Tuesday October 8, 2002 at 08:27 pm

***BE WARNED THIS IS A LONG POST***

Damn the weekend, and all it’s lack of entertainment value, and definitely damn on whatever store I bought the crappy coax cable, which after 2 yrs has somehow decided to recess itself within it’s housing without ever being taken out of the packaging, but more on all that later, I shall regress to Saturday now.

Granted I always try and make plans to work on the weekends, for at least 4 hrs, recently those attempts have all failed to the wayside of extended sleep periods or other more eventful activities. So this Saturday should not have come to a surprise when I simply didn’t go in. The surprising thing was Tom had been randomly calling me since 9:30 to get up and go do stuff. I finally decided to get up when I a flash of adrenaline, I realized I had forgotten to purge my crates of wax and assemble and updated set, as apparently the existing one was failing.

Mike was already at work, which was good seeing as I sprang from my bed, like I was late for the 1^st day of work whilst in mid air having the following thought process conversation.

“Hey dumb ass, your leg still has a micro fracture, how’s it going feel when u hit the ground?”

“Well I’ll just land on the other leg. Now who’s the dumb ass?”

“Well seeing as you jumped off the right side of the bed, towards the door, and the wall is pretty much making its presence known with every millimeter, and if you turn your attention to the bottom right hand corner of your field of vision, you see a nice crate of records residing in your proposed landing zone…hmm and those edges do look kind of sharp!”

“DAMN IT Bobby! Ah ha a quick little…. nope that’s not gunna work. Hmm, how bout… Ah hell…a little tweak there, and a little spin there. Yep, that’s it.”

And with that I landed with a KATHUMP, pull a nice, late 360 landing on one leg, braced by the other, and gracefully supported by the wall, with fingertips.

��������� “Impressive”

��������� “You don’t wanna step to this!”

So now that’s I’ve made it out of my room, I emptied both bags, and tried pulling all non relevant wax from the selection. Then called Tom up and came up with a game plan of how we were going to do things.

Apparently Chung, the Dj who was putting the whole thing together, did a piss poor job of it. He scheduled a party from 11am to whenever, but didn’t get off work till 1pm. According to Tom he was hoping to get out of work early, as it was now 12:30 and he was still no where to be seen and yet to call tom, that idea seemed to be shot to hell. Needless to say his planning skills, were lacking, and would be proven again and again throughout the day by the following.

1)���� When we arrived there was no table setup, and no arrangements to obtain one

2)���� Upon suggesting an old skool method of using milk crates as a stand, there lackluster effort, was begging to show, as they turned to Tom and I to solve the problem.

3)���� After Tom and I make a quick trip to the convenient store across the street and closer to the location, which they initially passed up, and recovered 4 crates, they inquired about the use of the coffin. (this request was the only one I thought about providing on, simply because I wanted to run a 4 table setup, so if it did suck, we could easily have a small scratch session)

4)���� After putting together a completely ghettoized stand, his crew neglected the fact that we were at a pool, and were forced to move the entire contraption back three feet after a resident decided to perform a cannonball in the direction of the tables. I personally believe he did this intentionally, but since it wasn’t my equipment, I really wasn’t phased by it, and simply made the suggestion to move everything back.

5)���� There were no bathroom provisions made at the location, and if it were a bigger event would have had everyone walking half way through the complex to the apartment of one of Chung’s friends.

Now up to this point, I thought things couldn’t get worse, but then again, I’ve been wrong before

6)���� After the cops showed up due to a noise complaint, and proceed to check all drinkers for id validation, we find out that no one has obtained permission form the city, or the condo complex to have this little gathering, which at this point could be heard at least ¼ mile away.

So now that Tempe’s finest had paid us a visit, we attempted to keep the music lou7d enough to be worth playing, while low enough not

At this point Tom, pretty much packed up his wax, and took it out to the car to avoid, any kind of obvious association other than being a simply admirer. I took his lead and did the same but simply set mine to the side. Chung on the other hand continued to play, and gradually raised the volume up over the last hour or so.

