mweiss

Oct 16 2006, 02:32 PM Although this is a story that I had heard about a few weeks ago, yesterday, while I was at the Primerica Leadership training in New Haven, CT (something we reps attend every 3 months), the story came to life in a very intimate way, when it was told in front of the group of 1,000-plus people that were there Saturday, Oct 14th. On October 1st, 2006, a family of five was traveling on the Long Island Expressway and for some reason their minivan veered off the highway and collided with a tree, causing the front vehicle to become engulfed in flames. A passing motorist notified police, just a mile down the road. When officers arrived at the scene, the children could be heard screaming and crying, in the back of the van. Officers used their tools to break a window and free the children, two of whom were still in their car seats, while the oldest child had her seatbelt on. They managed to save the children, but the fire was too intense for them to get close enough to the parents, Arturo Lopez, 29 and Christina Guardado, 30, who were in the driver and passenger seats. They perished in the fire. Just a few weeks earlier, Glen Paganinni, a Division Leader representative from Primerica Financial Services, was trying to convince the father of this family to replace their $27,000 'Whole Life' policy with a $1,000,000 Term Life policy, citing that if something happened to him, the original policy was severely underfunded and that the cash value would go back to the company upon payout of the death benefit. Mr. Lopez finally agreed and the policy was prepared. In the few weeks that the paperwork had gone to the parent company for processing, it was determined that Mr. Lopez had a medical condition which would cause the policy to be rated (this is an industry term which means that the policy premiums had to be adjusted, or perhaps that the applicant was found uninsurable due to the seriousness of the medical problem) and possibly he would not be insurable. Before the policy could be delivered, the October 1st fatal accident occured. From a legal perspective, Primerica had no obligation to pay this claim. The policy had not been delivered to the client and there were issues with the client's health that needed adjustments to the policy. However, the company chose to pay the claim, in the full amount of both parents' policy death benefits ($1,000,000). In my opinion, they went above and beyond their legal obligations. To hear Glen speak about this whole situation as it unfolded, was a moving experience and a tribute to the good that is still within some of Corporate America. People like to say that corporations are evil and will take people's money and screw them over, but the ethical integrity of Primerica is one of the factors that attracted me to this company. I joined this company because I believe in their philosophy--which is to help the middle class get out of debt, protect their income and retire wealthy. The Leadership Training I attend every three months is not just a chance to walk across a stage and shake hands with many successful Primericans (some of whom are former celebrities, like Warren Powers, who played for the Denver Broncos and was a superbowl star), but to learn of real instances where the company went the extra mile to take care of its clients. And the company takes care of the people who are the grass roots force of independant reps who get the word of these products and services out. I am an independant rep. I made a choice to join because I believe in what the company stands for and for how they reward us handsomely for our hard work and dedication to our clients. When I personally hear about stories like this one with the orphaned kids, and how this company stuck it out, rather than take the attitude of 'screw the customer, it's all about the profits" of today's majority of big corporations, I realized I made the right decision to join Primerica. Few people have what it takes to be successful, but I am going to give it my best, because it's worth it. For me, and my family. I joined because I see it as the only realistic opportunity to earn a great income. Yes, there are obstacles, but nearly all of them are internal to my personality and part of Primerica training is learning to overcome those obstacles. A lot of people hate Primerica, especially those employed in the ripoff insurance companies that are still screwing people with deceptive practices, and when I posted this story in another forum yesterday, the forum's software had automatically trashcanned it before it got posted, probably because it contained the name Primerica. So this story will live on in my blog. And this is why I am working with this company. "Friends don't let friends retire broke."

Oct 8 2006, 03:20 AM Following the general downturn of the radio industry with respect to RF engineers who work in the field, I am faced with the possibility of a forced career change. One of the things that plagues me with the radio industry is the relatively low hourly wage that clients consider "fair". My published rate is $65, however, I charge clients retained by referral just $50. Despite this modest rate, quite a few clients are indicating that the rate is more than they want to pay. I have lost about 30% of my assignments over this issue. Now consider the context of different industries: A plumber gets over $100/hr to fix a leaky faucet or unstop a toilet. Usually, the client is not a multi-million dollar enterprise, but a homeowner, struggling to make ends meet. And the leaky faucet won't prevent them from earning an income, as most people's jobs are performed outside of the bathroom. Now consider my job: I work for clients who have millions of dollars in physical and market assets. An hour of down time (off the air) can literally cost them thousands of dollars in lost ad revenue. These stations have much deeper pockets than the homeowner, yet they are unwilling to pay a rate half that of a plumber's. The comparison seems to suggest that there is an inequality here. I do important work, often under life-threatening conditions. This means that I sometimes have to work in close proximity to 10,000 volts, or perhaps climb a radio tower to troubleshoot a problem. Often in the heat of an emergency, in bad weather. The plumber generally operates in much less dangerous circumstances. There are a couple of engineers in my general market area who are religious and set their rates altruistically. As such, my rate is $10-15 higher than theirs. And they get most of the business. I usually do reasonably well when there's a new station being built, or a station moving to a new building needs new studios constructed, but this happens infrequently. Another factor is that modern broadcast equipment is so reliable that the owners develop the attitude that it must not really need regular preventative maintenance either. In the old days of radio, each station had a full-time engineer. Today, the large cluster groups have one engineer who is responsible for a half dozen station facilities in a geographical region. I'm a bottom-feeder--that is, I work for the independent stations which are not corporate-owned. These usually are the non profit classical stations, and many AM daytime stations located in urban areas. Some of these stations are doing quite well, having discovered the power of selling blocks of time to independent programmers (mostly Caribbean in my experience). The snort story is that I had a negative business profit last year of about $3,000. I spent more than I took in. I'll admit that part of the reason for this was reduced hours of work due to an intense home repair project that is about halfway through the 8-year estimated timeframe that I laid out. Even so, client calls for service dropped precipitously in 2004 and have been flat through this year. I was ready for a change, and an opportunity fell into my lap in mid-June. An old co-worker I used to know before I retired from the corporate world in the mid 1980s, bumped into me at an ethnic function that my wife attends every year. He mentioned that he was starting a new business in financial services "helping people get out of debt and retire rich." I didn't think the work fit the man's personality, but that's what he told me. We eventually get together, both of us and our Filipina wives (it seems just about every middle aged to retired guy is married to a Filipina these days) for dinner at my house. The next day, his wife calls my wife and invites us to some sort of 'career overview'. Since it's only 4 miles from the house and the time of day is reasonable, we both decided to attend to find out what possible opportunity would be presented. When I first got to the event, I entered a room full of about 30-40 people. There was a projector in the room and everyone wore nametags. I was asked to sign a roster and put on a nametag. We took our seats and listened to a presentation. At first, my mind was going "MLM, MLM, let's walk out." But as the presentation progressed, I could clearly see that this was quite a different situation and the services and products the company offered were a great benefit to the minimally-educated (financially) middle class family. The compensation system was not like an MLM, but like real estate. I liked that. The presenter posted checks for all to see from his last month's personal income from this business. He showed an income of $68,000. I was skeptical, but becoming somewhat optimistic that this large corporation was going about business legitimately. By the end of the presentation, I was pretty much convinced that we should get involved as a business partner and I indicated as such on a blue card they handed out with some questions about the opportunity and whether the viewers thought there was anything that interested them. I'll say this: it's a good business, but there's a major challenge to overcome before the new entry can partake in this gravy train: you need to recruit a decent number of people and build your own team of trained reps. You get promoted for every X number of hires. With each promotion, the commission percentage increases substantially. What they have the new person do is come up with a 'builder's list' of contacts--people whom the new trainee/rep will use to bootstrap his/her business. It starts with calling up friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers--anyone that will listen to a 15-minute presentation about the business opportunity. Many people do quite well in this. It's amazing