1st snowman of 2010

My daughter said it was a hunter (note the stick in it's hand). It froze into an iceman a week later and snapped off at the base and pitched forward into the kid's fort!


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Dead Moose stuck in a tree

Man. That must suck. Moose cow has an itch or something. Uses it's walnut sized brain to come up with a creative way to scratch it, and look what happens!

The really bad part must have came when it was stuck there awhile, maybe carrying on so that a pack of coyotes hears it and comes by and proceeds to chow down.

Ouch.. Thanks to Tripper for sending me these. I'll think twice next time I stick my neck between two trees!

Mother Nature. She's fickle..

Remembering old psychotic coworkers

When I worked at Consumers Distributing one summer in the late 80's, I had one co worker who was particularly psychotic. The first thing he asked me when I met him was if I could punch him in the arm as hard as I could. Then he told me, he'd punch me in the arm as hard as he could. Gee. Sounds like fun. I seem to recall this game. I played it in grade 4 when I was nine. I was now 19 and this guy was 26.
"No thanks." I told him. I'm wary of deals like this with people I've just met. He may as well have hit me up for a loan(in fact, he did that later).

This guy drove a motorcycle and picked up hitch hikers. I asked him if he thought this was dangerous and he said "Not for me!" explaining that he'd smash his bike into a tree if a hitchhiker tried to rob him. I had other thoughts of him digging large holes in the woods after and wondered where he kept his shovel.

He also said he was discharged from the army and could kill me using only his thumbs. Contests of strength were always very important to him and he expected everyone to match his extraordinary feats of strength! Case in point, the time I asked him to help me get a medium sized fridge off the top of one of the warehouse shelves (he's probably the guy who put them up there. Why put the the heaviest crap we have 15 feet off the ground?). He called me some name that was meant to point out what a weakling I was for even thinking I'd need help to lift something that weighed more than I did, but he came along to show me how a real man did it. This may be funny, I thought. He waved me off, climbed to the top of the warehouse shelving and pushed the fridge off the top. I stepped out of the way as this thing came down and it landed with a crash! One of the corners of the box was accordianed and I could see the siding poking out.
"there ya go wimp!" he said and he went off to cause havoc elsewhere.

I sighed and said thanks and wheeled it to the front Passing by my manager to tell him that GI Joe has gotten it off the top shelf, not me and that I'd be very suprised if it worked.

One good thing about working in an office, it seems to cut down on co-workers like this. There's other kinds of difficult people, but they're much easier to deal with

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Dead Peasants Insurance

I recently found out about this creepy practice that apparently accounts for a crapload of the policies sold in the states. I haven't seen the new Michael Moore film "Capitalism, a love story", but apparently there's a bit in the film about this as well. Just when you think that corporate greed can't sink any lower, here's a practice whereby companies insure their rank and file (sometimes without their knowing) and collect cash upon their death, which they keep and don't pass on to the family of the deceased. We're not talking top execs either, they also refer to this as "Janitor's Insurance".

At first I thought that it's just plain creepy to know that someone can take out a life insurance policy on you that you don't know about and collect on it when you kick off. How is this even possible? Doesn't the insurance company want to run tests on you and stuff to make sure you're not going to keel over a day after the policy kicks in? Isn't this the stuff of TV movies were one spouse takes out a million buck policy on the other and then pushes them down the stairs to collect?

Turns out in most states (I don't know about Canada), you do need to be informed on any policy taken out on you so companies force the issue when you sign an employment contract making sure it includes agreement to policies of this type.

Ridiculous. And legally whoever pays the premiums gets the money when you check out and they say where it goes: To the company of course. The real scummy part is that some of the big companies use it as a way to pay executive bonuses.

Nice... Work the employees to death to pay CEO bonuses.

Car poo

Bad car!!



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"Gee you have an Iphone? That's cool, most old people have Blackberrys!"

My daughter wanted to show the other kids at the after school program the program I use to Zombify folks so when I pulled out the IPhone, one of the 16 year old councilors said:

"Gee you have an Iphone? That's cool, most old people have Blackberrys!"

