Best scam I've seen in a while!

Wow, wish I had thought of this one... check out this 'Auction Site':

http://www.for10cents.com

It's ostensibly a competitor for ebay. ONLY DIFFERENCE IS, when you bid, you LOSE the money you bid whether you win the auction or not!!!! Example:

20" iMac that went for $139.26

So in this auction, both the winner AND the runner up paid about the same amount to the auction site! And then, you have the third place loser who paid ALMOST as much, and so on down the line. So basically, this site is a mashup between ebay and a roulette wheel. Is this even legal?! Either way, it certainly is hilarious!

So what's the best internet scam YOU'VE seen recently?

What We Were

Weekend was fun and constructive. Or rather it was rife with organizational effort, if not with new constructions. True, I did get some good work done on a new song (not by C.O.G.) that C.O.G. is performing on. But most of the rest of the time was spent on some desperately needed cleaning up of the physical locale and the virtual one, as well as mixing for local ska band 'The Local Skank' late Sat. night.

The Local Skank ruled the Hi Ho Lounge Saturday night... that was about the best performance I've ever heard from them (despite Melissa's severe burn on her arm!) Hopefully they start pulling more people soon... they certainly deserve to. One request - their drummer Darryl had BETTER cut a hole in the front of his bass drum if he doesn't want trouble next time!!! I'm not joking!

Sunday I spent a bit of time indulging in a long delayed project that I'd been meaning to get to - remastering an album by a favorite old local metal band that I've worked with on and off for the last two decades - Dead Rebecca's 'What We Are'. I learned much of what I know about live mixing from working with this band - Mike Martin's technique with drum EQ was a revelation to me at the time. I still remember buying the cassette (remember those?) of this album from Will Fey, the band's lead singer, in front of the Sandbar at UNO. This album was very well recorded (esp. considering HOW it was recorded) but never really mastered properly until now, and unfortunately the master DAT tape of the album was left at the duplication house, which subsequently went out of business.

'What We Are' was recorded in 1989 by their drummer Mike & their bassist Eddie, who had left the group by the time I started mixing for them in 1990, and been replaced by Jimmy Legnon. The recording was done Beatles-style, using a 4 track and a 2 track, by recording drums and bass first, bouncing down to 2 track, then back to two tracks on the 4 track and adding guitars, then lead guitars, then vocals etc. Fortunately they had a really high quality 4 track which they apparently ran at maximum speed for extended frequency response, and a Sony PCM digital 2 track converter, which is a device that turns audio into a CD quality digital 'picture' representation that can be recorded on a videotape, then converted back into sound when the tape is played back. This is how digital recordings were made in the late 70's and early 80's, before the advent of DAT machines or modern computers. About ten years ago, the PCM instrumental reduction master was found and given to me. I filed it away and didn't really do anything with it, as it barely played due to a tape crease, and also didn't contain any vocals.

Until last week, when Emmet Mayer, longtime friend of the band, located a still-wrapped copy of the published cassette of the album! I immediately asked him NOT to try to transfer it himself (on a USB tape deck), but to hand it over to me for a high quality transfer on my equipment. Which I did, adjusting the head azimuth for best hf response, then recording it to the computer. Then the fun began... with my new pristine copy of the cassette for the vocals and the digital master of the instrumental version of the album, I've managed to integrate the sources together to form a cohesive reconstruction of each song. Steinberg 'FreeFilter' adaptive EQ was used to match the analog to the digital source. The analog copy is also stretched in each case to phase-match the digital copy. Once the vocal-less digital and analog versions were tonally matched, I could edit back and forth between them, utilizing the pure digital sound for the intros, outros, and guitar solos, and the analog sound just for the vocal parts. The final edit is then mastered using my usual stack of blue EQ, FreeFilter and Loudness Maximizer. Here's the results so far (half the album)... hope you like late 80's HEAVY METAL, cause that's what this music is!

A fan-contributed C.O.G. limerick...

