NAMM

I'm in anaheim at the NAMM show with the AF band. 

We played a killer show at the Hilton hotel. Toward the end of the show I saw some dancing in the front so I grabbed my cabasa and fucking went for it. I had a few people really getting down. I took a tamborine and tried to get some players. So as I'm yelling at the crowd for more dancers I got this girl coming out and really grooving. She kept moving closer to me and I was trying to play it off. Mostly because I was in uniform and I don't want that picture of me slapping some girl's ass to come back and haunt me.

Some friends were down here as well Jeremy, Mike and Rebecca. Jeremy and Mike work at Ken's Pro Sound where I also work occasionally. So they hooked me up with some private invites to the sennheiser party at the house of blues. They had some bands playing I got there late and didn't see the first band but the second band was most of Tower of Power. 

They were killer but boy was it loud. Thank God I had my earplugs. The best part of this party however was the open bar.  And it was going down easy that night. 

We all get some drinks in us and we are chased out of the house of blues. After some debate we decide to walk back to the Hilton to see the Van Halen tribute band, Hot For Teacher. We are walking and Jeremy ducks into a 7-11 and buys some Sierra and starts handing them out. Niko gets the token brown bag. Nate and I wrapped ours in t-shirts that we got from the party. However I was still carrying it like you would a beer. I kept commenting on how cool and refreshing that t-shirt was. We were quite the drunken spectacle rolling down the street. We made it back to the Hilton and had our faces melted by Hot For Teacher. It was really loud but it was Van Halen I don't think there is a way to hear that kind of music quiet. 

We then stumble over to the hotel across the street. Jeremy, Mike, and Rebecca got seperated from us band guys. We decided to bail and get a cab I think those other guys decided to do the same thing. I love live music but some times it's just too fucking loud. 

It was quite and evening for all of us.

LOU

What's The Hold-Up

Sorry. I've been getting back into things here and geeking out at a ridiculous level.

There were alot of things that I have been trying to work on but the two main ones that have been consuming me are the GEEXBOX and Android.

For those of you not up to speed and LEO. Geexbox is a version of linux that runs as a media server. Follow the link above to see when I first hooked it up. Anyway they released an HDish version and it works beautifully on my TV. The problem I was having previously was making the movies stretch to fit the entire screen without black bars on the sides. Well the new version takes care of that so it totally rocks. 

So I wan't to install it rather than have to put a cd in the drive to boot up to it. You can install it to a thumb drive and boot it from there. So my idea was to wire a switch to the top of the computer that was wired to a usb drive inside the computer so I could turn off the connection and still boot into windows. The switch worked beautifully but I could not get the computer to boot up into geexbox from the thumb drive. So after 4 beers and hours I gave in. It still boots from CD but I was hoping for a slicker situation.

Now android has been working great. My wife's phone stopped taking a charge. Since we had the same model phone I gave her mine and bought another phone on craigslist. It's an HTC smartphone which I am not into. But I loaded a version of linux that had been developed for running Google's new OS called android. It's really slick. Not everything works properly and it's a little quirky but really cool. And extremely geeky and not cool at the same time.

One other geeky thing I've been up to. I got a new ipod touch and wired it into my car. I cannibalized a microphone connector from an accesory made for the iphone. It has a button that lets you pause and do next and previous track. So I mounted a small button on my dash so that I have these controls without having to try and operate it on the ipod while driving. 

Enough geeking out already!!!!!

I'll post some pictures when I get my camera back from Niko (more on that later)

LOU