Bike ---posted @ 10:32 PM Thursday, August 5,2004

I've started another bike project. Not like the lowrider Schwin in Fargo. This time its a real bike. I've always wanted a heavy duty cruise/comute type bike, but I've never liked the current options. So I decided on a single speed conversion mountain bike. It took a while to find the right candidate, and I missed out on a pimping 80's Peugeot, but I got a '93 Myata Sportrunner, horizontal drops, steel frame, no frills. now that I've ridden it a bit I have come to the realization that a single speed conversion was a total pipe dream. I need to ride this with the family too. Durring our ride the other day I found myself outrunning everyone while turning a 36/26 ratio (middle front ring, and #2 on the back) I climbed the giant sledding hill at the park in the same gear. I guess I'll have to spring for the SRAM Spectro sooner than I thought. I really hate derailers... The Schwin had a 3-speed rear hub.

jon

126 comments

Back in the Saddle ---posted @ 07:15 AM Friday, July 30,2004

I got a frantic phone call on Wednesday evening for Jayme at the 'Bear. Jayme is one of the production people that work for the talent buyer. There was no soundguy, and she had no idea who was supposed to work. You see Tom who works with me a lot there is in charge of scheduling all the soundguys. He is currently in Japan/Korea visiting his girlfriend (she teaches english in Korea). He had scheduled people for all the gigs, but didn't leave a list of who was working when. I was hoping to stay home and watch Bad Santa, but I ended up having to go down there. It was Blazing Saddles again. It was just me and there was no soundcheck. So for the first 4 songs or so Im running back and forth between consoles mixing in two places at once.

As is normal for their Wednesday shows we had a mechanical bull. It means I've got a huge squirrel cage fan for inflating the airbag around the thing sitting 6 ft. away from me while I mix. You know how every now and then you see something that just strikes you as a little odd. There was a woman in a Muslim headdress who rode the bull... twice.

Carmens birthday was yesterday. We go a baby sitter and went out. We had no idea what to do so we just wandered around downtown Evanston.

And , this just in.

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Hit Counter ---posted @ 07:02 AM Wednesday, July 28,2004

Can anyone recomend a new hit counter that doesn't keep counting everytime I reload my own page.

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Tributes and schtick ---posted @ 02:03 PM Monday, July 26,2004

Interesting weekend. We had a tribute, a schtick, and a tribut/schtick band. The Tribut/Schtick band was Beatallica. You'll have to download some tunes from them to fully understand. I was afraid is was going to be really bad. It was actually quite amusing.

They opend for a Clash tribute band (London Calling) that wasn't half bad. The "Stummer" character showed up with a Peavy Backstage Plus amp. A notoriously uncool amp, but it worked great for his tone. We agreed he should probably get a "My other amp is a '66 Bassman" bumpersticker for it so he doesn't keep scaring soundguys.

The final band of the weekend was a new goofy "theme band" project of the promoters. This one was called "Blazing Saddles" [sigh]. It's pretty rough and tumble, and I was enjoying the classic country tunes, but they did cover Friends in Low Places... I atleast had an excuse to pull out the cowboy hat for the night.

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TEST ---posted @ 02:23 PM Wednesday, July 21,2004

Check One...Two..

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FOH rebuild ---posted @ 01:22 PM Sunday, March 30,2003

Friday we had the return of the Socko/Shag double bill. These are two of the small handfull of good bands that play the Cubby Bear. It's therefore always exciting to have them visit. I dont remember anything out of the ordinary. There was a video guy for the opener (Anne E Dechant) he had the right answer to the most important question. " I've got what ever you want to give me. XLR, quarter inch, even RCA..."

Tom and I went in early on Saturday. Baseball season is coming up you see, and that means we need to get the PA ready for use by DJs. I could write for days on the subject, I wont. We completely repatched the FOH area needless to say. I'ts much better now. It's still more confusing than you average bar manager can deal with, and he doesn't want to pay to have someone come in and babysit. That means we're going to have blown speakers. No way around it with the current system.

We've been ragging on the new PA for a while, but it's come back into the forefront recently. The bar spent $200k on the new rig, but got screwed on the PA cabs, in my oponion. They are nice looking expensive boxes, but dont have to output to handle the room. As it is I have to push the system to the edge for all but the quietest/crappiest of bands. This aint good! Unfortunatly the bar owner doesn't want to deal with it. He owes the contractors money and they owe him some service, and we've had a blown sub driver for over a month now, or maybe even longer I forget.

These guys have a new sub that they offered to test at the Cubby Bear. It should kick the snot out of our current stuff. I just hope we can convince the powers that be to buy them if they cut it.

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New Home ---posted @ 09:07 AM Sunday, March 23,2003

Thanks again Dan. I woke up to a pile of emails today from Dan about this site. I moved it, if you hadn't noticed. I just ftp'd the files yesterday without reconfiguring. I was going to do that today, but that just wasn't good enough for Dan. He had to crack my password to do it, but darn it if it isn't working great. God bless him.

We had five bands last night, nothing exciting. Just a couple suburban dorks in pleather.

You're all probably wondering why I had the site moved. Well... theres another, possibly more interresting side to my work at the Bear. However since there were a couple people who knew about the blog, I couldn't really even talk about it. I'm not going to write out a years worth of history right now, I'll try to add bits as I go.

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Back in the Saddle ---posted @ 05:30 PM Monday, March 17,2003

I did my first gig since we had Emma this Saturday. Supprisingly I hadn't forgotten how to do it. I actually worry about these things. The mix came together really quick. Unfortunatly my ass was out of shape, and ill prepared to handle the required amount of bar stool sitting. The band was Mike and Joe again... They did add Personal Jesus to their set list which I thought odd. They always give me a set list with suggested reverb and delay times on it. It's like the name of the song with an arrow indicating whos singing and then an M with a circle to indicate medium reverb, and 240 to indicate 240ms delay, for example. When I flipped the sheet over there apeared to be a small paragraph next to the Depeche Mode song. Luckily I had time to create a special patch for it durring the set break. I dont get to do this sort of thing often so I really enjoy it when I do. Evidently the song uses a heavy gated reverb with a 100ms pre-delay. That means that the reverb kind of acts like a short echo, but it isnt allowed to trail off like normal, but is cut short by the gate. It worked great by the way. If not for the performance, they sounded just like Depeche Mode without keyboards :)

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New Baby ---posted @ 04:06 PM Saturday, February 22,2003

Check the photo link above for a look at the new baby.

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New server ---posted @ 12:37 PM Saturday, February 8,2003

This is now on a new server. I spent most of the morning trying to get Greymatter reconfigured. It seems fine now. My local path ended up being really strange, and I couldn't see what is was using ftp.

anyhoo... the counter starts fresh. I need to do more pictures soon, and I'll try really hard.

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• Cubs Schedual
• Cubby Bear Calendar
• T.A.D. Article

• Sound Physics Labs
• Crown
• QSC
• Shure
• SoundCraft
• Drawmer
• TCelectronic
• Yamaha
• Whirlwind
• Ultimate / K & M

• Mixerman

• Pro Sound Web L.A.B.
• TourSupply
• TapeWorks
• Camel Traders
• Penn Fabrication
• Middle Atlantic
• Gepco
• ProCo

• Thanks Todd