing loss becoming more of a liability than just an inconvenience. I couldn’t hear the buzz everyone was telling me about. I could not discern a single word anybody would yell at me from the stage when I was on the balcony with my computers. I was having problems just carrying on simple one-on-one coversations with the members of the band and our crew, even when there was no music playing.

At the end of the night, I felt convinced I need to resign from Sons Of Nothing as the technical director (a.k.a. provider of audio/video effects and sound and light liason) because dealing with my hearing loss is likely to become more of a problem and not less of a problem.

I still feel the same way about it today: a little hopeless. I don’t know what can be done to remedy the situation, if anything. I’ve been able to get by so far by “playing things by ear” (pun) but that’s getting less... practical.

That time of year

Happy Halloween.

I ran across an interesting story yesterday titled Power on a Chip. It’s about a firm that has developed a jet turbine engine the size of a shirt button. They intend to test it for use it as a power source in cell phones, PDAs, military field equipment, etc.

What a wonderful idea!

There was a quote in the story, though, that made me crack up.

Just wanted to post a quick entry before the new week started.

On Friday, I went to an IHC InstaCare because my ear was definitely not getting better. The doctor that saw me there told me I had a case similar to Swimmer’s Ear. He put me on a stronger regimen of antibiotics, installed a wick to assist in the draining, and prescribed some ear drops.

By late Saturday, I was finally able to put my hearing aid in again.

Now it’s Sunday night and I can barely feel any discomfort at all. However, I still can’t hear as well as I could before - but it’s been coming back gradually. Since this condition has been all outer-ear related, I’m sure I’ll get all my hearing back... all I had to begin with, anyway.

I feel partially responsible for my ear condition. When I first started having problems- it was just a swollen glands kind of thing in my neck and behind my ear. I read online I should apply heat. What better way to apply constant heat to my ear area than to submerge that side of my head in warm bathwater?

That’s what I did. I’m sure that ignited a bacterial carnival fiesta inside my ear canal.

Zipping through the weekend

Over the weekend, I worked on a small enhancement for one of Iodynamics’ clients. They wanted a facility which they could use to upload a ZIP archive file to the web server, have the facility automatically validate the archive, unpack items from the archive, and update the database, etc.

I’d never done anything like this before, but it seemed pretty straight forward. I used the Archive::Any Perl module to accomplish the extraction. I could have used by the Archive::Zip module but all I really needed was extraction. Archive::Zip was overkill... but I’ll keep it in mind for future projects.

Working late for the third night of four nights this week. Thought I’d take a short break to post a short blog.

Final presidential debate

I listened to the debate via streaming MP3 audio last night while I was working. I thought the president did very well. Kerry did well too, of course. He’s such a good debator. He’s the master debator. Hee hee.

Ear explosions

Starting about a week ago, I had a swelling in my neck and around my ear. I thought it was related to a head cold I’d been dealing with last week... so I went to WebMD to read about swolen glands in the neck. The advice from WebMD was to use warm washcloths to encourage blood flow to the area and drink lots of fluids.

After this had gone on for four or five days without any real improvement, I called the doctor on Monday and went in to have it checked out. The doctor said I had an ear infection and gave me a prescription of antibiotics.

So, I’ve been taking these antibiotics for 2 or 3 days now. This morning, I woke up to find something in my ear had burst and fluid was draining out. I guess this is a good thing, right? Things are on the mend, right? Well, I could hear find up until this morning. I’d say I’ve got a 10-15 decibel loss in my right ear now. I hope it clears itself up over the next day or so.

Workin late

I’ve been working late (e.g. to 8 or 9 p.m.) most nights this week. We’ve got some courseware to get out by the end of the week.

Fortunately, Iodynamics is slow this week, so it hasn’t been too painful for me to put in the extra hours at Guru Labs.

It’s been really interesting working with Stuart and Evan here at Guru Labs. No, it’s been fun! It’s been great. I don’t get to work with geeks in person when I’m working at home. And when I do go out, it’s usually to do some work at a clients’ office and they don’t know anything about technology or computers... that’s why they’ve hired me!

So, yeah, it’s been fun. It gets ridiculous at times when we all
brainstorm on evil things we could do to people’s Linux systems and
cackle and grin. Well, see, we’re working on a troubleshooting thing
this week and we’ve had to write a bunch of scripts that break a
Linux system and then the students taking the class have to figure out
what’s happened and fix the broken stuff. Anyway- we sit around and
talk about what would be "really evil" to do to a system. Heh. It’s
fun and totally geeky.