Fixing things is more fun when you break them first

Been on a 'fixing things' tear lately... working on a new MAME cabinet (in a Super Pacman this time.) Heck, I also had to fix my own MAME after it trashed a key config file somehow. Fixed one of the intelligent lights (replaced a bad servo, the one that does the color wheel.) Right now I'm fixing an old Peavey amplifier so we can have working sidefills when we audition for the role of 'Lab Girl #7' next week. Unfortunately I didn't get to break the amp myself; I had loaned it to Filbert, who had it running, when apparently "a flame exploded out of the side of it and it stopped working." Filbert, Filbert, FILBERT!!!

Aside from that, Rachnid and I met at the Secret Lab last night and recorded guitars for 'Too Many Atoms'. Gotta record a good bass track for that next... also last night I recorded a voiceover for a 'Louisiana Culinary Institute' spot that will probably be on TV in the next few weeks or whatever.

Been wallowing a bit in geekery lately, as a result of my parents dropping off a big boxful of memories, in the form of old zines (music zines, science fiction zines, and collectables, dating waaay back to my 1977 'Star Wars sketchbook' and 'Star Wars' edition of the 'Newspaper of Science Fiction and Fantasy' which I purchased at the concession counter at Lakeside Theater. In the spirit of that long look back, check out this home movie, make at Industrial Light & Magic during their formative phase.

Do folks have such fun at modern FX facilities? Somehow, I doubt it...

Good to be back!

Nice weekend! It was great vacationing in Galveston... also very educational, considering they are celebrating, if that's an appropriate word, the one year anniversary of THEIR hurricane (Ike).

Most of our time was spent at the Galveston Schlitterbahn water park - great fun! The park (and adjoining Moody Gardens complex) were 100% operational, and you'd never know there had been a disaster there 12 months ago, were it not for little signs like a marker in the middle of the park's food court reading "During Hurricane Ike, water level was HERE." (with a mark 4 feet above ground.) The water park itself is circled by a rushing innertube river channeled into calm and 'rapids' branches, and you can encircle the whole park whil relaxing in a plastic single or double innertube. Sluice gates dump waves into the channel to propel the river clockwise around the park. 10 or so waterslides of various types make up the park's attractions, some steeply pitched and thrilling, some twisty, some enclosed and some open. Some of these are innertube slides, and dump you right back into the river! Great fun. We went on 6 or 7 of them, refraining from the most thrilling looking when Jeannine started feeling seasick.

Galveston's reconstruction progress seemed good; virtually all places of business along the beach were open and looking good (with a few stark exceptions, like the Frontier Hotel, its facade ripped away by 100MPH winds and car bridge collapsed into the sea.) Suburban Galveston fared worse, looking a lot like parts of New Orleans, struggling to rebuild. There were also lots of devestated apartments, looking very much like New Orleans East. But on the whole, the city is back and open for business! There were no waterlines visible anywhere (my guess is that the storm surge flooded the town BRIEFLY and then quickly receded back into the sea.) There were also no junked cars anywhere, though there were a few piles of sheetrock debris here and there. Very encouraging, and it felt good to let our tourist dollars help another weather-beseiged city... especially when, on the way BACK to New Orleans, I struck up a conversation at a gas station with a gentleman who spoke of wanting to go back to visit New Orleans French Quarter, but had heard that crime in the Quarter was rampant, the city was still in ruins, and the water still wasn't drinkable. WHAT THE HELL IS THE NATIONAL MEDIA TELLING THE REST OF THE COUNTRY? If random people are still scared to visit the one area that best survived Katrina, somebody needs to deliver some reverse propaganda right quick to counteract this disinformation!

NOW onto the here and now! It's Lab Girl audition time again this season. Do you know a human female who's infectiously vivacious (ability to dance is a plus), can sing well (ability to sing harmony is a plus) is creative (ability to improv a plus) and is no stranger to music (ability to play an instrument is a plus.)

If you know a NON-human female who can do all of these things well, send 'em our way too!