Archive for the 'blog' Category
7/2/2008
I got a blast from the past which to date is the oldest contact yet: An e-mail from an ex-girlfriend I last knew almost 14 years ago. Yes this a girl I used to know before my 20s and has now found me at 33.
We traded a few e-mails, then traded phone numbers, then spoke yesterday on the phone. Very cool. She remembered quite a bit about me. During the conversation I remembered things about her too. It was interesting, it was ultra-nostalgic and it was surreal to speak with someone that I last knew when I was a teen (and so was she).
She also holds the distinction of being a girl I met online - but not via internet. Via BBS. Talk about old-school. “Wild Child” was her handle.
Something she said to me really hit a chord. She asked if I got married and all that. I said that I didn’t but I still look pretty decent. She said yeah, that’s why I still look decent and guys who don’t settle down don’t get fat.
That made me think for a moment. I guess I really haven’t ever settled down. And when will I? I have no idea.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The best part about chatting with her is that she was really nice to me and I really needed that right now. I’ve been in the dumps concerning dating recently and my opinion of women soured. But then I get a call, I am told things in kind and yeah, it put a smile on my face combined with a lot of warm feelings.
Her words said to me “Rich, all girls are not bad.” This is true. She’s not bad at all. Never was.
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7/1/2008
Recently I’ve considered closing my 2 YouTube channels permanently and moving my video elsewhere. There are plenty to choose from.
My reason for wanting to switch is for two 2 reasons:
- YouTube has been a paid-only club for some time now.
- The YouTube community is, without a shadow of a doubt, the absolute worst internet community that exists.
The paid-only club
Every YouTuber’s dream is to become a “partner”, i.e. to get paid by YouTube (Google). The problem with that is that you’re not a videomaker anymore; you’re an actor.
Let me clue you in on what happened to more than a few of these “actors”.
Hollywood fast realized that YouTube is in essence nothing more than a public access channel on steroids. Same crapola, much larger scale. As the old saying goes, you can’t polish a turd - it’s still shit.
When Hollywood put a few of these YouTube celebs on the small screen, no one bought it. Absolutely none of the internet fame translated to a wide broadcast audience the way people thought it would. Every single attempt to make it work crashed and burned. You can’t sell “internet cute” on television. It just doesn’t work, period.
As a result, there are more than a few YouTube celebs that moved to California who have come to the realization that going there was a huge mistake. Some still have a few bucks in their pocket but are losing money. Others are close to being penniless.
Mentally speaking, a few of these celebs are completely off their rocker at this point. They figured “Hey, I’m famous on the internet. I can do anything I want.” No, you can’t. Did you not remember that the line between the internet and real world is very, very thick? Guess not. When you have early-20s kid + internet fame, that kid thinks he or she rules the world. Nope. That’s not the way it works.
If any one of you YouTube celebs reads this (and it’s the internet so hey, it could happen), here’s my suggestion to you if you moved to California and have found it’s not a bowl of cherries there: Pack up now and leave. L.A. is a tough town that chews people up and spits them out for breakfast. Go home, rest, live normally to the best of your ability and try again in a few years if you feel like it. It is not an admission of defeat, it’s being realistic.
The worst community on the internet
Everyone hates the YouTube community, myself included. In fact it’s a stretch to even call it a community. A more accurate description would be “a bunch of fuckwits that just figured out how to use MySpace yesterday”. Give me a break.
Wherever I decide to place my videos in the future is going to be somewhere that’s reliable that has little or no commentary allowed at all. Possibly Internet Archive. That site has no “cool factor” to it whatsoever AND THAT’S FINE BY ME. Old school is good school as far as I’m concerned.
So whenever I get to it I’ll get to it. Yeah, sounds vague, but whatever. Not a pressing matter at this point. YouTube has run its course for me. Time to put my time and effort into something better.
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6/29/2008
A few internet-specific things I’ve been doing recently:
On my YouTube channel I set a bunch of videos to private on purpose. Mostly video game specific ones. I kept the oldie-but-goodies but shelved the rest because in all seriousness, a YouTube channel full of nothing but computer screen shots, video games and the like is frickin’ boring. No one wants to see that crap and moreover no one cares.
I uploaded a crapload of Buick-specific stuff to my Flickr photostream. I’m finding that yeah, Flickr really does kick ass. I can see now why people dig it so much. It’s just stupidly easy to manage your photos on there especially if you have a ton of them (I have well over 400 just in my account alone).