Gee thanks.. I told her I had an ITouch, needed a phone and decided to combine two things into one. She then proceeded to tell me about an application for iPhone called "Teen Torture" which can modify your iPhone ringtone to frequencies that sound like a mosquito buzzing. Why do this you ask?

It's because apparently, us OLD FOLKS can't hear them!

That way they can let their cell phones ring in class. THAT'S CRAP! I say. I can hear a mosquito fart with my super guitar musician hearing! Well guess what. What she said is apparently TRUE!

 Teen Torture Iphone App Discontinued Due To Public Alarm

Ain't that special! I'm old and also deaf apparently.  

 

Black Horse and a Cherry Tree - how to video

I posted this a few years back when I first went looking for it on Youtube. I had heard the tune at an Eric Johnson concert (the sound guy played it during setup). When I saw the live version I was impressed by the balls it took to use a splitter on a looper and use mic and guitar loop samples all in real-time. I have to learn this tune for something and found this great tutorial by KT herself on youtube where she shows you exactly what she's doing. Very cool.

Now go learn it everybody and buy her two CD's while you're at it.




And then part 2

I only ship to North or South America!

Here's a funny story I heard from a friend tonight. He ordered something on ebay.ca (which is kind enough to filter out people who don't ship to the Great White North) and paid for it right away only to receive a nasty email from the seller complaining that he did not read the shipping information.
  The seller was adamant that he only shipped to North and South America. So my friend replied back:  "Yes.. I read that. Canada is IN North America."

To this the seller replied:
"I only ship to North or South America! You know, North America like New York or South America like Texas!".

At this point I like to remind myself that the country to the south is the strongest military power on the planet. It's fun to be scared...

Boss SL-20 and DD7. Cool guitar toys

Lookin to fill up my new/old pedal board, ran across some coolness! Check that out! The Slicer demo at 3min mark is kinda neat. Cheezy but neat.

My first guitar and the beginnings of my obsession with BOSS guitar pedals

I just bought something off ebay that figured heavily in my teenage years. A BCB-6. Now I plan to fill it! Gotta love nostalgia! 

I took guitar lessons when I was 8, put it aside for many years, picking it up again when I was about 12 or 13. I slogged away on a nylon stringed classical and one day, I was at a friend's house and saw an electric guitar case on the wall. It was from the 50's. It was an old rockabilly guitar hollow body with a Bixby tremolo. It had little (rusty) steel strings, plugged into an old tube amp that looked like something out of the opening scene from Back to the Future, and made a great guitar farting sound.

