Archive for June, 2006

i can only receive, i can listen to you

6/1/2006

Title of this one are lyrics from Gary Numan’s “Cars”.

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I was supposed to finish up a track today for someone else but totally ran out of steam. There were some errands I had to do and needed to take care of that first, so tomorrow the tune will get done. It’s nothing that will appear here.

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It rained today - which was a good thing - but not enough. I say not enough because my truck is still dirty. :-)

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There is another blog I read that changes the design constantly, much like I used to do here. It’s very annoying. I’m glad that I’m not doing that “change my site every one-to-two months” crap any longer. So far it’s holding steady. (grin)

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I learned Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” on piano. Man, that song is so cool. I’m glad to have learned it.

Speaking of which, I’ve been messing around with some classical piano sounding things. I may put together a few tracks over the weekend for download here if I’m up to it and not sleeping my ass off.

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Here’s a shout-out to all the different places in the USA that have visited menga dot net very recently:

Ft. Worth Texas, Round Rock Texas, St. Paul Minnesota, Newcastle UK, Portland Maine, Las Vegas Nevada, Cleveland Ohio, Lodi New Jersey..

..and, of course, Connecticut.

You are all contributing to my 100+ unique visitors a day (at present). :-)

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holy grail grand piano

6/2/2006

Title of this post comes from the Alesis Fusion’s first sound you get when you turn it on, the Holy Grail Grand Piano. Yes, that is what it’s actually called. Don’t know if I’d call it “holy”, but it’s pretty darn good.

Work dragged today mainly due to the reason it was very hot in the warehouse. However, I got 33 PC’s cleaned up and out the door, so I did accomplish something. :-)

I just got done jammin’ on the Fusion a minute or two ago. On this particular synth I can finally do what I call a “roll” up and down the keys in C major because it has such high polyphony. In my next release, tentatively titled “Piano Power”, everything is going to be piano based. No drums. No bass. Just piano. My goal is to release four songs, possibly five.

For now, I’m going to shower and then go to bed. I’m beat.

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the cartoon returns

6/3/2006

One thing that used to be here that I took off but am now putting back is the cartoon I used to draw. Here’s episode one. More to come later. I’ll try to have one done every week or so.

My old comic was called “Menga Manga”, but this one is titled simply “Menga”.

This comic has nothing to do with my job by the way. (grin)

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piano power

6/4/2006

I just released a small three-song ditty, Piano Power! It’s on the music page. It’s the same as the last release, as in free for download.

My goal was to get four songs or possibly five. I got three. Good enough, I said to myself. :-)

The three tracks for this release were completed without any sequencing whatsoever. Nothing is quantized (i.e. use a computer to make out-of-time things go in-time). There are a few mistakes here and there but it was fun doing it.

I have never released anything that was strictly single-instrument based - so this is new for me. Everything you hear was done by my two hands without any programming, sequencing, speeding up, slowing down or otherwise.

I may do another one of these in the future. It was nice not to have to sequence stuff for a change. :-)

related tags: piano, classical, mp3, download, rich menga

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say cheese

6/4/2006

Far be it from me to write two articles just minutes apart (heh) but this stuff has nothing to do with the music stuff aforementioned.

Florida’s HSMV (that’s “DMV” to everyone else) seems to really have their shit together concerning getting a license, getting plates and so on. More on that in a moment.

I’ve been delaying getting a Florida driver’s license because I did not have a copy of my birth certificate (more on that in a sec). I wasn’t about to drive all the way back up to New England just to get one, so I wondered if there was a way to order one online. There is, and the place where I was born is listed in the areas they service. Cool.

Cost: Forty-two bucks. Yeah. Ouch. That’s the price you pay for convenience. Were you to just go to the office directly (or call them), the price is about ten bucks less. However, it takes a lot longer to get to you. USCerts.com said I would receive my certificate in seven to ten business days. I got it in three. Good deal there.

So anyway, if you have a Connecticut issued driver’s license, Florida allows you to reciprocate driving priviledges (”convert” a license without having to re-take a driver’s test). That’s good because I didn’t want to do the driver’s test all over again at thirty-one years old. I’ve been driving for fifteen years and I think I’ve got the driving thing down by now. (grin)

However…

You need a copy of your birth certificate as primary identification. The CT license is only secondary, hence the reason I acquired that first.

Crap involved will be as follows:

Cost of license: Twenty bucks.

One form to fill out at the HSMV office.

…and that’s it. Renewals are ten bucks in the future.

There is one thing that’s very cool about this whole experience. You can actually make appointments for these things online. Pick the office closest to you, pick the date, pick the time, confirm it and then just show up. Doesn’t really get any easier than that.

What I’m hoping is that with this appointment scheduled I can just walk in, flash a paper or two, get a license and get out of there.

How cool would that be.

I’m hoping getting plates is as easy, assuming getting the license is easy. (heh)

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And the Lord said, “You there! Fix your fucking tail light!”

6/5/2006

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proof i’ve been using the internet longer than you / florida dmv stuff

6/6/2006

For years I’ve always wondered who registered the Yahoo ID "menga", then yesterday I thought to myself.. Did I register it? So I headed on over and attempted a "forgot password" thing where you enter in some information and then answer a "secret" question you define when you first sign up for the account.