Now I regress to my set, and my appeal process. My set was much better than the last and definitely better than the 1^st pool party, but still could have done better. I think the main downfall from achieving a solid 8 on my set was due to the fact that I neglected to plan. Granted there was a time, where I looked down about planning a set and was all about the freestyle chaos theory, meaning play whatever you grab out the crate at the time. However in my wiser days, I see a planned set will relieve much of the stress related to finding a follow up song. Now my slight organization did pay off as I didn’t have a grip of hip hop tracked mixed in with the house, but still needs to be further modified. The 2^nd issues was, practice, I need, no have to find some time to setup at the new apt and get some practice time in, granted there was only one legitimate off mix out of my hr set, the 2^nd was due to one of Chung’s records skipping during the breakdown mix.

So over all I need to:

1)���� Organize my wax, and create a solid play set, along with a backup, for variations sake.

2)���� Get off my ass and practice this week.

Now for my appeal process, when asked I asked Tom to critique my set, as usual, he initially gave me a 7 out of 10 which was definitely good for someone who hasn’t played in public in a while and hasn’t practiced in god knows how long. He then vetoed that decision and gave me 6 out of 10. This was due to the 2 off beat mixes, and song selection, which was completely understandable. He said he initially graded me on a padded scale, but then after further consideration revamped it to a more appropriate scale, resulting in the 6 out of 10.

After further analyzing I appealed the 6 for the original 7 based on these facts:

1)���� It was Chung’s record that Skipped not mine, and I wouldn’t play a track that skipped and if I did it would only be for the beats and would mix out before the damaged area was capable of throwing the mix off.

2)���� Tom had been manipulating the table with the song being played; throwing my concentration of on more than a few tracks thus resulting in a possible off beat mix as the original song was getting back to speed.

3)���� Even with the off beat mix, the level of cuts performed on a non-battle mixer would have made up for it.�

So with taking all this into perspective, I had my official scored raised back to the original 7. Not bad for no practicing since the 1^st gig over 3 weeks ago.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful, Tom didn’t even go on even though he attempted to as we were breaking down the equipment. The party was to go until 6pm, but since there were only 12 people there we closed shop at about 5:30pm. I dropped Tom off and bounced home, we both came home, we both agreed to likely not spin at anymore of Chung’s gathering unless it was a on a larger scale and not just his little crew. I know it sounds phucked up, but they only come to see him spin so there’s really no point in us being there, when we could have setup in some random park and drew in a crowd of our own. Besides that I feel kind of bad when I hear him doing lil off beat stabs in his mixes, and then I follow him with more high end, crabs, flares, and soon orbits, which thanks to remembering Cerveza’s comment, I practiced during my set.

I don’t feel that bad however, because he has built in effects on his mixer and can flawlessly work them into his mixes. On the other hand there is something to say about a dj that can make his effects with just tables and wax, and one that has to use presets built into an effect processor. Almost like the difference between a drummer and a drum machine programmer, have the same outcome, one is the pioneer, and the other is the innovator, modifying and enhancing the art. I simply like to think of it as, without the pioneer there would be nothing for them to build upon. Okay enough of me being harsh and trying to explain this, I’ll save it for another time, when I can go into further details.

So I get home and Mike is itchy to get out of the house, whereas I’d wanted to get back to the house, so I could sit and rest my now throbbing ankle and leg. I Planned on formatting my system this weekend, but was now to lazy to actually take it down, instead I put it off for Sunday and began backing up everything I needed and transferring it to another drive. Apparently Mike was going insane and decided we need to go out, granted I was hungry for something to eat, but had no clue as to what I wanted. We ended up going to the Mexican place right behind the apartment. It was actually decent for once; the last time I was there I got sick from the boiled chicken. Why it is no one can simply grill a chicken, bake a chicken, BBQ a chicken, hell microwave a chicken, no they boil the chicken meat, then toss it and all the water in a tortillas, pop it in a oven to brown the tortilla, and say the whole thing was baked, all to have it ooze all over my plate with the 1^st rupture by the fork. If I wanted chicken soup, I would have stayed home so this time I specified grilled chicken, with no beans and light sauce. Other than the fact there consideration of light sauce is half a bucket instead of the full bucket, it was okay.