It was then in 1982 or 1983 that I decided I wanted (no NEEDED) an electric guitar. I voiced this to my parents and my Dad took me to a second hand music store a friend of his mentioned. It was Sangitt Bianga near Bank and Gladstone (later to become SONGBIRD MUSIC). The guy working there, Danny Dupont, pulled his favorite guitar in the shop at the moment, an old Black Ibanez Goldstar Series 2 off the rack and let me play it. It was very nice… Mmmmm. I loved the way the thin little strings felt and how they bent. It even came with a case. A shitty old grey fall apart thing with dark blue plush that looked like it had a family of cats sleeping inside it at one point. I still remember what it smelled like, which was not cat hair, instead it had that great wood-type smell all electric guitar cases seem to have. It was close to Christmas so I'd have to wait to play with it but sure enough, Christmas eve I was able to crack the thing open and try it out at home. My Dad had gotten me this big 2 channel amp, a transistor Yamaha of some sort with spring reverb. It did the trick, it was way better than most starting amps. I had this one guitar patch cord too (I think it was brown). There was one problem though that first night. It didn't sound like an electric guitar!!!
My expectations were that it was to sound like Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. Overdriven Fuzz-faced distortion up the wazoo! This didn't sound anything close to that. I had just made the discovery most electric guitarists make when they just don't know how stuff works. An electric guitar plugged into a clean amp sounds a bit like an amplified acoustic guitar. There isn't that cool distortion sound (or farty sound like I was used to from that old 50's guitar in my friend's basement). As luck would have it, a few days later my Dad took me to his friend's house when the guy's band was over playing. Danny, the guy who sold us my guitar was there (playing a pile of 1950's and 1960's vintage Fender strats) and he was at that point, the best guitarist I had ever seen. He would play upside own over the neck, all these Eric Claptony, Jimi Pagey, type licks. I was suitably impressed. What I noticed that night though, was that my Dad's friend Donny was changing the sound of his guitar (a newer Fender, very pretty in a natural wood grain) by stomping on these colorful little boxes on the floor. They were in this cool little grey case which had form-fitting slots for six of them. What the hell were THOSE??
They turned out to be Boss Guitar pedals. I would later collect these things like candy in the mid eighties once I found out what they actually did. Not everyone used them. Danny was running his guitar straight into a Marshal Stack (this guitar amp head/speaker combination would be coveted by many of my friends but never me. You still see WALLS of them at concerts). The Marshal had 2 or 3 channels and could be set to sound clean, or "dirty" using the Marshal's built-in preamp to overdrive the signal giving you that great distortion sound. A simple footswitch would let you toggle between the channels. What Donny (the guy with the pedals) had was a big amp which he'd set for a clean sound, and he'd run his pedal board into it and he'd step on this Orange "DISTORTION" pedal to change the sound from clean to JIMI HENDRIX AT WOODSTOCK.
I HAD to get me one of those… Or two, or three.. I was too shy to ask what the heck each one did so I just watched and listened.. Amazing..
A few days later my dad invited Donny over, and he brought his guitar and his pedal board and he taught me what he called the "A run-up" (which turned out to be the A Pentatonic blues scale. Thanks for that one!! Muhahahahaha). He had the following pedals in his pedal board:


Power pedal
Distortion
Chorus
Flanger
Phaser
Delay

Distortion was an orange pedal made it sound all dirty, crunchy and cool like Jimi!
Chorus was a blue pedal and was very subtle. It kind of took the sound, divided it in two and played both at the same time but slightly off time so it worbled the sound a bit.. This is best used on a clean sound but sounds neat distorted. Satrianni and Alex Lifeson use a chorused dirty sound. Everyone else uses it clean. Think Andy Summers in "Every Breath you take" by The Police.
Flanger is purple and is sorta like a chorus on acid. It can sometimes sound like a Jet taking off. The most famous song with a Flanger I can think of is "She Sells Sanctuary" by the Cult. Takes it name from an old recording trick where you would mess with the flanges of a tape turnstile.
A Phaser was green and it was kind of a light version of a flanger. It would take the signal and you could make it go out of phase. Eddie Van Halen has a phaser on most of his solos on the first few Van Halen albums.The Delay was Red I think. It was an old Analog delay that would give you three repeats that would trail off. More on this later.
My friend Mike was over that night and we absconded to my room with these pedals and played the different sounds (turning them all on at the same time) until the wee hours of the morning.
Back to the "gotta get me one of those!". Luckily the grandparents had given me Christmas money.. Gotta love the Christmas money!



So I got a DF-2 Distortion Feedbacker. Tons 'O' Distortion!! As well as a Stereo Chorus CE-3 and I though I sounded GREAT! Muhahahahahahaha. It was the Beginning of an obsession. A few months later I was able to pick up a Delay pedal, a DSD-2. This was a sampling delay which was kinda fun! You could play something and it would repeat it at different pitches.

So these little pedal thingies were starting to pile up. And each one took a shiny 9 volt battery. I was going through a pile of them (Eric Johnson thinks that Duracell batteries sound better than EverReady ones!). It was time to acquire one of those sexy BCB-6 cases!! The BCB-6 bcomes with a red pedal that supplies power to the other pedals (and takes up a space). Later versions utilized another power-source that went up above, freeing up a pedal space. It also had room for the Boss tuner, which fit snugly up above beside the case handle pocket.  

Over the years I switched pedals in and out. I met a professional musician, Bob Clairmont, who told me the best pedal to have was a compressor sustainer. This thing, the CE-3, compresses high input signals and boosts low input signals to produce sustain. It also evens out attack so that if you strum hard, it cuts it down and if you strum low, it gives it a bit of a boost. It's helpful for clean comp playing but can make for a hissy sound if used improperly.