Stick this!

Well, we came to a concensus on a sticker design to get printed up to promote the FloydShow.

We’ll have these stickers to sell or give away for the 29 October show at The Phoenix (previously known at Club DV8) in Salt Lake City.

Goin... CRAY...ZAY!

Life is great. Life is grand. Life is whizzing past my hand!

The worst thing about this last week or so is that even though I get up pretty early every day, I still get my regular burst of energy around 11:30 p.m. I have a hard time getting to sleep as a result.

It doesn’t help I’m battling a cold this week too. The good news is that, for the time being, my voice is all James Earl Jones sexy.

I’ve had to try to make it to a couple appointments before showing up at Guru Labs at 9 a.m. and I’ve been a little late getting into work each time as a result. Fortunately, the guys at Guru are cool about it. I told them it won’t happen again.

Today, I think, is pretty typical of how my schedule is going to be from now on.

I arranged to leave Guru a little early today to head up to Logan to meet with a potential new client for Iodynamics at 4:30. I went over to Frank’s and picked up frodo. Frodo is Dave’s Linux box that got hacked into last week as a result of a poorly chosen root password and an SSH config that allowed root logins.

I got home from Logan around 8:15. I watched the last 20 minutes or so of the vice presidential debate on FNC and then headed downstairs to my “office” to catch up on e-mail. While I was there, I heard the rest of the family come home from a church activity. I went up and helped get the girls in bed, then went back downstairs.

I worked on some issues with Dave on a client’s website until around 10:30. Then I watched an episode of Angel season 4 with Christine. She went to bed and I fetch frodo from the car and started installing Fedora Core 2. Meanwhile, Mike showed up online to work on debugging a PPTP VPN issue with me. So, while FC2 was installing on Fedora, I was working with Mike on that.

We got that resolved and I booted up frodo with FC2 and started updating stuff via yum.

Frodo is going to sit on my network here now. So, I had to get a switch installed between the DSL modem and my gateway box. Ran out to the car and got a small 5-port Linksys I had in my laptop bag there. Got that all set up.

Now I’m just waiting for yum to finish installing updates so I can power frodo down, disconnect the CD-ROM drive I used, and move it to its new home.

It’s nearly 1 a.m. and I need to get up in 6 hours.

It’s time to talk a little about what has been going on in my life.

New contract work

I started working for Guru Labs as a full-time contract employee on Wednesday. I will be helping them with a number of consulting projects, courseware development, and possibly doing some training at their Bountiful facility or out of state.

The contract is for 90-days. What happens after that remains to be seen.

From Wednesday to Friday, I worked on a very interesting project for a Guru Labs client which involved setting up a cluster of two HP/Compaq Proliant DL380s and a MSA1000 storage array.

Each of the servers was to run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES9). SLES9 includes the High-Availability Linux utilities like heartbeat and I used these to set up a cluster with failover capability with these two servers.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I set up two test machines with SLES9 and set up the heartbeat across an crossover ethernet cable. After putting the test machines through the steps of demonstrating they were effectively failing over and so forth, I did it for real with the client’s machines on Friday. Everything went well.

Incidentally, this was my first experience working with SUSE Linux. I like yast — the SUSE installer/configuration tool — but I haven’t dabbled enough to determine whether I like it more or less than Red Hat/Fedora.

So what’s up with Iodynamics?

Iodynamics is still here. In fact, Iodynamics is very busy right now which means my partner Mike is probably feeling like he should grow an extra set of arms. The truth is, we’re currently looking to see if we can find a person or two to work part-time to help us out.

I’ll be working on Iodynamics projects in the evenings and on weekends.

The end result is that Christine and the kids probably won’t be seeing much of me for the next three months, but that’s okay, right? We’ll have a decent Christmas this year.

XMission at eleven

Yesterday, my dad and I joined my brother-in-law Adam at XMission’s customer appreciation party held at the Salt Lake City Masonic Temple. This was a celebration of XMission’s 11 years in the Internet service provider business. XMission was the first ISP in Utah.

Pizza was provided for all who came (and a lot of people came). Pete Ashdown, XMission diety, spoke at 5 p.m., told a brief story about how XMission came to be and answered some questions from the audience.

After the party, I took Adam and my dad down to XMission’s data center, gave them a quick tour of the facility and showed them where our server is and told them of our plans to put more servers there.