how many people the average person knows, and how large most families are, or how geographically close these families may be. Ethnic groups do especially well due to close-knit community traditions. When it came to me, I figured it would be reasonably easy to interest a couple of my friends. I have no living relatives left and my wife's relatives are in California and the Philippines, so my options were limited. What with me being a misanthropic reclusive most of my life, I made few friends (and with the advent of the internet bulletin boards, quite a few enemies). But the few friends I do have are either not in the right market, being old, retired, or just too darned business saavy to need the type of financial services we offer to more 'average' families, so I quickly found myself out of names to call up. Which is the death of many new hires in our industry. Usually, once wasted, these new hires drift off, stop coming to the meetings and are lost. I chose to stick it out. I read about an Ecuadoran couple who basically made almost nothing for the first 3 years they were involved with the firm. They were new immigrants in 1995. This year, they were recognized as top income earners, having earned $150,000 that month in personal income and having hired about 250 people themselves. I set these people as my model. I realized that success in this biz would take time and that I should not expect instant wealth and become despondent when it doesn't happen. I went on to go to school to study for my life insurance license. I passed the test a couple weeks ago. The license app is pending with the state. Meanwhile, I get the brilliant idea to try a job search database. I look up Monster.com and am dismayed to find out it costs a couple of grand to buy limited access to a few hundred names for 2 weeks. I look at some competing sites and find similar costs. Those are out. So I talk to my trainer. He suggests going to the state-run job search sites. A lot of Googling and I find Jobsearch.org and I create and account. I can browse 600,000 resumes. "This is great!" I remember thinking. Only problem was that the contact info and names were blocked "not approved to view". The next day, I attempt to login to the site and my username is no longer recognized "user does not exist". I end up creating the same account all over again. Same situation--can't browse the contact info. Can browse the resumes--heck there are 2500 people interested in sales and insurance just in the town where our main office is! But I can't reach these people. I write an e-mail to the admin of the site asking why the contact info is not available. I get a response the next day to the effect that you have to wait three days for approval and it helps to have a tax ID number and an unemployement tax ID. The following day, I find my account deleted again, so I sign up for a third time. I'm realizing that three days will never pass if the account keeps vanishing ever 24 hours, so I write the admin and inform him that the accounts are disappearing a day after signing up. I'm waiting for a response. I approached our Regional Vice President at the meeting, about this tax ID requirement for registering. He quickly informed me that 'because you're in your own business, there is none." And he further stated that it's against the rules that we agree to when we signed our independant business application, to call up on resumes. What a blow that was! I had high hopes that by sheer volume of calls, I could build my team. Now I was stuck approaching total strangers in public--many of whom are not looking for a new job. I got this sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach, realizing I had invested hundreds of dollars in the business app, training and my toll-free business line, and was in too deep to just quit. Meanwhile, my trainer and I spent a day at a gas station, conducting a bogus survey, that leads into asking people if they are interested in earning extra money, part time. It was quite uncomfortable for me. I kept thinking about how scary I must look--I mean, here's this big, strapping guy approaching you while you're pumping gas into your vehicle--what does he want? I'd walk up to whomever was just starting the filling process and greet them and ask them if they would mind taking a quick survey 'about the local economy'. Most said no thanks. But out of an afternoon of approaching people, I got four that answered my questions. Three gave phone numbers. One was a salesman himself, but he gave only a postal address. When I got to my office the next evening to make the followup calls, two of the numbers were wrong numbers, no such person exists at the number. The fourth answered and seemed interested, if mildly. I read my script, invited the woman to the 'career overview' and gave her directions and an address. I even called her the night before the overview, just to make sure that she had not forgotten. The day of the overview comes, but the guest never shows, and never calls to say that she couldn't make it. So I hung around for 45 minutes after the meeting, talking to a woman who happened to be in my insurance training class. She too, was waiting for her invited guests, who never showed up. We compared notes about our attempts to recruit family, friends, relatives.. her story was not too surprising, as several of the people she had contacted had already been contacted by another person from the same company. One was even working for the company under a person who was her upline! I too had found the some of the people I spoke with in public had been through the business and quit, stating "it was too intense". So here it is, today, and I'm somewhat defocused on my goal because of the realization that I won't have a database of 600,000 job seeekers to call on and present the opportunity. The electric bill hasn't been paid in three months. The dentist, not since March. My radio business has pretty much evaporated, and I'm pretty much up against the corner, realizing that this opportunity is really all I've got. So I'm not giving up just yet. But I feel tired now and want to sleep. Maybe I'll feel better about it in the morning...

Oct 5 2006, 11:47 PM This is about carpentry, struggling against poverty, and being in a positon where one's back is against the wall and slowly prevailing, little by little. It is about an ongoing project that I started in earnest in 2003. I live in a house that, a few short years ago was fit for condemnation and demolition. Having gotten married late in life, to an Asian, we returned to the US and the situation was, fortunately, not too much of a shock for her. And American woman would have taken one look at the house and filed for divorce. With a baby on the way, I had to do something. A few estimates from contractors were evidence that they had better things to work on, and financing it would have been out of the question. The house was not even suitable as collateral for a mortgage. Lacking any alternatives, I realized I had to do this work myself. So I surveyed the situation and figured out a way to break the job down into more manageable projects. My first project was to rebuild the bathroom. The ceiling had partially collapsed and was being held up by large sheets of plastic and some 2x4s propped under various sections. There was a family of squirrels living in that ceiling, and every fall, we could hear them mating and in February, the babies would be born and more little squirrels would run around up there. For years, I tried trapping them, shooing them away, and even shooting them when they came out for air. I tried rhodent repellant deviced, drilled holes and injected everything from moth crystals to bleach and nothing worked. The darned animals just kept coming back and dug further and further, making holes in the already termite and water damaged joists, until much of the roof was unsafe. In April 2003, I began renovation on that bathroom. I tore down the sheetrock and yanked out the beams, most of which were rotted beyond belief. Since there was no non-rotten part of the house to attach new joists to, I decided to build a floating frame and worked from there. I used pressure treated lumber this time, anticipating that we live in an area that is subject to various kinds of attack on wood. The next thing was to rebuild the wall. The east wall was on the leeward side of the flat "shed roof", and there was no overhang, so it became ao waterfall whenever it rained. When I tore off the sheetrock, I found no studs left in the wall. Instead, there was a layer of mulch and leaves--the remains of studs that rotted. The only thing holding the wall together was the Transite fireproof exterior siding. I carefull and surgically removed a section of wall at a time and rebuilt it, but before I could do that, I had to rebuild the floor! The outer couple of feet of the entire floor was so badly water damaged from both the leaks and the toilet leaks that had occured over the past forty years had rotted both the subflooring and underlayment and the joists! I had to rebuild a new frame of joists and put down all new flooring before I could rebuild the wall. That room was largely rebuilt in about a year. It was only 10x10'. We put in new cabinetry and sink, but kept the deluxe toilet and bathtub, adding a new set of fiberglass walls and a glass shower door. The following year, I had to set to work in turning the second bedroom into something suitable for my daughter. It was next to the bathroom, on the same east-facing side of the house, with no overhang. Again, the situation was a disaster. That room was so bad that the windows had fallen out of their frames! The wall studs on the east side had also turned to mulch and were nowhere to be found. The roof had been leaking so bad that it would just flood the floor, seep through and flood the basement. The room's heating system froze one winter and the pipe ruptured, necessitating my cutting the pipes to that room and sweat soldering caps onto the feed pipes in the basement. The room had been deteriorating for decades and was uninhabited since 1999. As such, I had sealed it off. Opening the door to that room was like opening the door to outdoors, except that it smelled awful from the mold, feces and urine of squirrels and whatever other animals lived there. In April 2004, we had Amanda, during which time, I was working hard on the rebuilding of this second bedroom. The process was much like the bathroom, only it was a corner room, so it had two external walls and on the east