August 2006 Archives

Right now, we're in the Durango traveling to Grand Junction for our second show of this run through Colorado. Last night's show at the State Bridge Lodge near Bond, CO went very well. Unfortunately, we didn't get an audio recording of the FloydShow set, but we did get a very nice recording of the Sons Of Nothing original set.

It began to rain about half way through the FloydShow set and I was the roof of the restaurant/bar across from the stage where I set up my laptop. I had to scramble and get under cover when it started to sprinkle. It only rained for about five to ten minutes, so not too disruptive. I love how all the hard work of the visual effects is done by lumen and lumen stays safe on stage. It continued to crank out great video and projections while I was picking up all my stuff and moving to the deck where I could have some protection from the rain.

There was a brief power outage before the show. We were inside the restaurat having some dinner at the time. Matt left after the power came back on to get his keyboard rig set up again. I noticed a game machine on the bar was booting up and it was clear it was just PC hardware because some very familiar BIOS POST messages were being shown on the screen. I snickered expecting to see some kind of "Starting Windows" message come up, but the next time I looked, the right side of the screen had green "[OK]" lines down it. Holy cow! I thought. It's running Linux! Cool!

A couple pictures from the show:

That second picture shows some of the new video I put together for the Sons Of Nothing original tune "Positively Evil."

More pictures can be seen here.

After the show, Juli, Matt, Thom, and I went to our cabin and pretty much crashed for the evening. They gave us a log cabin that had seven twin beds in it, two of which were in a loft. Thom and I took those two and had the ceiling about 6-10 inches above our heads. Tim (and his girlfriend Amanda) had a yurt by themselves. Daryn had a bed with us, but he stayed out for a while partying with some of the enthusiastic fans that had come to the show.

This morning, I found out most of the group didn't get much sleep. Thom, Juli, and Matt were either kept awake or constantly awakened by noise from passing trains (State Bridge Lodge is right next to a Union Pacific rail) or people outside and next door partying, which is where Daryn was.

I guess I'm lucky I can just pop my hearing aids out.

We're going to get some rest in Grand Junction before loading in for tonight's show.

A few things to get out of my system here.

Sons Of Nothing at The Depot -- thoughts

Last Saturday, Sons Of Nothing played at The Depot in Salt Lake City.

First, the venue. This was my first time at The Depot and I have to say I was pretty impressed with the place. It nearly has the charm of the late Zephyr Club and is certainly, hands-down, the nicest venue in Salt Lake City. As for other venues the band has played in, I'd compare it to The Big Easy in Spokane, WA and The Mesa Theater in Grand Junction, CO (although it is larger than the latter).

The sound for the show was engineered by "Todd Almighty" (as Thom called him) and it was awesome. Todd engineered audio for SoN the last couple times we played at The Zephyr before it closed down, so we had confidence in the guy. His professionalism and perfectionism still intact, Todd made the set-up and soundcheck, "a joyful experience," Thom said.

Todd got to do his work with one of of the most technologically advanced mixing consoles I've seen in my life. Very cool.

Lighting was a different story. The venue programmed lots of cool stuff into their Jans Hog lighting console (similar to the one I used at the Arts Festival earlier this year) and then lost all that programming due to powering the unit down without saving the programming to a disk. At least, that's how I understood it.

As a result, the lighting for the show was fairly tame. There were a few times when Davey (the lighting technician) did some extra stuff, but mostly he was trying to keep the stage lit using really boring presets.

The lighting was a bit of a disappointment, but in the end, it worked out to our advantage in another way. We recorded the show on 4 video cameras and snagged an audio recording off Todd's board. The lighting, being pretty uniform and generally brighter than usual, worked out good for the video.

Most of the staff I encountered at The Depot were very friendly and helpful. Most were also digging the music.

The band opened for itself, playing a 45-minute set of original tunes before launching into the 2-hour FloydShow. The original tunes sounded great.

Audience turnout was lower than we had hoped. Between 100 and 150 people showed up. That number appeared smaller given The Depot has a capacity of 1200 people. But, the people who came were receptive and generally seemed to enjoy themselves.

A couple geeks I know from UOSP came and said hi too.

Since the show, I've been editing the video from the four cameras and joining it up with the audio from the board. It may become a "bootleg DVD" from the band. We'll see.

If you're interested in seeing some lower-resolution XViD-compressed samples, let me know.

This next week, we'll be taking the same 45-minute originals set and FloydShow performance to three venues in Colorado. We usually get very good response from our friends in CO so I'm looking forward to it.

Rush Replay - DVD

A couple weeks ago, I saw "Rush Replay" on DVD at our local Target store. The price wasn't too bad, but I thought I might be able to find it online for a few bucks cheaper. Sure enough, I did and a few days later, it arrived in the mail.

This 3-DVD, 1-CD box set has special meaning to me and probably anyone else who was a fan of the Canadian prog-rock group during the 1980s (I got into the band in 1987 or so). This box set features the first DVD releases of the "Exit Stage Left," "Grace Under Pressure Tour," and "A Show Of Hands" live concerts. I still own "A Show Of Hands" on VHS and probably had second or third generation copies of the other two on VHS at one time as well.

The audio for these DVDs has been restored, remastered, etc. into Dolby and DTS 5.1 mixes as well as stereo. The video looks great- as good as it can, anyway, considering the era and medium from which it originated. The DVDs don't offer much in the area of extra features. The packaging, on the other hand, includes some treasures: replications of the original dead-wood programs from each of the tours these DVDs are comprised of.

Since music from "Grace Under Pressure Tour" was never available on CD, the 3-DVDs are accompanied by a bonus CD containing this audio. Very cool.