  I bought a second-hand noise gate once, just because 1. I read that Stuart Adamson of Big Country used one, I had no idea what it did, and 2. It was cheap, $40 and it would fill the last spot I had in the case!! Muhahahahaha. When I did find 0out what it did I was glad I bought it. What it did was completely shut off the signal when you muted the stings and made your amp deadly silent. I tried it out on our cat once, who was curled up in front of my amp one day. I turned on my pedalboard, ran my hand over all the dials on the amp so that they were all on 10, shucked down the guitar volume, stepped on the distortion pedal, muted the strings,rolled the volume up and windmilled a power chord. What happened next was worth the price of the pedal! Muhahahahaha!

One thing that developed early on was that I identified the sound of each pedal with it's color. That is to say, today, when I hear a distorted sound, I see orange waveforms vibrating on strings.  If it's overdrive, it's a yellow waveform, Flanger, purple, delay is white or silver and so forth. If it's a mixture of sounds then the waveform layers are mixed together like colors wit5h each string outlined in the many colors that make up the sound. 


Weird huh? What picture forms in your brain when you hear a power chord?

I went on to get a flanger, an EQ pedal, a Phaser, an Octaver, a Super Overdrive, A Heavy Metal Pedal, a Turbo distortion, a dynamic filter and many many others, swapping them in and out of the five available slots . At one point I had this white duct tape and taped each pedal and wrote a noun or verb that described what each one did. The Delay was "Schmear", the Distortion was "HATE", the power pedal was "Life". I had seen a photo of Steve Vai's rig and saw that he had done something like that and imitated him. I'd see movies like "Purple Rain" with prince and giggle because he had the same pedals as me!

Then.. I got rid of them all.. one at a time, because I heard about this mysterious thing called a Roland GP-8. And another obsession was born. But that's another story...

My new man bag, fanny pack, side satchel-type thing and iPhone case..

I started carrying one of these things around in college, in the early 90's when a classmate had one and I saw how much crap you could cram in them. I endured many unflattering remarks and fashion comparisons but the things were too practical to give a damn! The first one I had was black. Then a few years later I scored a brown leather one and carried that around for years until it fell apart(I've always been more of a brown-leather jacket wearing guy than a black leather jacket guy, and it carried over here) . Well, it's that time of year again, several side satchels later, the old one has fallen apart and I was on the lookout for a new one when I happened to walk into a Roots store.

I saw this thing called a "village pack in tribe leather". This thing was perfect! The belt is a bit short though. It JUST fits. This ain't for the stout of waist.

Since I had just bought an iPhone I also did some research on cases for the 3Gs and decided on a great flip case from BeyzaCASES. They had one in a nice vintage leather. I've already dropped the phone in the snow and left it there for about five minutes with no ill effects in this case, so it's held up fine thus far! It's got holes in all the right spots so you can do whatever you need to do and leave it in the sleeve.

I've had them strapped on for a few weeks now and someone told me if I added a hammer that I'd look like Mike Holmes.

Survivor Samoa - Robbery

"Noooooo!"

New Bigfoot sculpt!

Miss Tiggywinkles had one of these waiting on the shelf for me. It can go outside on the front lawn too! Thanks to Kirok for spotting him and emailing a photo a couple of days ago!

He's 16 inches tall!



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The BB e-cigarette

A coworker has stumbled upon a new way to quit smoking. They're called e-cigs. They use a Vail of 24 mg Tennesee smoke juice to simulate smoke and give the user a tiny bit of nicotine. The smoke is actually steam. With one of these rigs you go through the motions of smoking, with a huge decrease in the toxic intake of a regular cigarette.

The funny thing is when someone lights up one of these things indoors. It's technically not illegal . It makes for some interesting confrontations. An expensive way to quit smoking.





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Hoodat! Let's shoot mah TV when my football team loses!!!

Kirok sent me this. It's scary because these people live in the most powerful country in the world. Luckily they're pretty south of us (Louisiana), and thankfully they lost that war back in the 1800's, so the more North you go, the less, uhh.. I dunno. I won't go there...