Thinking it was going to be a laid back Saturday night, we decided to hit up blockbuster for HALO for the X-Box, and I looked for a DVD copy of Scratch. Unfortunately neither was available so we headed to Video Paradise, which seems to have more, hard to find titles, on the way Mike began letting the wheel drift. I’ve noticed this seems to be a common occurrence when riding in his stratus. Just when I was about to say something in regards to it, I felt the thump, and knew this time it was for a legitimate reason, another flat.

This is his 4^th flat in the last 6 months, and of course no, apparent obstructions was found thus once again leading me to believe that the 17’s with 40’s was a bad combination. We ended up sitting there for over an hr, waiting on roadside assistance. No you may think it was pretty lame that 2 guys are sitting on the road for assistance with a flat, but trust me, if you’ve ever tried jacking up a car with the POS jacks Dodge provides you would to.

Finally the guy showed up, and we had made plans to simply address him has Bubba no matter what his name was. That plan was shot to hell when his response to “Hey what’s up, how’s it going?” was “Nothing….nothing at all”, apparently our call had kept him away from something he’d rather be doing and he was obviously pissed about it. 10 minutes later we were headed back to the crib, so much for uneventful.

When I got home I decided to try out the PMCIA cards my dad have given me from his old job on my laptop. Unfortunately the token ring adapter just wouldn’t mesh with the 10/100 LAN I was running. Finally frustrated with swapping cables and trying a myriad of drivers, I plugged the 56k modem card in and was about to give it a try, when I heard the plug come out of the wall jack, the clip had broken. Thinking I was stuck I hoped there was something else I could hard wire together to make it stick. While in the process of searching I found a 28.8K PMCIA card, figuring something’s better than nothing, I popped it in and ran into another wall. I had to dialup service to use, and I couldn’t access my emails with the corporate dialup # and logins because it was safely tucked away on a drive that was now disconnected to prevent accidental formatting, yes I’ve done that once before, so I take no chances now. I broke down and download a copy of the NetZero setup file and slapped it onto a floppy to transfer over to the laptop, and setup a new account. Now for being a free ISP with a huge banner running across the top of your screen this came in handy for a “in a pinch” situation. Too bad the modem still sucked and I spent the next few hours between backing up my desktop and playing MahJong on MSN, which I have become quite addicted to now, finally crashing at 6am.

Sunday

The initial plan was to work on my desktop and laptop, mainly backup, and reformat my desktop, and get my laptop on the LAN and updated with the latest hot fixes and drivers. The battle never really started as a battle, it started as a small annoyance, at 1^st I couldn’t get the Token Ring adapter to work the night before, so I broke down and accessed no matter what I would need a new adapter for the newer laptop as well as the older one. So I called Tom to see if he wanted to roll to Fry’s and possibly Guitar Center and hoped in the Grandma mobile and headed over to his crib. Halfway there I noticed a small puff of white smoke behind me every time I took off from a light or a stop. She was trying to tell me something, she was on her last leg, unless a possible major overall took place.

I called Tom and cancelled the plans for tech shopping and headed to the 7 day a week Firestone, as no other auto place was open. The news was of course expectedly bad, and of course it would take the greater part of a day to determine what was wrong. So feeling the pressures of get it now or forever hold your peace took over and I stopped by an Office Max and picked up a Belkin PMCIA 10/100 adapter.

Finally prepared I swapped out cards and within 3 minutes was online with the laptop, and already updating. It was a little after 7 now, and I still had barely scratched formatting and reinstalling the desktop, so after hiding the cables and making room on my desk, I set out to take down the 1.2 ghz XP giant. I’m always a little nervous about formatting a system. I think it’s simply because if something goes wrong I may not be able to get back up and running, and the fact that this has happened before, especially if it’s been awhile since you’ve used the operating systems CD’s. Everything began to look fine until, it came to reinstalling the OS, the CD wasn’t being read, so I tried another, and it too was failing. My worst fears for this kind of thing were starting to come true, okay maybe not my worst fears, simply because in the event none of the XP CD’s worked I still had 2000 pro and 98 SE to fall back, fortunately it didn’t come to this, and I was soon, back on my way or so I thought.