side was a chimney I had to contend with. I had to work fast with certain parts of the project. I started rebuilding the floor, after knocking down the wall, both on the 2nd floor and below, down to the basement level. The reason for this was that the supporting walls on the floor below were also rotten and had to be rebuilt. I tore everything down to the foundation that spring. The side of the house reminded me of a bombed out hotel in Beirut--the entire side, from basement to upper floor, was open to the outdoors. I rebuilt the frame of the first floor in about 2 weeks and got it sheathed and tarpapered. Then I worked on rebuilding the floor upstairs in the bedroom. Once the floor joists were replaced, I was able to build a new wall. I had to rebuild the entire east wall and most of the north wall. Then came the scary part: the roof. I watched the weather forecasts for a while, looking for a string of sunny days. I was pretty lucky that year. I had a week of clear weather and it was between two hurricanes that were tracking up the coast, so I was under the pressure of urgency to work fast. I spent about a day and a half tearing down the old, rotten roof, while trying to avoid being crushed by falling sections of it as I made it collapse, a section at a time. Once the old roof was clear, and I was staring at the sky above, I knew I had to work quickly, and I started installing the new joists, cutting and notching them as needed, and fitting them into place. The first one is always tough, because there is nothing to support it laterally. Subsequent joists were easier. I built the new roof, got it sheathed and got asphalt, 30lb felt, more asphalt and 90lb mineral roll roofing installed, all in about a week. It was a grueling job! As the place closed up, I moved on to installing windows, insulating and sheetrocking, as well as electrical wiring. The final touch was engineered flooring, after painting. By November 2004, the room was ready to move in and my daughter was so happy to have her own room finally. I felt that I was over my head with the larger rooms and contacted many contractors for estimates. I got few responses, but only one contractor actually gave a rough estimate of $170,000 to rebuild the roof. That pretty much made my decision. 2005 saw the finishing of the exterior siding for that section and this year, 2006, I chose to undertake the most expansive and difficult renovation task yet: the dining room, kitchen and part of the livingroom roof. This was a total of about 456 sq ft of roof that had to be gutted, new joists installed and completely rebuilt. In April of 2006, I started the first step with my two fingers: I pushed against the east wall in the old dining room. It fell outward in a big, terrible crash. Suddenly, I had a 12' long side of the house with a view of nature. The scaffolding was built and I set out to rebuild a new wall. But before I could, I had to rebuild the floor joists and the supporting systems. Then I attacked the rebuilding of the wall. However, the weather was not in my favor. April saw continous rain for 27 days, with only brief letups every 3-4 days. I was working with my power tools wrapped in plastic, to prevent the waterfall (this was again on the east side of the roof where the water runs off) that was falling on me from shorting out the motor of my drill and saws. In about 3 weeks, I had rebuilt the floor and a new wall. Next came the roof. This time, I purchased a special order size tarp of 20x40' to cover the section of roof that I was planning to rebuild. Little did I know that I would end up rebuilding about twice that area! The corner was the most complex. It used a diagonal carrying beam, and joists met up with it at perpendicular angles. Plus the roof was pitched at a slight angle, so I had some complexities to deal with. I chose to visualize the entire project in CAD first, so I made some drawings in 3D and observed things from various angles, making plans as I went along. Once I had a plan in place, I unfolded the huge tarp and covered the area to be removed. This work began in mid May. It was still raining. In fact, it rained for the entire month of May, except for the Memorial Day weekend. By this point, I was somewhat alarmed at the amount of rain and was thinking that something was wrong with the climate lately. But I had work to do and developed a "damn the torpedos!" attitude toward the weather, which had me working even in the raging of thunderstorms. I began demolishing the old roof and that started with pulling down sheetrock. Boy did I find some weird stuff! The eastern end was full of brown powder from the plywood above and joists--termites or carpenter ants had been busy for decades! It seemed that if I didn't get a shovelful of powder falling on my head when removing a piece of sheetrock, it would be an ant colony being revealed, with a theatrical horror quantity of swarming ants, startled by the sudden exposure to daylight, scattering from the scene. I took about two weeks to demolish the corner, including carrying beam of 19' length. In the following week, I built a new carrying beam in-place, and started putting in joists in their perpendicular directions on either side of the diagonal beam. I extended the beam beyond original design, to create an overhang that we never had, so that the east wall would not be under a waterfall. As I was tearing up the roof, I found one small section that was not rotten. Apparently asphalt had been applied directly to the plywood, and even though the layers of roofing on top of it were soaking wet, the plywood was pristine in that area. That would confirm my hunch that pre-coating all the roof sheathing with asphalt roof cement would be a good hedge against a failure of the roofing materials above it. By late June, I had gotten almost to the halfway point with removing and replacing joists, and that's when the apocolyptic thunderstorm--the strongest, most intense I had seen in over 20 years--hit. Within two minutes, about 70 gallons of water had accumulated in the tarp between a large 4' gap in the joists old & new. It sagged like some huge elephant belly, hanging between the rafters. The dining room floor was just below it. And below the dining room floor was a recording/television studio with my life savings of investment in equipment, computers and hardware. For a short time, I struggled with trying to lift this balloon of water and push it out above my head. It was utterly futile. I then tried poking a hole and letting the water drain. But it was under so much pressure that it came out like a firehose with a narrow jet of water. I raced to the kitchen and grabbed the largest pot I could find and put it under the jetting water. After dumping several pots full, I realized that even though the rain had tapered off, it was still collecting faster than I could drain it. It was about this time that the whole thing gave way. Instantly, I had 70+ gallons of water on the dining room floor! Luckily, a section of the floor on the overhang was not completely closed up, so I grabbed a broom and swept frantically, like a deranged madman, with broad and wild strokes, trying to move that water over to the gap where it could drain to the outside. In less than five minutes, I had the majority of the water out of there, and started up a leaf blower and an industrial shop vac. I had lots of air moving and between the sucking up of water with the wetvac and the 200 mph air flow from the blower, the floor was drying up in a couple of hours' time. Fortunately, I had moved fast enough and the floor had a good enough seal that no water came into the studio on the first floor. For the next month or so, would be fighting rain, by placing plywood sheets to span the gaps in joists and keep the tarp from caving in. But that storm came up quickly and with a ferocity that I had not expected. The summer dragged on. June was rainy, July was rainy, but August saw the first string of sunny days. The removal and replacement of joists was slow, taking about two days per joist, because these 16' long beams were also supporting kitchen cabinets near the other end of their length. There were five joists that directly supported box structures onto which hanging cabinets were bolted. I had to rig up a support under the island of cabinets and unbolt the lag bolts from the ceiling joists before removing that particular joist. This slowed things way down. The project dragged on and I was becoming tired of it. That was much of July. By August, I had gotten past that and had made it up to the west entranceway wall. I had been following up with sheathing and had gotten a close friend to help for a day with getting started with the toughest part of the sheathing. Eventually the whole dining area was closed to the weather, so I installed the new window unit that I had purchased for that area. Work had to continue along the outside where the roof overhanged the deck. And more so, it had to continue north--there were six 18' joists over the kitchen that were so rotten they were beyond help. I spent a week and a half removing and replacing these joists. Then I spend a few more weeks insulating, bracing and sheathing and finally applying waterproof roofing materials as before with the rest of the roof. I worked my way toward the western side, toward where the existing joists were in better shape and where the sheathing was still intact. Much of the weather work done, I focused on getting insulation, vapor barrier and RF shielding (we are next to a 50,000 watt FM station and cellular sites) installed and then had a 'sheetrock party' and invited two friends who had helped me on Amanda's room. Plastering and taping followed and finally, painting. My wife and I picked out a nice chandelier and had the painting done in time for installation. Last week, I put down marble in front of the entrance, and we put down a hardwood bamboo floor over the rest of the dining room. I had to rent a pnuematic floor nailer and a compressor, as hand nailing proved to be glacially slow. With the proper tools, we had the floor installed in about 5 hours. The room looks beautiful now and we have the peace of mind that it is structurally so overbuilt that it is about as solid as concrete, but not nearly as brittle. And our daugher, Amanda, loves to play on the floor in there now. There is much more work to be done on this house, but this year was the most monumental achievement so far. I thought I had bit off too big a piece, but somehow, with a will of iron, I prevailed!