Unless he was doing his to force an upgrade, maybe he had his eye on a nice new 65 inch plasma, I don't see the sense in this. Although it's somewhat captivating. Like a car accident. And the collection of guns is interesting. One funny part is when one of their friends shows up wearing an orange jacket just so he doesn't get shot in the excitement. Smart man..


TV Shot To Death After Saints Win - Watch more Funny Videos

Photos of my lava lamp

Took a photo of my lava lamp the other day. The lamp is a secret code in my house. When it's on, it means something.

Sometimes my kids turn it on and get me in trouble

Lava lamps are cool!



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The little Christmas tree contest

We had a little mini Christmas tree decorating contest at work last week. This was my entry.

I didn't win...

I think it's because I've recently moved into a new building, two buildings away from where I used to work and my 70-some co-worker ex-neighbors were too lazy to walk over and see my creation. We couldn't send photos because the whole point of the exercise was to walk over and see the entries in person and get to know the new people in the division.

Oh well.

I think mine rocked!!!

It had Mini me! The Energizer Bunny! A Borg! The Linux penguin, Mr Bigglesworth! Sideshow Bob! The Stanley Cup!

I mean, it didn't have chocolates or creatively bent paper-clips or pipe cleaners or things like that in it like some folks.. But it had class and style..

Wait next year!

It was still the coolest.

My stupid GR-500A Casio G-shock watch.

I bought a watch for myself on Father's day this year. How ever long ago that was, it didn't take too long for me to break the thing. This is a rather expensive watch, the CASIO G-SHOCK GW-200A. It's used by some militaries. You never have to buy a new battery (HAH!) because it features a rechargeable solar battery that can (quoting from the manual) "Charge in sun or artificial light to a full charge and the battery will work for11 months even if the watch is placed in a drawer."

Liars! Two weeks ago, when winter kinda started and I started to wear a coat, the watch spent some time under a sleeve and the battery quickly died. I charged it under a light all night but it would only come up to a half charge, and it died again a few days later. What a piece of crap watch! I did some research and this happens in a few cases, and it's the battery that has just gone bad, the CTL1616. So I call up "The Source" and they tell me they have it so I make a trip out to replace it.
Turns out they didn't have it. They had a CR1616, just a regular lithium battery. What the hell, it should work. The girl behind the counter insisted on replacing it and I let her. It seemed to work!

That night I went home, froze my butt off at the Orleans Parade of lights and took a warm bath afterwards - and my nice watch filled up with water. The salesperson at "The Source" didn't put the waterproof seal in right. I saw it sticking out when I inspected the watch closer. It's sitting under the hairdryer now but I don't have high hopes..

I've killed SUUNTRO outdoor watches as well. I am going to re-think my whole outlook on watches. I'm going to buy cheap $20 watches and jut throw them away when I bust them.

I think "The Source" has some of those.....

The office move 2009

Today I moved offices. I moved across two buildings to the same building and floor I started on as a student in 1991, along with two of my friends/co-workers who also started out here as co-op students at the exact same time and place(how weird is that?). Yesterday found me furiously scrubbing my old desk and cabinets so that they'd be nice and clean for the new guy moving into my old digs. It was a good thing I did this because I found gross stuff like one of my old gel guitar fingernails (it cracked off when I went to eject a CD in my PC last year) and some old M&M's on the floor behind my UPS(they were still edible!).

I faithfully stickered all my boxes and stuff with my name and future office number, being a veteran of many office moves, I know how stuff can disappear on you. At 2:20 or so my PC disappeared (to go to the new place) and around 3:00pm, an hour before move time the head moving guy shows up with a floorplan and he's standing outside my cubicle telling me that all the office numbers written on my stuff are wrong. We've been given the old floorplan and those offices no longer exist. He gives me the new numbers. The trouble is, almost everyone has left the office now because we have no PC's and need to get out of the way for the move to take place. So I had to take the guy around to every person who was moving, get the new numbers and write it down 10 or 16 times on all of their stuff boxes, chairs, screens, cabinets, fans, garbage cans etc.. Except for Slava, who has condensed the contents of his office to two boxes which he has moved himself a few hours before. I actually did a preemptive move of some of my odder items with Slava. My huge office tree (the plant people are not going to like that I moved this, they get upset), my hockey stick and the hologram picture of the old 1920's guy who turns into a devil that kept the cleaning staff from coming anywhere near my office 2 years ago.

