My wife and I are driving to western NJ to see the kids at camp on Sunday, listening to Breakfast With The Beatles on Q104.3 as I do pretty much every Sunday morning. I especially wanted to listen to this one, as the interview with Ringo is going to be played.
So we are listening and Ken announces that he will be playing hte first half of the interview in the next segment. We listen and wait (OK I wait and she continues to read her book). Then Ken announces the first part of the intervew ***from where we started the tape rolling!!!*** This means that the first thing everyone gets to hear (especially me) is me chatting with Ringo about reel-to-reel tape recorders vs. DAT. a total *WOOHOO!* moment for me.
I have a copy of the whole thing coming to me from the radio station. Needless to say I will listen to the beginning a dozen or so times :)
That's it for now - back to following the news on Israel's war.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Friday, July 14, 2006
Ringo!
I had an interesting thing happen to me the other day. It actually started 27 years ago, but ended 2 days ago. In August of 1979, a local radio station had a Beatles weekend. Every hour they would play some Beatles with some rare stuff mixed in.
One of the blocks had a version of Help! that had some interestingly but minorly different guitar woek and a great vocal by John that was mixed way out front. The DJ announced that it was from the 1965 Hollywood Bowl concert. Fortunately I was taping at the time. Unfortunately my cassette deck ate it not too long afterward.
This began a 27-year quest to find a specific performance of a song that I was to find out was not only not from the 1865 Hollywood Bowl concert, but was not from any Hollywood Bowl show and not from any other show I could find - and I have found a LOT of them over the years.
I recently joined this group that shares Beatles music and video via BitTorrent. One of the things that I downloaded was a DVD called "Telecasts '65". I was half-watching it while working on my laptop (my usual nightly position) when I heard something. It was Help! - the version for which I had been hunting, literally for decades.
I have a friend who is the DJ who does the Beatles show on Sunday mornings on the biggest AOR radio station in the world. I ripped the audio down to an mp3 and sent it over to him with basically the explanation above. I also asked him if he was going to be coming out for the Ringo show on Friday (today - this happened on Wednesday) and would he like to meet up beforehand for a drink or something? He replied that he would load up the track for Sunday's show but would not be coming out for the show. He had to cover the 4-6:45 shift for another DJ who was out of town.
Thursday comes along and I get a call from him that he may end up doing the show intro afterall and if it happens would I like to come as his guest? I tell him sure, why not?
Friday morning I get an email - he now is not only doing the show intro but is getting time to interview Ringo beforehand and could I possibly be his sound engineer as he needs someone who can actually work the equipment?
"I'm not sure, let me think about it... YES!!!!!!"
He tells me to meet him at the venue at 7:30 by the van. I meet him, he slaps a pass on me and we walk around back. Hamish Stuart is hanging outside of the back door. He recognizes me (another story) and gives me a big handshake and hello. We go to the tent outside in the back and there he is Ringo. There. In front of me. Ringo.
He says Hello to us and shakes my hand. I unpack the gear and he looks at it and we start talking about it and old reel-to-reel decks and how he likes those (me too) and I get everything set up for the interview and Ken sits doen to start the interview and RIngo says he would rather continue talking about the equipment. Were those violins I heard?
A strange thing about meeting Ringo... There are probably aspects of his life that I know more about than he does. It wasn't like meeting him for the first time, rather it was like seeing an old good friend that you had lost touch with and just found again. It was only a quick minute that I got to speak with him before the interview started, but I guess that's more than most get. The interview itself will likely be on Q104.3's Breakfast With The Beatles this Sunday, so I won't go into it here.
After that there were some interesting things having to do with quite good vegan food, but those are not so important.
I got to meet Ringo!!!!!
A very cool night. Let me tell you something about Edgar Winter. You see him and the word "white" jumps into your mind and it stays there.
I got to meet Ringo :)
One of the blocks had a version of Help! that had some interestingly but minorly different guitar woek and a great vocal by John that was mixed way out front. The DJ announced that it was from the 1965 Hollywood Bowl concert. Fortunately I was taping at the time. Unfortunately my cassette deck ate it not too long afterward.
This began a 27-year quest to find a specific performance of a song that I was to find out was not only not from the 1865 Hollywood Bowl concert, but was not from any Hollywood Bowl show and not from any other show I could find - and I have found a LOT of them over the years.
