I decided to put my updates in a separate blog entry, since my last one is basically me yammering on and on about multitrack recording solutions for my band. So, in my excellent unordered list format, here's the news:

After blowing out my voice Friday, I settled in for a nice weekend of rain, culminating in me feeling pretty crappy yesterday. I missed all of my classes Monday, and I missed stats this morning, although I got up and made it to political science and band practice. My sore throat is pretty well gone, but I'm sneezing all the time and I'm generally stuffed up. Good thing it's nice and rainy around here...

After the relatively dismal show that we had at City Limits, I was ready to tear it up when we played at Brewski's last Friday. However, what happened was far from ideal. If you really don't want to read a rant on my part, take a breather and wait for my next posting.



We got started at about 11:20pm. This was sort of late, but we had to accomodate Winston's schedule since he is now working. No big deal. He did show up around 11 and managed to get set up. I myself was rushing on time since I only got to Brewski's at 10:45 (I had to go home and load the truck), and Ed and I were trying to get the PA set up and the bugs worked out before we started. Additionally, we elected to use the direct outs on the amplifiers that had them (Winston's and mine) so that Ed could fine tune the level out in the house a little bit. I'm not really sure where I should start, so I'll just start with lessons learned:

I'll start the entry with yet another plug for my band. Slow Goat Riot is playing at Brewski's in Bremerton, today, Friday 14th, at about 11pm.



Now that the plugging is over, I'll start the news. First off, I thought it just rocked that my last post got so many reads and comments. Leading the pack on the comments was Jeremy (I'd link to your user information listed home page except that it doesn't appear to be anything other than the regular kerneltrap home page), responding to my issue about the "read more" links on long blog posts. I must confess that it's pretty cool when Mr. KernelTrap himself starts reading your blog. What was cooler was that he took Les's suggestion to make the "read more" link look like something not on the bottom toolbar as something worth trying out on a development box. BTW, it looks pretty nice weather-wise in Margate, FL right now; I'm jealous. I spent a year in central Florida (Orlando to be exact) when I was in the navy at Naval Nuclear Power School (now located in Charleston, SC, and I can't find a good webpage for it), and I loved it.

Ok, Travis told me last night that he didn't realize that KernelTrap truncates the postings for brevity until recently, so one more notice to those that think I only write a paragraph or so (which rarely happens): If you see a "read more" link at the bottom of a blog entry, it's because there is more to read. Be sure to click it. So, time for the updates:




My friend Dave (Evy's husband) sent me some email on trying to get his website up and going. Much like me, it's not satisfying to Dave to have too many things hosted by someone else, so he has put up his website here. Now, by the time anybody else reads this, his IP address will have changed, so fair warning. Dave, be sure to get yourself set up with a free DynDNS account, so you can have a human readable website address. Come to think of it, the freesco router that you use has a DynDNS client built into it, so it will update DynDNS every time it reboots or otherwise picks up a new DHCP lease from your cable provider. There is a fix for it since DynDNS changed the updating web page earlier this year, but other than that, it does work. I used it when I was still using a Freesco router. Oh, and thanks for the security info too. (Dave is already up to speed on an ICMP vulnerability in the 2.0 series of kernels, which is what freesco uses. He's showing better admin skills than me. I'm terrible with reading BugTraq or using Bugzilla, and I don't understand how Neil can do this so well. It must be osmosis or something.)

You'd think all of these things would be unrelated. Well.....you're right. They're not, other than the fact that they all happened to me today.



First off, the whole Nutella thing. Winston and I were talking about sandwiches or something on the way to practice the other day. (On a related note, Winston has decided to blog here on KernelTrap, and while he doesn't code, he earns my props for being an avid convert and user of OpenOffice.) Anyway, at some point Winston mentioned that he thought that Nutella kicks ass. Apparently, he's not alone:

Well, the City Limits show is behind us, and while we actually sounded much better than the last time we were there, thanks to a new PA system, the crowd situation was much worse. Actually, it totally sucked. We had four paying customers; all of which left in the first set. I could tell Greg was bumming, and the second set basically turned into a rehearsal session for the rest of the night. We somehow played "I Wanna be Sedated", a song we've never played before, in the middle of the set. I'm really not sure why we kept playing, other than the fact that Selena's mom (Selena is Winston's girlfriend) came to see us play. We're still having volume issues on the stage, although they're getting better. I need to find someone decent to run sound for us. The plan is that when we play at Brewski's next week that we'll have the amps going through the mixer so the sound guy can control the house sound.

"Antitrust" is on TBS right now. Man, I'm such a sucker for bad hacker movies. Of course, "Hackers" is fabulously bad, but this is pretty good, especially the open source software reference. Makes me feel like I'm back in the dot com days.