Today I head over to the new place and find all my boxes, but no PC's or screens. It's gonna be hard to work without these so I take a walk around the new digs looking for them. They are no where in sight. One of my co-workers, DJ, scored an office with a PMPO (Presumably Messy Previous Occupant) who didn't really clean his up for the new guy like I did. The presumably messy guy actually inherited my old office on my old floor. My buddy is unhappy about this and we can all tell. One of the AD's goes by and makes the mistake of asking him how things are going and 20 minutes later a cleaning crew arrives asking me where DJ's office is. I don't know who called them but it's funny. Apparently we aren't expected to clean our offices, this is something they do. Shit, if I'd have known that, I would have left the fingernail in mine. Still, do unto others like you'd like done to you sorta thing..

I come back from my search of the new floor and find the confused LAN guy with Slava scratching his head (the LAN guys is scratching his own head, not Slava's).
"I installed them in here yesterday!" He says. That is not good. Maybe someone has mistaken them for the previous occupant's PC's and has taken them back over to my old floor. I take a walk to my old digs two buildings over and find them after awhile in Slava's old empty office. I call the LAN guy and he says he'll come and get them and install them in the new place. The "Move Gremlins" probably did this to screw with me..

When I get back to my new office to start unpacking my boxes I see that the PMPO is over at his old digs conversing with DJ about the unsatisfactory condition he left his office in. I don't know if he's been called over or if he forgot something, but they have a brief conversation which is moot because the Cleaning crew has been through and DJ already picked all the fingernails off the floor and removed the 3 years of muffin debris between the crack in the two connecting portions of the desk.

"Well I did not clean the crack.." says the previous occupant.. This is funny for some reason. I actually cleaned MY crack.. I took a paperclip, straightened it out and ran it through there to get out the build up of crusty debris. (the fact that we could be talking about body parts is not lost on me).

Throughout the morning two people an office away have been flirting loudly non-stop for about 2 hours. At one point the guy was threatening the girl that he'd come into work wearing a speedo or something and I felt the need to poke my head around the corner and ask that they not scare us like that on our first day because we're new. Everyone giggles.. I'm making friends. I go back to DJ's office. He's mad and proclaims loudly that the previous occupants cleaning habits leave a lot to be desired (he doesn't exactly say it like that though, he uses a cuss word and the name of that animal we get bacon from). I try to shush him and remind him that we may be embedded amongst 20 of the guy's best Friends but DJ does not care at this point. He's a bit pissed and rightly so I guess..

I hook my PC up, unpack a pile of boxes and the next thing I know it's lunch. I crack a book open while I eat and notice that the flirtymates have resumed their mating ritual because it has been reasonably quiet for awhile. They must have gone away or something. I've always been able to tune stuff like that out if I want so it does not bother me in the least. As long as they change it up and don't repeat themselves too much. It goes on all lunch hour.

DJ comes in my office after lunch to discuss an issue with an application we just rolled out. He pauses while the flirty couple laugh loudly. He comments on this just as loudly. A few minutes later I urge him to come into a conference room with me so we can talk about our project as well as the flirty couple's ability to work and chat nonstop whilst not offending them too badly on our first day.

It always takes time to get used to a new place... Still, I think I'm going to like it here. I have a feeling there's a few people on this floor as weird as I am..

If the flirty couple is at it again tomorrow I'm going to go over and break the ice for them so they can go on their first date so I don't have to hear the elaborate mating ritual play out all day. I know it bugs DJ. I have a feeling he's gonna show up with his classical music collection and the biggest set of earphones money can buy tomorrow!

Difference between men and women according to my 5 year old

Women have boobies.

Men have "nibbles"





There you have it....