Feb 12 2006, 11:29 PM This is the story of a small dream that came true. For years, I'd been authoring web pages and uploading them to some server across the country, for a yearly hosting fee. My cable company broadband forbids running servers and blocks all the common server ports. I'd been with them about four years. All of this would change after the wind storm of January the 18, 2006... We had two back-to-back outages in which the cable was out for a week or more before they would send a repair truck. That was it. Then I got notice of a cable rate increase. The last straw. I ordered DSL service. By Feb 1st, the line was provisioned. By the 2nd of February, I had my complex two-tier network configuration set up. I made things more complicated because I wanted to have two tiers--a router behind a router. The DSL service supplied a Gateway, containing the modem, a router and a wireless access point. On this router, I placed my content server. And my existing router's WAN port connected here too. Behind my existing router are my workstations. Protected from Tier 1, where the content servers are. It sounds simple, but setting it all up and getting access to PCs on either side of a router is no trivial task! I struggled for two days, configuring, researching and changing settings on both router and gateway. I finally got the router behind the gateway to see the internet and learned of a method by which to see the servers as a LAN connection. Slowly, I got everything configured exactly as I had hoped would be possible. The next step was to advance beyond my music streaming audio, to a full-blown web server and ftp server. I did some research, and ended up installing Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). It was already part of the OS that my server runs (Windows XP Pro) and supported FrontPage extentions, a very important feature for me. I went about setting it up and I made the discovery that moving the content folders from C: drive to D: drive broke the FP extentions, as I lost the ability to publish. It took a while, but I finally decided to remove and reinstall FP extentions. That fixed things. Next, was to publish a test page. I was able to see it. So I began configuring the gateway firewall to forward the ports required for these services. Then I accessed my test page through the public internet. Success! I had a hunch that I could support multiple web sites by hosting them in virtual subdirectories and pointing the URLs to the IP address and subfolder, so I created a sub-web and published my content to it. The amazing thing about publishing to your own server is the speed! A site that would take hours of uploading to a commercial host was transferred in less than a minute! Updates take just a few seconds. And the content was immediately available to the world. Great! My next step was to migrate some of my other sites to my server, so I added more sub-webs and published to them. It was so easy. Finally, I decided to experiment with pointing a domain name to my server IP\foldername. It worked! I contacted some friends and associates and asked them to try the domain and see if they got the new modified web page on the server. They connected easily. That being done, I decided it was time to give my sound system's web page (Bass Pig) it's own domain name. So I registered www.basspig.com and pointed it to the appropriate folder at the IP address of the server. The domain registrar must be using a new way to propagate domains, because instead of the usual 48-hour delay, the domain worked immediately. Not just on my computer, but on a friend's as well. So now that I have three of my web sites hosted locally, I am starting to update content and play with capabilities I could not access on commercial servers. I may soon be running a discussion forum on my site as a result. There are still some loose ends to tie up. The DSL connection is a dynamic IP, but it has not changed since I powered up the modem, and will probably remain unchanged until it is power cycled. However, I am looking into dynamic DNS services that keep track of a changing IP and update a special URL that I can point my other URLs to. There are some options for implementing this, and I am beginning to experiment with them. I still have to back up the server and make an image of the hard drive contents for disaster recovery, and tighten up IIS security here and there, but I have the basics down and the server is working very well. The whole sense of freedom and a new, wider vista of capabilities is very attractive. Okay, so why did I do this? The answer is that I look at it as both a chance to educate myself on server administration and an opportunity to both cut hosting costs and gain more control over my content and ability to rapidly update it. I continue to be amazed a the sheer amount of features packed into Windows XP. There's a LOT of functionality crammed into what most people use for an OS just to send e-mail or write letters. The bottom line gain? I cut my internet connection services costs in half, open the potential to save hundreds on hosting and enjoy faster upstreams than I had with my cable provider, and the big one: no restrictions on how I utilize my connection.

Aug 10 2005, 11:25 PM We shot our first wedding with the VX2000 (and my wife shot stills with a new Olympus E300—what a camera!!) last Sunday, August 7th. The wedding video was planned back in March. We had decided to use three cameras, our two VX2000s and our TRV900. I had arranged to have a relative who is going to school for commercial graphics apprentice as a camera operator. She had done a reasonable job at an event we taped last summer, so I decided to offer this job to her. The morning of the wedding started off smoothly… we dropped our 15-month-old daughter at the baby sitter’s and arrived at the client’s home 5 minutes ahead of stated time. We started out with taping the bride and her brides maids getting their hair done. We videotaped the dress, as it was arranged on a bed, and all the related items. My wife and I also took turns taking still photos with our Oly E300 dSLR. I used a zoom lens to get some fantastic portrait shots, achieving nice differential focus effects. Two of those portraits can be seen here http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b28/mwei...loseupsmall.jpg and here http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b28/mwei...073560small.jpg . Things got more hectic as we started to pack up and move to the wedding location. My wife dropped a tripod and a handle/knowb broke off of it. I spent a minute or so trying to fix it, but the party was starting to leave, and we had a ton of equipment to pack and haul back out to our truck. So it became very rushed from there. We drove like a maniac to catch up to the wedding procession of cars and followed them to the West Haven city where the Savin Rock Conference Center is. This is a nice spot next to Long Island Sound. Beaches, oceanfront view, boardwalk that goes for miles. Nice place. I had arranged for the driver of the car that the bride was riding in to do a go around after I got my camera ready, but somewhere along the line, something got lost in the translation I guess. Anyway, we taped the bride exiting the car. Then we started unpacking our gear. I got most of the gear out to the hall and went back to fix the tripod. We have three: One older one that my wife broke two years ago. The one she broke today, and a new and very expensive