Long story short: I got in. Couldn’t believe it. Yes, it was me that registered that Yahoo! ID. NINE YEARS AGO.

As proof, see the profile page. The "last updated" date is in 1997. I kid you not. I purposely did not update the profile so that date stays as is for nostalgic purposes. You can’t "fool" Yahoo!’s servers into doing that - so it’s legit. It’s probably one of the oldest Yahoo! ID’s in existence.

I would have written about this yesterday, however I had to write Yahoo! and request that the "secret" question be changed because it would have been really easy for some people to get in there - but that’s all fixed. Yahoo! wrote me back, honored the request and everything’s cool with that.

Here’s some more factoids that will probably make you say "whoa".

At the time the ID was registered….

• Yahoo! Mail was under a year old and still in its infancy.
• Yahoo! itself was the #1 search engine on the planet. These days people say "Google it", but back then they said "Yahoo! it".
• Google did not exist (that was 1998)
• Geocities was not owned by Yahoo! (that was in 1999)
• The #1 instant messenger was ICQ.
• The most popular operating system was Windows 95 (remember, Windows 98 didn’t appear until 1998).
• The most popular web browser was Netscape Navigator - which some of you out there have probably never heard of.
• A good dial-up internet service was $29.95 a month - and that was a deal in 1997.
• I did not own any domain names. My first one was registered in 1999.
• Blogging as we know it now did not exist.

A nice stroll down amnesia lane. Ahh…

So why does it exist in Member Profiles now when there was no such thing in ‘97? The answer is that it was "imported" over when Yahoo! decided to implement profiles.

I have "menga" on Yahoo! Messenger and gave it an e-mail account just for kicks - but I’m not changing that profile. Just seeing that 1997 date is way cool. ;-)

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I now have a Florida driver’s license. It was very easy. Go to the office, hand over CT driver’s license, birth certificate, have photo taken, pay twenty bucks, done deal.

And yeah it was that easy.

And the staff was very nice and courteous. Kudos to Florida there.

Back in Connecticut I never really had a problem with the DMV, for the simple reason that I always came prepared. I would make sure (usually by calling them first) that I had all my documentation, write-ups and whatever else I needed before I even walked in the door. I notice that 99% of the time, people have a hard time at the DMV because they didn’t bring with them what they were supposed to bring in the first place. Had they prepared, they would have been in and out lickety split.

My DMV photo, as usual, is awful.

Goes with the course I guess.

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superman stuph

6/7/2006

At work today one of the people I work with was going on about how he wants to go see Superman Returns. This movie is getting a ton of hype. Will I see it? Probably not. The only good movie I’ve ever seen translated from a comic that was worth watching was Spawn. That movie kicked ass in all the right places. Great timing, awesome graphics, an awesome hero and plenty of great comedy to go along with it. I saw that in the theater three times.

So I watched the online trailers at the web site. I was not impressed - save for one character: Lex Luthor. The only reason Lex is cool is because it’s being played by Kevin Spacey. I’ve got to say.. they couldn’t have picked a better bad guy. Kevin is just a phenomenal actor. He’s the only reason I would go to see SR. The way he plays his character (for whatever it is at the time) always impresses me to no end.

So anyway… unless someone begs me to go along with them to see this flick I’ll pick it up when it comes out on DVD. Maybe. I stopped falling for movie hype many years ago. (grin)

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untitled as the day is long

6/9/2006

Right now I’m in kind of a “blah” mood, but I like to keep content fresh here as best I can, so here’s some random stuph:

Pop is doing well and will be here sometime around the middle of next week. I will be going up to Inverness to help him move into his new house. Right now he’s in Massachusetts staying at my sister’s place, but soon enough he and his truck will be on the Auto Train headed down this way.

Trains are cool by the way.

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The updates for version 2.0.21 are finally available for phpBB. An announcement was made on their site that the update was available, yet I couldn’t download it because none of the mirrors had it - but now they do. I’ve updated and things are running as they should be.

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I haven’t really found a good car wash around here that I like yet, but this weekend I might seek one out. I like keeping my vehicle clean but right now it’s outright filthy. I need to clean both the outside and the inside because it’s just nasty.. well.. nasty to me. (grin)

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i had no idea

6/11/2006

Cool link of the moment: Florida Division of Recreation and Parks

Back in Connecticut I made it a point to visit as many state parks as I could before I left, with my personal favorite being Roseland in Woodstock Connecticut (see why here and here). I’ve been trying to find some good ones here in FL but the GPS hasn’t pointed me towards any I really cared for.. so I decided to search for it, and -whammo- they have a whole web site dedicated towards just that. Every single one of them has a phyiscal address I can punch into the GPS so I can go check them out.

So today… is definitely a photo day. ;-) I’m hoping there are some close enough that don’t charge to get in the gate.

One more note, CT also has a site listing all their parks too, however, quite a few of them are missing from the Windham County region. I know for a fact there’s way more than three. (grin)

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