Speaking of IT issues, Les has a very well worded rant about why the Navy sucks. It's specifically targetted at their poorly run attempt to get all commands running under one IT infrastructure. Check it out; this kind of boneheaded crap is going on in the government (and probably plenty of regular companies) every day.

I guess what I'm really asking is why I can't have my hindsight be foresight instead. Oh well.



After the rock show yesterday, I told myself that I wasn't going to pick up an instrument today. Nevertheless, this evening went Lisa went to a work mandated Halloween gettogether, I found myself getting bored, yet unwilling (and too broke anyway) to go out. After catching up with my friend Brian and Les on the phone, I got bored so I tuned up the fake Charvel and played around for a bit. The more I use it, the more I enjoy the Rocktron Metal Planet distortion pedal I picked up a couple of weeks ago over the objections of the condescending jerk at Ted Brown Music. It absolutely screams, and makes my tiny little Yamaha guitar amp sound as close to a Marshall stack as it's going to get. While I'm thinking about that, I'm not sure I ever posted pictures of my new bass rig, but I took a picture of it after I got the rack case for the amp and tuner and you can see it here.

Good god! It's 4:24am, and I'm just now getting my equipment put away and things straightened up around here (as much as they ever are).



The Halloween show of Slow Goat Riot was a definite success. The band simply rocked; we played better than we ever have in practice, and the sound with the big amplifiers was just killer. The PA in the first set was cutting in and out because I had it cranked just too much, but I backed off the master volume, and the trusty Peavey Vegas 400 I still have haunting me made up the difference when the limiter would kick in on the PA amp. Say what you want about Peavey products; they're never particularly great sounding but they take a phoenomenal amount of abuse and continue to operate.

This would have been a well-worded, articulate post, but as I was writing it last night, I made the mistake of visiting a website written in FrontpageXP in a different Mozilla tab, and it took Mozilla down like a tornado destroys a trailer park. I was not happy. So, from my hazy memory, here's what's up:



Whit left navy city yesterday on terminal leave. He's not quite out yet, but effectively, he is. Congrats Whit; It was a pleasure to serve with you and I know you gave that place quite a bit of work in spite of your personal feelings.

Man, KernelTrap has been busy in the past week. It seems like there have been more new stories posted than ever before. The story I was interested in was the journaling file system benchmarking; I'm pretty hardcore on ReiserFS, and it's treated me well, but I do run ext3 on my rsync backup box for the sake of diversity. (For Whit's benefit:) I find it very amusing that a fs test suite is called Bonnie; apparently she'll test your hard drive like the real Bonnie tests your patience....

But what do you figure, it's 3am here...



So time for the updates.

• Lisa, my wife, just started a blog here. Her entry on metric time is pretty amusing.
• Brian and Greg of Kvasir have decided to kick Mo out of the band, and they're joining up with Winston and I. Greg is shifting from guitar to drums. So, we're all playing together at the Old Town Pub in Silverdale as Slow Goat Riot in a week. It should be a good show; we'll definitely play the Wicked Asylum favorites (including "Wally") and we're going to try to play some of the Kvasir songs too. What I was planning on doing was taking my minidisc recorder and plugging into the outputs from the board, but then I realized that we don't mike the drums for a small venue. So, maybe I'll just do it with a microphone and see how it turns out.
  

Tomorrow I wrap up the last test of the week. Which will be a nice thing; I can finish up my Flash midterm and keep working on the preparations for the big rock show next Friday. I went to go practice with Kvasir tonight, and as I pulled in, Mo and Brian were leaving. WTF? So, I ended up working with Greg on the drum parts for all the new songs. The big surprise was that things went really well; there were no tempo changes whatsoever. I think playing with a guitar player was screwing with him. I think it's a curse when guitar players try to play drums; I swear they have the worst sense of timing. It's all I can do to get them to count through the measures where they need to rest or whatever. They start listening to the guitar player or zoning off and spontaneous tempo changes result.

It really was ridiculously rainy yesterday! We set records here in Western Washington; over 5 inches of rain yesterday. Skagit and Mason counties are pretty well flooded out, and I'm surprised we haven't had more roads wash out here.



The testing season starts today; I've got a stats test in 45 minutes. I'm really looking forward to the next week when the tests are done and I can get ready for the Halloween show. Yesterday I went looking for drum machines to cover just in case we have a drummer involved in a "bizarre gardening accident" or some other weird nonsense. After looking around, I settled on a Boss DR-3 that my local Ted Brown music was selling surprisingly for the same price as most online retailers. Of course, the Silverdale store can never seem to stock anything, so I've got to wait to pick it up. I also picked up some Audio-Technica monitor headphones, some cables, and a Rocktron Metal Planet distortion pedal for my guitar. It sounds terrific, and it let me re-bias the amp so my clean channel is once again clean.