I recently joined this group that shares Beatles music and video via BitTorrent. One of the things that I downloaded was a DVD called "Telecasts '65". I was half-watching it while working on my laptop (my usual nightly position) when I heard something. It was Help! - the version for which I had been hunting, literally for decades.
I have a friend who is the DJ who does the Beatles show on Sunday mornings on the biggest AOR radio station in the world. I ripped the audio down to an mp3 and sent it over to him with basically the explanation above. I also asked him if he was going to be coming out for the Ringo show on Friday (today - this happened on Wednesday) and would he like to meet up beforehand for a drink or something? He replied that he would load up the track for Sunday's show but would not be coming out for the show. He had to cover the 4-6:45 shift for another DJ who was out of town.
Thursday comes along and I get a call from him that he may end up doing the show intro afterall and if it happens would I like to come as his guest? I tell him sure, why not?
Friday morning I get an email - he now is not only doing the show intro but is getting time to interview Ringo beforehand and could I possibly be his sound engineer as he needs someone who can actually work the equipment?
"I'm not sure, let me think about it... YES!!!!!!"
He tells me to meet him at the venue at 7:30 by the van. I meet him, he slaps a pass on me and we walk around back. Hamish Stuart is hanging outside of the back door. He recognizes me (another story) and gives me a big handshake and hello. We go to the tent outside in the back and there he is Ringo. There. In front of me. Ringo.
He says Hello to us and shakes my hand. I unpack the gear and he looks at it and we start talking about it and old reel-to-reel decks and how he likes those (me too) and I get everything set up for the interview and Ken sits doen to start the interview and RIngo says he would rather continue talking about the equipment. Were those violins I heard?
A strange thing about meeting Ringo... There are probably aspects of his life that I know more about than he does. It wasn't like meeting him for the first time, rather it was like seeing an old good friend that you had lost touch with and just found again. It was only a quick minute that I got to speak with him before the interview started, but I guess that's more than most get. The interview itself will likely be on Q104.3's Breakfast With The Beatles this Sunday, so I won't go into it here.
After that there were some interesting things having to do with quite good vegan food, but those are not so important.
I got to meet Ringo!!!!!
A very cool night. Let me tell you something about Edgar Winter. You see him and the word "white" jumps into your mind and it stays there.
I got to meet Ringo :)
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Keeping an eye on things
Being on a quest for minimal downtime lately on all servers, I have been working with all new kinds of interesting monitoring tools. The ones I seem to have settled on are monit and munin. The former being a server process that will monitor and restart as needed, processes on the server and also email me if it cannot get to a given service on another server. The latter keeping an eyes on a bunch of servers and reporting back to a single server that gives a great set of graphs showing everything you could want to know about you machines.
As for what was happening in the previous entry, no trip to Taiwan, but maybe still something with the company. The fiber optic thing will likely be happening this summer. A friend of mine got it and loves it.
At this point most spare time has been spent with the kids and getting paperwork to the Infernal Revenue Service so they will give me back all the money they seized from me. Isn't that nice of them? Sheesh.
On a more personal note, Mark Hudson is not touring with Ringo after all this summer, so there likely goes my chance to hang with him (Mark, not Ringo) this summer. Too bad - he's a great guy and an amazing raconteur.
As for what was happening in the previous entry, no trip to Taiwan, but maybe still something with the company. The fiber optic thing will likely be happening this summer. A friend of mine got it and loves it.
At this point most spare time has been spent with the kids and getting paperwork to the Infernal Revenue Service so they will give me back all the money they seized from me. Isn't that nice of them? Sheesh.
On a more personal note, Mark Hudson is not touring with Ringo after all this summer, so there likely goes my chance to hang with him (Mark, not Ringo) this summer. Too bad - he's a great guy and an amazing raconteur.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
An interesting week
Here is an interesting week. A company that wants me to come work with them has gotten a major chipset mfg from taiwan to agree to pay for me to do Computex. They (the first company) will likely pay for business class tix for me to go.
Of course the main company I work for has me on this major project call Seabiscuit, which is so major that I can't even talk about it with most of the company!
Then of course I will have to ask this company for a paid week off to go to Taiwan to Conputex, which is being paid for by 2 other companies. The first company (the airfare one) wants me to work with them as a permanent sort of thing, but I like the company where I am now. I finally have things working well and probably will be getting more toys.