My Buick site has undergone a minor facelift. It was due because some of the information there was a bit outdated and/or incorrect, so I fixed all that up. By a turn of good fortune I stumbled across the entire 1975 Buick promotional booklet used in dealerships and posted it. Because of this I now want another Buick in my collection, the ‘75 Skyhawk. I had no idea the car could look that good, but yeah, it does.
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6/29/2008
This one starts off with a story. Of course y’know that I went to Guitar Center and they had 2 things available for guitar multi-effect rackmount units: Jack and shit. And Jack left town. By the way, if you want to hear my initial review of this unit and skip the story of how I got it, scroll down until you see My review.
I head over to Sam Ash in Tampa to see if they had any rackmount units.
First I’ll say that it’s WAY easier to find your way around Sam Ash compared to Guitar Center. The store is better laid out and it’s easy to find stuff.
So anyway I march over to the pro audio section and talk with a guy. I ask him about multi-effect rackmount units. He does have some and they’re plugged in and ready-to-try. Unfortunately none were guitar-based. The guy says to go over to the guitar section and ask around.
So I did.
I talk to another guy. He says “Yeah, we have one.”
One?
Yep, just one model. A DigiTech. But he can’t remember the name of the model (which is not a big deal because they have weird-ass model names anyway). I tell him to see if he can look up the price on the computer.
He tries to look it up. Can’t find it. Then he calls over a second guy. He can’t find it in the computer either.
The first guy says “Let me go into the warehouse and get one and then we can look it up. Can you wait a few minutes?”
I agreed and waited.
Five minutes later he comes back with a DigiTech GSP1101.
I ask the price expecting it to be at least 900 bucks.
It was $499.
This honestly shocked me because I remember when these things sold for over $1000 not so long ago.
I ask if there’s any way I could do a no-interest/no-payment deal with Sam Ash credit.
He says yes; they have a promotion going on right now where I can get no-interest/no-payment for a year(!) and he’ll take 100 bucks off the price right there since there’s some “midnight madness” sale going on.
400 bucks is the absolute cheapest you could get this for. And I don’t have to pay one red cent for a whole frickin’ year?
I bought it.
My review
I really don’t know if I like this unit or not.
Here’s what’s happened so far:
When I first plugged it into my mixer board it sounded like absolute shit and couldn’t figure out why.
I read the manual and it says you have to program the unit for what type of output you want. A-ha. So I set it to “mixer” mode (which it wasn’t).
But it still sounded like shit.
I swapped out a cable figuring that was the problem. Nope. Still sounded bad.
I turned it off and on again and it magically started sounding proper.
Weird? Yes. I guess we’ll see if it continues to sound correct.
As far as the way it sounds, it’s definitely above-par. The GSP1101 can basically make any sound you want, emulate any cabinet you want and is chock full of goodies. There’s your standard choruses, delays and so on, but there’s also a really decent envelope filter, wah, parametric EQ and a whole bunch of other stuff. In addition it has a USB port so you can control it via Windows. Very cool. Although I wish the interface program was designed better because there’s certain stuff where you still have to manually adjust via the unit itself.
I’m not sure whether I want to keep it. I made sure to ask several times what the return policy is for Sam Ash. It’s 30 days as long as I have all the original packaging. Whether I return it or keep it is indeterminate at this point.
Looking for rackmount? Get used to disappointment.
It used to be that rackmount guitar effects were really easy to find. Rocktron had some, Alesis had some, DigiTech (obviously) had some, ZOOM did, etc. This was not difficult to locate.
The guitar effect industry today champions pedals, pedals, more pedals and pedal-boards. Rackmount effects - which are the best by the way - are almost buried to the point where newer guitar players don’t even know they exist.
What makes pedals suck?
Pedals suck because you have to play it thru an amp for it to sound any good. What if you live in a place where you can’t make noise? What do you do then? You can’t plug it direct into a mixer board because it sounds like absolute shit.
So how do you record your riffs? You don’t. You have to bring your amp to a controlled environment, hope it sounds good that day and put down a track or two. And it takes so much fucking effort it’s almost not worth it. You have to plug in the amp, set up the mics, route those to the mixer board, spend time adjusting the mics for the proper sound, blah blah frickin’ blah. SCREW THAT. I want to record and record now.
A rackmount unit is the only way to do it. Otherwise you’re forced to do it the old-fashioned way that wastes massive amounts of time.
Why are rackmount units so buried?
I have no idea. The guy at Sam Ash said yeah, more than a few guitar players come in the store looking for them only to find that none are there. The one I bought was one of two they had in stock.