Manfrotto that I’ve had for a year. I was able to take the knob off the oldest broken tripod and make one good tripod, so now we had two with pan bars that work and one with a broken knob for the pan bar. That last one would be used to support the TRV900, unmanned. After we got into the venue with all our gear, I noted that it was 10:50 am. For some reason, I thought the wedding ceremony started at 11:30. But my apprentice camera operator was nowhere to be found, so I called her. When she answered, she gave a lame excuse that she was sick that morning, but that she could be at the job site in 45 minutes. I went around to some people to ask when the ceremony would actually begin. Turned out that was to be 11:00 am! I told the apprentice to forget about coming today, as we don’t need a third camera operator after the ceremony is over and hung up. The ceremony was outside, in front of a gazebo, in the broiling hot sun. And boy, it was bright that day! Sun reflecting off the ocean is quite awesome. The next 10 minutes were a blur. I raced to unpack all three cameras, set up tripods and unravel mic cords, set up mic stand, insert mics, plug things in…. Cam 3 (TRV900) was to get the back shot facing the justice of the peace. Cam 2 was to get the lavelier mic audio. Cam 1 was to get the audio from a stereo pair of cardioide condensers set up at the edge of the local where the B&G and justice of the peace were located. In the frantic rush, I was unable to hear any audio on Cam 2, despite putting batteries in the laveliers. It later turned out that the Line/Mic switch on the camera had been set to Line somehow overnight. So we went without lavelier audio. The ceremony began. One of the Filipino friends gave an invocation. It was during that invocation that Cam 1 powered off suddenly… about five minutes after turning it on… more on that later… I powered Cam 1 back on and began taping again. The rest started to come together, but my wife was still taking still photos and no one was manning Cam 2. After a while, she did finally operate Cam 2, but only briefly, until the ceremony ended and the procession left the gazebo. Then she went back to taking stills. I was tethered to the mic cables, and couldn’t move from the tripod, and had assumed that my wife was taping from the front of the procession. I later found out that was not the case… Back to Cam 1’s shutdown… long after the event was over, it dawned on me that I never pressed the RECORD button. That was why the camera shut off. It had timed five minutes and powered down. It was a ‘gotcha’ that got me during a taping of two former orchestra members at the Danbury Symphony concert I taped in June… the confusion stems from being a driver. You see, to me, green means GO, Proceed, A-OK, etc. and red means Stop, trouble, bad things… and mentally, in the hot sun where I could not hardly make out a thing on the LCD, which was over my head, on a tall tripod over 7’ in the air, I somehow equated the green STANDBY indicator with tape rolling. It didn’t occur to me that the red REC indicator was what I really wanted to see. Oh well. Chalk another one up to ‘be more vigilant next time.’ None of this would have likely happened if I didn’t have zero setup time. I mean, they were coming down the isle, literally, as I was putting cameras on tripods! Lacking my assistant to help carry the gear out there (a long walk to the parking lot) we took much longer, making five trips to the truck to get everything. And no help setting up. So with a panic state of mind, I didn’t have a moment to calm down and think about why the lav mics weren’t working into Cam 2. And perhaps if I was not so rushed, I would have remembered to press the REC button on Cam 1. I did remember to REC on Cam 3. The ceremony began. It was one of those justice of the peace guys who does hundreds of weddings a month and doesn’t bother to find out the correct pronunciations. Needless to say he mangled the pronunciation of the bride’s first and last name so badly that I was really wondering whether her parents were her original parents! That was, until some of the guests spoke up to correct him. I taped the rest of the ceremony with that terrible sinking feeling that we had missed part of the core presentation. (As it would later turn out in post review, we didn’t do so badly—we had good footage on at least 1-2 other cameras and audio from the TRV900 in a pinch. I will have to do a phenomenal job in editing to put this all together seamlessly and fill in the missing audio across cameras.) The ceremony over, all moved to the building where the reception was held. Here was a different kind of nightmare—the large wall of windows facing the –you guessed it—blinding oceans reflecting the sunlight. I had to plan my shots so that the windows of this hexagonal room were mostly behind me. A difficult task, considering that the dynamic range was probably at least 15 f-stops between outside and inside and that some windows were always in the shot. But I managed on manual iris and forced the background to blow out serverely in order to get a decent pickup of the people in the room. For close to four hours, we had Cam 1 taping all the background activities at the B&G’s table, again from their backs because of the windows, and Cam 2 was the roving eye. We arranged for various key guests to give their wishes for the B&G on tape, so one by one, we asked and escorted them to a seating location in another room away from the DJ and crowd noise and got their thoughts recorded. Back in the main hall, we taped quite a bit of the major events, the dancing, the garter toss, etc. It was a little crazy because nothing was clearly planned as to when it would happen. It just happened and we did the best to be alert to each important event. At the end, we arranged to have the B&G walk along the beach as we taped it. We also had them pose for still shots. I got out my 40-150mm lens and the E300 and took some fifty or so portrait shots. It was hot, and the B&G were squinting, so I changed positions to avoid them looking into the sun so we could get better shots. But it was really hot and bright that day. Several shots came out just dazzling. Finally, we taped them getting into their car and leaving for the honeymoon. Packed up slowly and trekked out to the truck, taking inventory and rechecking that all was packed. And we made the drive home, arriving just in time for me to produce a 2-hour show for my weekly radio broadcast and then to drive up and do the program live. What a long, greuling day! After I returned home from broadcasting, my wife and I reviewed all six tapes that we shot that day. Things were not nearly as bad as I had feared. We’re going to be able to cover our few mistakes. Such as not having a video cam on the aisle for the procession… we might use the stills my wife took and do slow zooms and dissolves from one still to the next and make it into an artistic effect. Sometimes when you’re forced by unfortunate mistake to do something creative, it can work out with desirable effects. We hope that is the case with this project. Lessons learned? Next time, I will call my hired help an hour or more before the show and make sure they are on-schedule. And I will make it clear to my wife that if we are down one videographer, that she becomes the #2 camera operator and to forget the stills, as we are being paid for video, not stills. Old Man Murphy was definitely on the guest list at this wedding! But I think it will turn out fine.