Speaking of toys, my old company, which failed, sent me some more old toys so I have a few extra computers now with video capture cards. Need to do something with those (mythtv anyone?)
On totally unrelated news, another company that I am part of, a nights & weekends sort of thing, just found out that I got fiber optic cable laid near my house and how cheap the bandwidth from them is, so it looks like I will be getting a server rack in the basement, bandwidth and some electric paid for, a major UPS and possibly even a generator put in.
Of course the main company I work for has me on this major project call Seabiscuit, which is so major that I can't even talk about it with most of the company!
Then of course I will have to ask this company for a paid week off to go to Taiwan to Conputex, which is being paid for by 2 other companies. The first company (the airfare one) wants me to work with them as a permanent sort of thing, but I like the company where I am now. I finally have things working well and probably will be getting more toys.
Speaking of toys, my old company, which failed, sent me some more old toys so I have a few extra computers now with video capture cards. Need to do something with those (mythtv anyone?)
On totally unrelated news, another company that I am part of, a nights & weekends sort of thing, just found out that I got fiber optic cable laid near my house and how cheap the bandwidth from them is, so it looks like I will be getting a server rack in the basement, bandwidth and some electric paid for, a major UPS and possibly even a generator put in.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Guess the first two comments were little ado about nothing.
What to do here... Well, a bit about me perhaps. I am a 40-something computer professional. I live in the metro-NY area and have recently begun working for a company in the travel industry, in charge of taking the mess that is their server rack and making it into something good as well as maintaining all of the internal PCs.
That was actually my charge when I took the job in late November, 2005. Here it is, about 3 months later and all of the crappy PC workstations in the company are gone. The Dells that were here have been reloaded and more Dell PCs have been ordered. Everything from the workstation end is far more stable now.
A bunch of old generic servers have been removed and replaced with Dell 2850s for the mail and databse servers, a Dell SC1425 for the outgoing mail (we do a lot of that) and an older Dell 350 (1Ghz) for the firewall.
There are a bunch of Compaq servers in use as well, but those seems stable, which leaves me with 2 machines to be replaced, but those really need some work done on the software side before that can be accomplished.
From an OS side we are WinXP on the workstations (except for mine) and Centos on the server (and my workstation) side.
I just recently moved the company from an old java servlet based chat system to a nice open-source program call Crafty Syntax. I am a big fan of open source and fortunately so is the president of the company, so I can spend the time to do work on Open Source projrcts and donate the code back during work. That would explain using Centos, no? :)
On the "rushtrader" side of things, I have 2 main projects. One is a Direct Connect hub for the trading of Rush concerts. That would explain the monniker, no? Rush tacitly allows this and as a result we are quite careful to not allow anythign commercially released into the mix. The other project is to manage the chat forum for a Zebra, a group with roots in New Orleans and on Long Island.
What to do here... Well, a bit about me perhaps. I am a 40-something computer professional. I live in the metro-NY area and have recently begun working for a company in the travel industry, in charge of taking the mess that is their server rack and making it into something good as well as maintaining all of the internal PCs.
That was actually my charge when I took the job in late November, 2005. Here it is, about 3 months later and all of the crappy PC workstations in the company are gone. The Dells that were here have been reloaded and more Dell PCs have been ordered. Everything from the workstation end is far more stable now.
A bunch of old generic servers have been removed and replaced with Dell 2850s for the mail and databse servers, a Dell SC1425 for the outgoing mail (we do a lot of that) and an older Dell 350 (1Ghz) for the firewall.
There are a bunch of Compaq servers in use as well, but those seems stable, which leaves me with 2 machines to be replaced, but those really need some work done on the software side before that can be accomplished.
From an OS side we are WinXP on the workstations (except for mine) and Centos on the server (and my workstation) side.
I just recently moved the company from an old java servlet based chat system to a nice open-source program call Crafty Syntax. I am a big fan of open source and fortunately so is the president of the company, so I can spend the time to do work on Open Source projrcts and donate the code back during work. That would explain using Centos, no? :)
On the "rushtrader" side of things, I have 2 main projects. One is a Direct Connect hub for the trading of Rush concerts. That would explain the monniker, no? Rush tacitly allows this and as a result we are quite careful to not allow anythign commercially released into the mix. The other project is to manage the chat forum for a Zebra, a group with roots in New Orleans and on Long Island.
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