Rockbox

A couple weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge and try out Rockbox on my iAudio X5 portable music/video player. Rockbox is an open source firmware you can install on a few different popular portable music players including the iPod, iAudio X5, iRiver H100 and H300, and Archos players.

The X5's official firmware already supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC, so I wasn't interested in Rockbox for support of other audio file formats. It was more just curiousity.

Overall, I was very impressed. The Rockbox firmware gave me a lot more control over the X5. The equalization options were vastly superior to the official firmware. I seriously think all my music sounded better with Rockbox, but I admit I may have been imagining it.

In addition to providing similar functionality for playing music, the Rockbox firmware also includes a bunch of toys including a Bejeweled clone, an Asteroids-type game, and some xscreensaver-type screen toys.

I was really only disappointed with two things: First, the Rockbox doesn't play video yet. The X5 will play XViD-compressed video 160x120 (or smaller), but it's very picky, even inside of these parameters. Even iAudio's JetAudio Windows program can't seem to generate totally-X5-friendly videos as well as transcode in Linux can with some experimentation.

Video is coming, though. In the future, Rockbox will be able to do eveyrthing the X5 firmware can do, video-wise, and more.

The second thing Rockbox is missing is the ability to record from line-in to compressed audio files. It can digitize to WAV files, but that takes up a lot of space. By contrast, the X5 firmware lets you digitize directly to MP3.

I looked around on the Rockbox site for some information about encoding directly to MP3 files and it looks like recording directly to multiple audio formats is planned for version 3.1 of the Rockbox firmware (I grabbed the latest which is v2.5). It will be even better if I can record directly to Ogg Vorbis files or FLAC on occasion.

Need an enclosed cargo trailer

If anyone reading this knows of anyone selling or willing to rent or lend-out a small (5x7, 6x8) enclosed cargo trailer, I'd really like to know.

Just a reminder to all readers that this coming Saturday, 12 August, is the day Sons Of Nothing will be playing at The Depot in Salt Lake City. This is a don't-miss event.

The Depot is the new United Concerts venue in the old Union Pacific train station building in The Gateway plaza downtown. I also recently found out The Depot is a non-smoking establishment. Very cool!

In addition to a two hour set of tribute to the music of Pink Floyd, we will also be playing selections from the band's original music, some from the new CD, "Clarity," for which this show is the release party. We will also have plenty copies of the CD on hand for purchase ($10/ea).

All the projected visuals and sound effects for the show will be provided by a Linux server we like to call lumen. It's a substantiation, of sorts, of how versatile open source software is.

It's been a while since the band has had a really good show in a traditional Salt Lake City music venue (thereby excluding the arts festival show and last years Gallivan Center summer performance). It's probably been since the last show we did at the old Zephyr Club before it closed down.

Anyway, The Depot looks like an awesome place. I'm stoked.

Come a little early and grab a meal and do some shopping at The Gateway. Make a night of it!

It seems like every Utah geek blogger and their dog is either weighing in on the Hollywood vs Cleanflicks, et. al. ruling or filling the RSS aggregators with spittle about some new Toyota they bought. So, I admit, peer pressure is persuading me here...

Like many, it seems, I've never been a fan (or a member) of any of the edited film clubs. I always thought there was a something wrong with someone going into a place like that with a clear conscience and renting a film that would otherwise pass as softcore pornography.

This reminds me of a story. 

A few years ago, when I was still living in Cache Valley, a friend and I were driving back from Taco Bell where we had just had a delicious and nutritious meal and passed by a corrugated plastic sign posted in a grassy spot. The sign was an advertisement for Logan's newest edited films business: FLICKS CLUB.

Both my friend and I scoffed and snickered. Then, one of us noticed, because of the font the sign was done in, it would require very little alteration, either with electrical tape or a black marker, to change the "L" and adjacent "I" on the sign to appear as a "U". How funny that would be... and how ironic, too.

Okay, fast forward to now. Court says "can't do that!" and Cleanflicks is goin' out of business.

How do I feel about it? I have mixed feelings. I don't really think Hollywood producers and/or directors should have any say over what Joe Consumer does with a motion picture once they purchase a copy of it. That is, if I purchase Striptease on DVD and edit it on my computer so the whole family can watch it, I may be a really creepy guy, but I don't think Hollywood should have any say in it. It's called "fair use" and that's how it should be.

I have personal issues with people who have serious problems with their kids seeing stuff like Titanic with the boob shot and the love scene. Maybe that's because I thought it was fairly artistic, not to mention that Kate Winslet is a fine example of a woman in art form.

I mean, If we hide all that kind of stuff from our kids, edit or ban the movies and TV, cover all the cleavage-ladden womens magazine covers at the grocery stores, etc., what will the children do when they walk out of the house and see some neighbor-girl walking down the sidewalk in a low-cut blouse?

Oh yeah, that's where the anti-depressants come in.

Anyway... I have strayed off topic, so where was I? Oh, yeah, I have mixed feelings. Yeah, I thought these edited films places were running a stupid business, but didn't the movie biz folks in Hollywood have anything better to do? As others have pointed out, they were still making plenty of money on the business of edited films. Heck, I wondered why they didn't start slapping edited-for-TV versions on DVD for a piece of the edited-for-content action.

Oh. Yeah. Movie studios only do those television edits -- not out of the goodness of their hearts -- but because because the FCC forces them to. Maybe that whole artistic integrity argument does mean something and most Hollywood film biz people are really actively contributing to the moral decline of our society.

I guess the bottom line is that if you really want someone else making decisions on how to best slice and dice that steamy, bloody, profane film into something the whole family can stomach, get a Clearplay subscription or, better yet, take advantage of the open source mplayer's support for Edit Decision Lists (EDLs) to create (and trade online) non-destructive modifications to the presentation of a film.