Jul 19 2005, 05:15 AM The third week of June was a most interesting period for me, as I was enjoying a rare opportunity to achieve one of my dreams: recording a symphony orchestra. The opportunity arose because of a longtime client of mine, the general manager of a classical/fine arts radio station, who also happens to be the son of a famous American composer and a conductor as well. In late May, he approached me about a recording session, mainly to be for his self-promotion. I was to make a video and sound recording of a local symphony orchestra, comprised of non-union volunteers, playing mostly public domain music. The concert was to be a "retro pops" format, reliving some of the classic old television show themes and commercial jingles. Wanting this badly enough, I worked out a very aggressive discount, as this would be MY resume as well, and I made sure that the client knew that I was willing to work with him because of a mutual benefit. We made a deal, and I was to record two rehearsal sessions and one concert. I figured out how to fit three television cameras, an 8-channel recording system, laptop computer, three tripods, cables, 6 microphones, and a myriad of miscellaneous other items onto one handtruck. It must have weighed more than 140lbs. But I figured out how to back it up to the tailgate of my SUV, tip it and roll it up onto the back of the SUV cargo bay. Woohoo! Was I proud of myself for figuring that little challenge out! The rehearsals went well. We had a few challenges, mainly the air conditioners were noisy. The bass drum player was afraid to be heard, the second French Horn player was flatting his notes... so on the second rehearsal, I got them to turn off the a/c for the first 56 minutes and got a pristine recording that I was able to be proud of. With most recordings, there's only so much range between electronic noise and distortion. During silence or a very quiet passage, if one turns the volume control way up, hiss is heard. I found that with the equipment I use now, the noise floor is so low that during the quiet between songs, one can turn up the volume and hear clothing rustling and pages turning on the music stands, but no hiss. And the music sounded splendid--or as good as possible for that orchestra. So I made it through two rehearsals. They went well. And the next night was the concert, an outdoor affair put on by the city center. I arrived early, about 4pm for a 7:30 concert. Talked to the stage manager and then hauled my equipment over and started unpacking. The client arrived an hour later and I assisted him with some of the setup of his stuff (projector and a small mixer/amplifier) and got it all connected to the speaker columns that the city provided. I finished getting all my stuff setup, and made some final concessions with the conductor, ending up hoisting my micropone "tree" up another 2 feet, so that his line of vision to each orchestra member was not obstructed. After setup, I fielded some advanced preparations for interviewing some people about the concert, for videotaping during intermission. Then I waited for it to begin. And on time, it did. Got the cameras rolling and started the audio recording software on the laptop, which controlled the 8-channel audio interface, recording in glorious 24-bits at 96KHz sampling rate to the hard drive in the laptop. The concert went smoothly, though I could tell that the conductor was sometimes a bit nervous and I could see in the closeups in my viewfinder as his lips moved silently trying to remember a song title or a composer's name in the brief pause before he stated them. But the performance was about as good as could be expected from an orchestra comprised of volunteers (even though the concertmaster and first violinist is a student at Juilliard) and had it's high points and its low points. The second half of the concert was taking place in darkness. Although the bandshell had lighting, they were not as effective, nor were they consistent. The front of the orchestra was in total darkness, while the interior members were bathed in orange and blue light. The appearance in my LCD viewfinder had me concerned, but as it turned out in post production, the images looked okay on a regular CRT monitor. I recorded the whole concert and an interview without incident. (Well, except for the interview--I was recording audio the whole time, but I realized 5 minutes into the interview, that my camera was on standby, not record!) I fixed that in post by making two cuts to the interview and arranging the sound-only portion in the middle and using rehearsal video footage instead, with their voices as narration. It worked out pretty nicely. After the concert, I packed up systematically and managed to locate all cables and equipment in the dark. The client and his wife thanked me for doing the recording and we had a brief chat about the content of the promotional clip that was to be produced in addition to the DVD. Three weeks have passed since the concert and I have produced two revisions of the DVD for evaluation purposes. The raw recordings generated over 300 gigabytes of sound and video data! A significant amount of time was involved with downsampling the audio to DVD format specification. What I normally do is capture all the assets to the production workstation, then import them to the timeline and synch the audio tracks with the camera audio/video. The project had six high fidelity sound tracks and six more lo-fi camera audio tracks, so there was a LOT of audio to work with. I synched most of the camera audio then unlinked it and discarded it once its usefulness was over. After the gruntwork of synchronizing all those tracks, the next step was cutting big swaths of wasted "dead time" from the program. That bought about 10 minutes. Then came the A/B/C camera cuts. And finally the transitions (dissolves from one camera to the next, depending on music tempo) were added, and then titles. As it turned out, we did have one other minor problem: I had recorded a stereo feed from their mixer, the intent being to have clean vocal tracks and MIDI piano tracks to mix in the project. As it turned out, there was something wrong with their mixer and they had changed out some equipment after I did my level check. The result was a weak and distorted feed to my equipment. I had not bothered to re-check the feed. So I ended up using the low fi camera A audio in snippets where vocals came in. And I got the slide presentation audio on CD from the client and dubbed that in later. As well as the slides of various logos, commercial products from the 1950s-70s that were shown on the projection screen during the concert. I integrated these items into the final video. I finally got to write the first DVD last week, and watch it on the big screen. And boy, did it look and sound great! In the early stages of the cuts-only portion of the editing, I put up some excerpts on my web site at the following tiny URLs: http://www.tinyurl.com/dws47 http://www.tinyurl.com/9aoub They are unfinished, but one can hear the 5.1 channel audio and get a feel for the early stages of editing as well as the look and feel of the concert. I'm very close to done, and I hope the client is very pleased and becomes a big proponent of mine. At the moment, I wait on his reaction, while I contemplate my proposal to record the Austin Organ at a cathedral in Hartford, CT this fall.

Jul 15 2005, 02:26 AM I just got back from the Cathedral in Hartford, CT where I heard the Austin organ demonstrated for me by the assistant music director. This is one of the larger cathedrals in the eastern US. We talked about numerous recording possibilities, including orchestrating unconventional renditions and adapting them to the organ (ie, a piece normally played by an orchestra, adapted to organ). I also spoke to the organist, who lit up when I mentioned the great Bavo Organ in the Netherlands, and my experience with it by proxy of having bought the Post Organ Toolkit samples for my Kurzweil. The organist at this church has played the Bavo organ! He's been around the world and all over Europe, performing. He gave me a copy of a recording that someone had made for the fortieth year dedication of the church (it was built in 1962) and I am listening to Widor's Symphonie V. He is darned good! He's got the sense of passion in his performance, so I have no issues with the performance or the cathedral acoustics. The issues that the assistant music director raised were that, depending on the season, the stained glass windows rattle when the 32' stops are played. I noted this too during the demonstration. His solution to mask this was to add some 16' and 8' mix to enrich the harmonic overtones and cover some of the rattling. It was not too bad, actually. My overall impression is that the organ wasn't as loud as I had expected. The 32' pedals, even full out, didn't cause my heart to stop, or cause difficulty breathing, the way I would listen to organ on my own custom sound system. So I have some rethinking to do about how I adjust my playback system for organ music. Perhaps fourteen 18" woofers is way overkill for reproducing 16Hz. At any rate, the assistant music director explained to me that this organ is not so much suited to Baroque as to modern and French impressionist music, because of the way the voicing works. He explained that in contrast to a mechanical organ of Bach's era, this Austin, built in 1962, uses electro magnetic switching (solenoids) to actuate the valves that let air into the pipes. The mechanical organs could actually, through the way the organist presses the keys, vary the flow of air and affect the way each pipe 'speaks'. The more modern electro-actuated organs have no such controlability, and are more like a MIDI keyboard that has no velocity sensing. The tone of the organ is quite nice though a bit darker than most that I've heard. I think it's possibly due to the immense size of this cathedral (108' ceiling, 298' length of the gallery) that the higher frequencies are being absorbed. After the demo, we talked about the prospect of a commercial release. He liked the idea. And he invited me to come again when they have a full symphony orchestra and a 300-person choir performing. The Altar is large enough to encompass a full symphonic orchestra. And we talked about the prospect of expanding beyond just making organ recordings, to doing other types of music involving orchestral performances. The possibilities make me feel giddy! Everyone was friendly and seemed delighted that someone was taking an interest in making a serious recording. I did have my expectations rather high, especially after he told me that the 32' pedal is loud enough to overload the Neumann U-87s that they have flown from the gallery. My experience with it was that at floor level the 32' stops were quite tame. Perhaps I have to get my mics way up there to get the sound. Working a venue this size with 8 mics is going to involve a mammoth amount of cable! Especially if I get fancy and decide to mount some extra mics up in the catwalk at the 108' level! Just getting around this cathedral requires a degree of physical agility--many flights of stairs just to get to the choir loft where the organ controls are. They asked to see examples of my work, and fortunately, I have just completed a symphony concert 3 weeks ago, and pressed the rough evaluation DVD for the client. With the client's permission, I will forward a copy to the Church for review. This is looking very promising. Great cathedral, great organist, and a top-notch organ to record. It sounds rather like the one in Toulouse, France, but darker in tone. If I can figure out where the 32' tones reinforce, I'll have a winning combination. The recording they made 3 years ago seems to dominate around 60hz and there is barely any 16hz fundamental to be found on it. I hope that I can do better. Perhaps I'll bring an oscilloscope and attach it to the output of my MotU 896 and have the organist play the lowest of the 32' pedals while I move a mic around and look for the highest ratio of fundamental. I know that all acoustic spaces have areas where they reinforce the lowest notes. What remains to be done is to prepare a repetoire and contracts and decide what the object of the recording session is to be. One thing is evident: this is going to be exciting and enjoyable!