The 1^st boot seemed good, except for a small glitch I had never noticed happen before on any of the previous installs, and I dismissed it has it testing the video adapter. I should have stopped it then, the entire install failed, with corrupted files scattered all over the drive. No problem thought it had enough files to read the other drives in NTFS format, so I simply shut down connected the drives, formatted in FAT32 the main partition of the C: drive, and installed directly from the backup drives.

Up and running at last I almost fell into the trap that I’ve seen most people fall into. Installing what you want before you install what you need. So I canceled the installs of several non essential programs except for Winamp3, which I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling anyway due to some weird bug issues, and proceed to download and install over 30 updates for XP alone, and another 10 for my video card, soundcard, Smart Card Reader, CDRW drive, keyboard, and optical mouse.

Relief everything was working, except there was still static from the soundcard when video processor was under heavy load. Figuring this was something I would have to live with until I replaced it or the sound card.

I finally broke down and ran the TV cable from the wall jack to the back of my system, so I could watch TV in my room, as well as attempt video capturing and recording using the “TV On Demand” feature of my ATI All In Wonder 128 Pro video card. Scrounging about for a short Coaxial cable I found one I had never even opened, and was amazed at how pliable it was, normally coaxial cable is stiff and hard to manipulate around corners, where this one was quite opposite. I later found out a possibility as too why this was, as when after a brief bit of troubleshooting why it wasn’t working, I unplugged it to find that the internal cable at the end connected to my computer was no where to be found. Now I was extremely frustrated, because I had no idea where any of my other coaxial cables were, or if I even had any other except for the 150 ft monstrosity residing in the depth of my cable bag, buried beneath a plethora of other various cables, adapters, connecters, splices, and a door knob. I pulled it out and question whether it was actually worth it, but since I had put it off since we moved in, it was now or never, and at least later I could replace it with a shorter version once everything was setup and working.

The end result being:

1)���� Fresh Install of Windows XP Professional

2)���� All ATI software installed and working with all TV channels available

3)���� TV cable and LAN cables are now run to the system and working

4)���� Laptop is updated with full connectivity to LAN

Now all that’s left is to:

1)���� Disconnect all the cables

2)���� Move the 450 from the other room, to the cubby hole under the desk in place of the subwoofer

3)���� Rearrange the shelving on the desk to accommodate a the 15” monitor

4)���� Re run all the cables from the wall jack to the other side of the room so I, but mainly Mike, don’t trip on any of them or yank them out of the wall.

5)���� Rearrange the bundle of wires on the other side of the desk, now being called the connection center somewhere else so the laptop will have a station for itself

6)���� Acquire full connectivity and file sharing on all systems within my room, creating a sub domain

7)���� Setup remote access on all systems and verify remote connectivity from outside the LAN

8)���� Setup all systems in the apartment on LAN for limited file and print sharing

Now to the big news, yeah like this hasn’t been long enough has it is. We’re getting another roommate. Basically mike is feeling the financial pressures ensued by the promotion that included a pay cut, and is looking for some way to relieve the stress. Granted with my nice hospital bill still unpaid for and breathing down my neck, and the grandma mobile now, giving signs of a large dump in the near future, I too could use a little financial relief. So Mike suggested having his co worker move in to the 3^rd bedroom, there was a small matter of breaking up the cost, simply because Mike thought everyone should pay 300, including himself. I on the other hand was not down for such matter since Mike has the master bedroom and his own bathroom, so there was no way I was paying the same price has him, for barely half the same space. One thing I did realize as well is that even though I have the covered parking, I’m still going to have to share a bathroom with this guy, which as long as he’s not a slob shouldn’t be an issue. But then again since Mike’s bathroom is bigger I think that maybe they should share his bathroom, as there is much more pantry space for any personal toiletries he uses. So anyway he’s moving in this weekend, so I’ve� got to find some place to put my extra crates of wax and some clothes, which I think I may try and sell the unused wax on eBay or something.

Well that’s it, my big ass 6 page update from the weekend!