Sam Ash? Guitar Center? Could you stock more of these? You’ve got buyers waiting…
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6/28/2008
Yesterday I headed to Guitar Center to pick up a set of acoustic strings. I got my set successfully but was thoroughly disgusted at the rest of the hardware there. More on that in a moment. I wrote a new song called “Life in D” and put it on my Sabbathized MySpace page. Check it out if you like.
A friend of mine that lives close by IM’ed me. I said I didn’t feel like internet-chatting so I asked if it was okay if she called me up. She did; we spoke for a while. Just general this’n'that stuff. She’s a sweetie. Very cool girl. It just so happens she’s a bit of a history nerd which is pretty darn cool because I’m an Americana nerd. I made note that I feel sort of embarrassed that I haven’t been to Busch Gardens since moving to FL even though it’s literally less than 2 miles away from me. Yeah. Seriously. So hopefully sometime before the summer is over she’ll agree (fingers crossed) to take a trip with me there. I don’t even care if the place sucks. I just want to go just to say “Yeah, I went. Been there, done that.” :-)
Okay, here’s why Guitar Center Tampa pissed me off:
The staff was cool as usual, no problems there. What I did have issue with was the selection for what I was looking for. And what is it that I wanted? A rackmount guitar effects signal processor. My Alesis Quadraverb GT is really old and the backlight on the dispay doesn’t work anymore, so I was in the market for another. I just wanted something simple.
Now here’s the deal. GC has these on their web site and they’re relatively cheap, like this one or this one or this one, blah blah you get the idea.
Want to know how many GC had in the store? NONE. These aren’t out-of-stock items. I’m saying they literally had zero rackmount units. Oh sure, they had pedals and stompboxes. They had those galore. But true-blue rack effects? Nonexistent.
This pissed me off because a signal effects processor is something you have to hear before you buy it; it’s very unwise to buy one “sound unheard” so to speak.
I remember not so long ago that GC used to have these things stocked, plugged in and ready-to-try before buying. Not right now they don’t.
I’m seriously considering going to Sam Ash in Tampa. It’s just under 10 miles from me right off Dale Mabry highway. One can only hope they actually have some rackmount effect units there that I could actually, y’know.. HEAR.
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6/27/2008
I broke down and bought a digital clock yesterday with an alarm on it. I was using my cell phone as my alarm but the problem is that you can’t hit “snooze” unless the phone is open. And if you press a button the snooze doesn’t work. So one trip and five bucks later I have a digital clock with an amber display.
Why amber?
Because I don’t like red on clocks. It looks cheesy to me for some reason. But other colors like amber don’t.
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6/26/2008
A few changes are coming soon to menga.net so I’m writing this to alert my readers so they don’t freak out.
The blog will remain mostly the same but I’m going to divide the site into separate (sorta/kinda) sections for easier access. It’s really difficult to describe how these sections will work, but once you see them you’ll say “Oh. This is really easy.” Yeah, that’s the whole point. :-)
Recently I’ve been checking out some of the more popular tech bloggers out there and it’s my feeling they’ve got their design wrong. And I mean completely wrong. These supposedly smart guys who use all the social media they can possibly get their grubby mitts on moosh it into their personal web sites. And yeah, it’s a big pile of mush turning their sites into slow-loading behemoths that piss people off left and right.
These guys embed everything. Flickr, YouTube, Ustream, blah blah frickin’ blah. WRONG. Haven’t these guys ever heard of text links? You know.. hyperlinks? Yeah, those things. Evidently this is a foreign concept to tech bloggers. Social media tries so desperately to make sites that load nice’n'quick and are easy to use. But then the tech guys MASH all this stuff into a sidebar.
Again: Wrong.
Link it. That’s what links are for. If you want to identify the links easily, put a little icon next to it. Really, really simple guys.
My upcoming semi-redesign is going to weigh in heavily on hyperlinks. They load fast, they work and there’s no need to embed every single frickin’ thing in the universe on a sidebar. Want to get creative? You can use little icons. Those are okay because they’re quick. But once you start mashing in a crapload of JavaScript and Flash… sheesh. Haven’t we learned enough about design over the years to know not to do that? Have you guys ever seen Web Pages That Suck? Go read that. Then bow your head in shame and redesign your site so it LOADS FAST for a change.