Apr 19 2005, 04:47 AM Last Friday night (4/15), I attended a dress rehearsal of a regional symphony orchestra. I was there for the purpose of preparing for the early stages of a possible recording contract; ie., getting familiar with the venue, the orchestra and the politics of it all. This particular night, the orchestra was preparing for a performance of La Traviata in concert form. I sat in the middle of the front row of an otherwise nearly empty theater of 2000 seats, with nothing but my notepad and a pen, assiduously taking notes, sketching diagrams of the stage and noting possible microphone and camera locations. Now and then, I would get a curious glance from the conductor, the tenor soloist and some of the violinists and cellists who were closest to the front of the stage. Little did they know that I was there on a mission to provide them a gift of incomparable value, pending my doing a superb job of negotiating the deal. I will have to negotiate a deal with my best powers of conveying the concept of mutual benefit. This is a union orchestra. As such, I have to sell them on the concept that my recording will benefit them in numerous ways. I had some brief conversations with a staff person for this orchestra, along with some lengthier e-mails, where I proposed some ideas and she quickly shot them down. I see that there are some restrictive limitations that I will have to find a way to negotiate my way out of, in order to make this project the success that it ought to be. Getting back to the rehearsal, it was an uplifting experience. The orchestra was only rehearsing, but each time they played a phrase, or started from a particular bar, they played like a well-oiled machine, with precision and effortless finesse. The orchestra sounded like a fine classical recording--note perfect, no sour notes, not a glitch in the tempo. In one break, the conductor was explaining to the horn section how he wanted a certain staccato style of playing and with a bit more emphasis on certain bars. He didn't use much technical terminology, but instead made sounds to imitate what he wanted the horn players to do. I found that rather amusing. There were three vocal soloists in this opera: a baritone, tenor and a soprano. All were excellent, although I could tell who was familiar and who was not familiar with the music. The rehearsal started at 7:30pm and ended on the dot of 10:30pm, when the conductor thanked the players. All during this time, I had walked the auditorium looking for electrical outlets (there were none), and determining best locations for camera angles. The theater is in an old building, but it had recently been renovated and was in nearly pristine condition. The acoustics were very good. I found my way up to the balconey and walked the width of it, glancing at the stage and imagining what kind of lens would best get the shots. Then I returned to the main floor and went back to my seat, scribbled some more notes on my pad and continued to watch the busy hive of people during intermission. Each session was about an hour and fifteen minutes. I note that 90-minute tapes will be a tight fit and that any unmanned cameras will have to be started up a few minutes in advance of the show. The orchestra chair announced the 4-minute warning before the next session was to start. I found my liason contact person and she asked me what I thought of the orchestra and venue so far. I expressed positive impressions and that I had come up with some ideas on where to place cameras and microphones. She introduced me to the stage manager, and he suggested a possible position for a camera to cover the conductor, and that the stage set had a trap door that could be opened for this purpose. Time was short and the orchestra was about to begin, so I went back to the center, but this time the third row. I wanted to get a better sense of the sound from further back, as the front row had too much separation from the soloists on the left and right sides of the stage. Third row, center, was much better, sounding more like stereo. If I had my druthers, this is where I'd place the 'microphone tree' (I coined the term because the framework of the support mechanism holds five microphones for 5-channel surround sound and as such, looks a little bit like a mechanical tree). In reality, given the extremely tight requirements and restrictions, I have a hunch that they won't allow such a contraption in the important real estate of the third row. I'll most likely end up with eight microphones in an arc surrounding the conductor's podium. That would be a more intimate sound, but not like the sound the audience would hear. The orchestra played as they worked on more sections of the piece. It was a nice, pleasing sound, not very loud, but not too soft either. It was drier than one would hear in a recording, but very smooth and detailed. And the different sounds coming from various directions across the stage made for a fascinating sonic experience. I noted that cellos can play in much higher ranges of scale than I had assumed til now. I thought they sounded rather like violas than cellos at times. And then there were the voices. The tenor had amazing room-filling volume. Amazing, I thought.. there is no amplification, but this man's voice projected almost as if hundreds of watts of amplification were assisting it. Actually, all three vocalists were something extraordinary. The rehearsal and 10:30pm came all too quickly. But the memory of the music and the uplifting nature of seeing scores of musicians perform their magic together, demonstrated one of the highest levels of civilization. Here was man doing his finest accomplishments in the world of esthetics. The musicians were all people that had worked hard for many years to achieve their level of skill. And yet they played with such ease as to belie their effort, their playng seeming as natural as breathing is to any living creature. By the end of the night, and on the drive home, I felt energized, uplifted. Classical music, performed live, by virtuosic-level musicians is a unique and valuable experience. Seeing a concert of this variety is something that every intelligent human being owes himself. It is the expression of man's highest values.

Apr 9 2005, 03:58 AM I just finished reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton. The book impressed me to a degree. By proxy, he proceeds to demolish the entire fraud of the environmental movement, exposing it for what it is: an apparent means of making a few leaders of the movment rich, while pretending to be doing something noble for humanity. The story had a few moments where "suspension of disbelief" was stretched a bit thin, but overall, he did a very adequate job of building suspense, mystery and resolution. The story initializes with several related but separate events going on with the purchase of technology, as well as the murders of certain scientists. There are good guys and bad guys in this story, as well as a character who goes through an awakening, reluctant at first, but rather commited to change as a result of direct confrontation with the enemies he was supposed to be defending. A picture of how private groups form, accumulate funding and go into action without much government oversight is painted. The groups described in this book are eco-terrorists to the extreme. All throughout, there are characters who, even when presented with the evidence, continue to evade the truth and demonstrate the Catholic version of faith in their cause--a blind following without testing the veracity of the principles they are fighting for. One gets to witness the evils of evasion in pure black & white in this novel. And Crichton backs up his assertions with non-fictional charts from the USGS, NASA and other government and private climate monitoring agencies. The footnotes are real, the story is fictional, which makes for quite an interesting experience. I found myself pausing several times to ponder the charts and think about what a sham this global warming claim is. I also found some nice quotes from time to time. I will have to skim through and write them down. Definately a worthwhile read. Keep an eye on a character named Kenner. He's the objective one in this story. There are others too, but he is the spearhead that works methodically and tirelessly to unravel the mysteries of the eco terrorists plans.

Mar 1 2006, 08:34 PM A couple of years ago, I received a Plaxo invitation from a trusted friend (or was it Plaxo, impersonating him?), so I figured I'd try it, since, well, if he is using it, then it must be safe. So on my system, it's been for two years running. And in the back of my mind, I'm wondering some things that this particular writer, whose article is linked below, is wondering: http://www.meskill.net/archives/000467.html Things really came to a head when I decided to troubleshoot, in earnest, a strange problem with Outlook e-mails getting copied to the Windows clipboard without my doing so. I got a new clipboard utility in FrontPage 2003, which holds 24 clipboard items and reports from the taskbar. Well, I was really alarmed when, as I scrolled through my Inbox in Outlook, the number of items on the clipboard was increasing! Of course, this was not the first time I discovered this. It was a few months ago, while pasting for sale items to a newsgroup, and clicking on Inbox to let the news server do its thing and clear a logjam, I noticed that the very next thing I pasted was not the for sale item text, but the first e-mail in Inbox! Today I decided to get to the bottom of it. After numerous virus scans turning up nothing, I realized that Plaxo was the only odd thing here. So I took it out today. So what happened? The clipboard behavior stopped. No longer are my inbox messages being auto-copied to clipboard. Now this makes me wonder, if that was happening because of Plaxo, could it be that Plaxo is collecting a lot more than address info? Could every e-mail I've clicked on be copied to some computer in the Plaxo corporate building? Enquiring minds want to know! So I am putting out the word that Plaxo does some strange things to your Outlook software and that data privacy MIGHT be compromised.