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6/24/2008
I filled up my gas tank. Cost was $46.50. The price at BP was $3.89 a gallon if you paid cash so I went to the ATM first to grab some before filling up. The price appears to have plateaued for the time being. Around where I live it hovers between $3.89 and $3.95 depending where you go.
Speaking of gas, my “green” article made it on Yahoo Finance. Evidently the fact Florida isn’t very CNG-friendly concerning cars is a big deal with many (and I can totally understand why).
Someone starting banging on my door at around 9:30pm-ish. I didn’t answer. I think it was a neighbor. Neighbors always have a specific type of knock because they don’t knock, they bang. VERY LOUDLY. And they’ll do it at least 3 times. Normal people don’t bang, they knock politely. Furthermore a neighbor almost never visits just to say “hi”; they always want something, i.e. they’re moochers. No, you can’t have a cigarette. No, I have no money to give you. Bug off.
My sleep pattern is messed up again where I’m staying up all night. It really bothers me when this happens and usually takes about a week or so before I shift back to regular hours. The only time it really serves an advantage to me is when I do the live show for work because it usually goes past 10pm.
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6/22/2008
Yesterday I switched my phone plan to a bare-ass minimum deal, that being 50 anytime minutes and 250 weekend/night minutes per month.
Some would read this and shudder in horror. There’s no WAY I could live with a plan that crappy! Well, I certainly can, and I’ll tell you why:
$20 a month.
Does it sound crappy to you now? :-)
To those who wonder why I don’t switch to pre-paid, I would if I didn’t have to incur the stupid early termination charge. Fortunately there’s legislation in effect going on right now that will hopefully cure that ill. But until that happens I have to stay on the post-paid because there’s no effing WAY I’m paying $155 just to switch to pre-paid.
I basically almost never use my cell phone ever since I got digital land-line. At best I may use 20 minutes a month, and that’s being generous. Not only do I barely talk on the thing but I never send text messages either. I have always hated them and purposely have my phone set to BLOCK any that come in (save for the bill notices).
The reason I hate cell phones is because I remember people bitching about Ma Bell.
Prior to 1984, the phone company was tyrannical in all senses of the word. One company ruled it all. Then the government stepped in and broke them up. But prior to the demonopolization the phone company was just absolute shit. I remember speaking with BBS Sysops about it that lived thru it all. Not one of them has anything nice to say about the phone company. And by the way, they call it “the phone company” because Bell was literally the only one. And it was bad. People were spending 50 bucks a month - IN THE EARLY 80s - just to make calls ACROSS TOWN.
Cell phone plans are almost EXACTLY as bad as Ma Bell was in the early 80s. In reality they’re worse. Not only are you paying for a cheap plastic toy (and they’re all toys no matter what anyone says) to make your calls with that breaks in 2 years, you’re locked into a contract and have to deal with spotty connectivity.
What’s worse is that people think 40 bucks a month for a cell phone plan is cheap. CHEAP?! You pay 40 bucks for the privilege of using a toy that has no guarantee of completing a call. That’s not cheap. That’s called getting ripped off.
Seriously, think about it. You probably don’t know a single person without a cell phone, right?
Wouldn’t you think with all the new customers all the wireless carriers get on an almost daily basis that the plan prices would go down? Of course they don’t. Instead you’re going to pay the same rate for the life of your plan and never will you get a break - and that’s exactly how the carriers want it to be. They’ll keep signing up customers left and right and getting more and more cash, but you’ll never see any savings from their increased revenues.
Maybe I could understand if cell phones were only for a limited market - but they’re not. Kids use cell phones now and have for several years. Everyone has one and there are more and more people getting them every day.
That being the case, all post-paid cell phone plans are nothing short of highway robbery.
I’m still getting ripped off even though I’ll only be paying $20 a month. I know this. But I have to have that phone in case I need to call someone on the road so I’m forced to keep it. Otherwise I’d be more than happy to toss the phone in the nearest river.
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6/21/2008
Well I finally finished moving all my photos to Flickr. So far I’m happy with the service, but my only complaint is that the geotagging completely sucks. You can’t enter in longitude/latitude coordinates and the map is crappy at best compared to Live Maps or Google Maps. Other than that the service is a-okay. Someone even favorited one of my photos (cool!) :-)
The Flickr community is really cool and I should have started using the service a long, long time ago but was insistent that I host my own photos. I realize now that a photo-hosting service like Flickr is a much better way to go.
My “Photostream” (as Flickr calls it) is here if you want to check it out.
I’m really happy that on many photos you’re finally able to see the big-big versions of them because they look so much better.
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