Mar 22 2006, 03:54 AM I've been making a concerted effort to find work in my area of talent and experience, relating to computer technology this year, and I'm coming back from it all, very frustrated. For example, job postings on Elance.com are attracting very low--ridiculously-low--bids. And the companies that post these projects have absurdly-small budgets. Who the hell can produce a 36-page 4C catalogue for $236?? Other jobs involve fairly advanced 3D graphics modeling and animation, again, paying just a few hundred dollars! It seems that the only jobs that are budgeting close to $1,000 are the ones where you must build an entire e-commerce site, including setting up the database, front end, PHP/MySQL scripting--the works. Basically, any of these jobs would have me working at a couple of dollars an hour if I could bid on them (to do that, I must take out the credit card and sign up for a monthly fee just to get the bare minimum privilages to bid on the few jobs that might both be within my grasp and earn enough money that I'd be earning more than the gas station attendant. Back in the late 1980s through the early '90s, graphic design work paid well. It was hard to get, but the jobs I did get paid well. For example, $5,000 to lay out a VHS cassette sleeve and 4C/1C sell sheet. Later, that project price offering was reduced to $1500 for the same work and later, $1350. I still did well, and the multiple VHS jobs paid $3,000 and took me just a few hours to complete. With the cost of film, 4C seps, 3M color proofs considered, I was earning $128/hr back in those days. My last good jobs was designing faceplates for a kiosk marketing firm that positioned coupon printing kiosks at stores like Caldor's, Bradlee's and K-Mart. I averaged about $100/hr producing full color ads and B&W coupon layouts for each product offering, and often cranked out 8-10 ads a day. The firm that hired me also had an in-house staff of five designers, who, collectively, produced about 12-15 ads per day total output. I streamlined my work, used state of the art hardware to maximize efficiency and was able to produce excellent faceplates that passed their quality control inspections every time. And I was earning thousands a week. Unfortunately, that firm went bankrupt in the middle of my subcontracting with them and left me with $6400 in unpaid invoices. But the money was great while it lasted and I worked my tail off, pacing myself and always trying to surpass my earlier benchmarks of performance and quality of work. After 1995, all I got were scraps and it's been downhill since. In 1997, I reluctantly went into broadcast radio engineering as a constract service provider, risking my life climbing towers and working around high voltages in all kinds of weather. Suddenly, I was racking up 800+ miles/week on the car, and earning only $25/hr. After meeting up with a former FCC inspector one afternoon, whom I'd subcontracted to do a specific task for a client, he convinced me to increase my rates, seeing I was driving a 17 year old clunker for transportation and after having a frank conversation about rates. He was charging $75/hr in the MN area and $150/hr for consulting he did that involved flying to distant locations. Over the next 4 years, I gradually raised my rate to $50/hr. I lost some clients in the process, the Hispanic stations refused to pay that rate, but I was working fewer hours for better quality clients and earning more money. For about 2 years, that was paying the bills pretty well. Then the radio market started to dive in 2003 and owners could no longer afford maintenance, so my hours of employment dipped. The wife took a manufacturing job just to help make ends meet and because she wanted some nice things that her friends have, like furniture, a better car, etc. So now, with skyrocketing electricity and fuel costs wiping out what was left of a retirement account that was already wiped out by four years of five-figure property tax bills after some recent revaluations tripled the taxes, our comfort of life is all but gone. Radio is just not cutting it, and I don't love the commutes at all. I'm getting on in years and need to find work that is less physically-demanding. So I'm revisiting computer graphics, my passion, along with sound & multimedia. But I'm discovering that it's no longer paying a living wage. These companies, and the people that bid on the jobs, must be living in a bubble. Who would bid on a job at $236 that involves at least 30-35 hours of work? It's unrealistic. There must be a lot of kids out there who are providing the cheap labor. Back in the days when I was actively involved, and you needed a $15,000 Mac Quadra 950 to do anything respectable, you got paid real money. I was heavily invested in software and hardware, spending as much as $4995 for a graphics card alone, $15,000 for animation software, thousands more for photo and page layout applications, etc. And I was able to make a profit and pay off the loans. Today, I couldn't pay a property tax bill on the income I'm expected to make with referral jobs from places like Elance. This can't be real! I must be missing something somewhere. Surely there are REAL graphics/multimedia projects that pay in the thousands, where it's possible to earn $60 or more an hour after expenses are considered, but where?? It seems that the people who are well off have a lot of investment real estate, own radio stations and live off the ad revenue, or are Wall Street day traders, like my neighbor. Everyone else is slogging along working two menial jobs and popping pills just to stay awake on the job. I have another neighbor who's in the latter unfortunate situation, and they look haggard and worn out way too early for their years. So where are all the good jobs? Where is the money at these days? Is there some top-secret society of graphics people that get to choose from an elite pool of clients that I don't know about? Or are all the great animations and graphics we see on television being done by poor fools earning less than $7/hour? I'm under a lot of pressure to increase my income, as it seems that local government is tightening its grip around the necks of it's victims taxpayers. I need a steady $60/hr income to keep the wolves at bay, but I'm not finding it online these days. Spammers easily surpass that. I'm sure too that the scammers and credit card thieves are enjoying a lifestyle I'll never achieve again. But where is the money for honest, hard-working designers, multimedia enthusiasts and video/sound professionals? The local market has been a series of closed doors. It seems the industrial door to door sales is dead. Why am I finding myself selling off all my precious items on ebay just to come up with bill money each month? My income is shifting away from real work and more toward coming from PayPal deposits. But I have a finite number of items to sell off and when they are gone, that income stops. Before that happens, I had hoped that some of these referral services were the solution to the income problem. But from what I've seen perusing the rather paltry selection of projects up for bid, and the pathetic price range of these bids, I am feeling an impending sense of financial doom. Fifty years ago, a man could work a simple wage job, have a decent home, a wife at home that cooked and cleaned and raised the kids and gave them proper love and attention, and life was good. Today, we both have to work, and there still isn't enough money to pay the bills and the taxes both. And the wages for both full-time jobs as well as consulting 'job shop' work have tanked. My wife's company's new CEO is withholding this year's raises indefinately. The whole situation leaves me pronostacating that the proverbial excrement is about to collide with the rotating propeller.

Mar 30 2005, 12:08 AM I went to the dentist today to have a long-needed root canal done. This is part of a series of things I am doing to get myself physically feeling better. The mind, in order to function well, must be supported by a body that is functioning well. I've had trouble with a certain back molar for a few years now. It usually flared up twice a year, but it was becoming more frequent this year, so I decided it is time. My dentist is probably on of the best around. He's actually quite rational. We have had conversations about politics. He dislikes socialism and could cite me examples of how Canada's socialized medicine is an utter failure. I've spoken Objectivist ideas to him in the past and again today. He doesn't disagree, but listens and sometimes agrees. There is hope for this man. He's not only an excellent and focused practitioner of his trade, but he also is compassionate and genuinely cares about his patients. I remember my first visit to his office, on the referal of a longtime friend: my tooth emergency came in the middle of a snowstorm. I called my new dentist, and he stayed after work to take care of my emergency, even though he did not know me well as a patient. I make it my first priority among creditors, to pay him first. He does amazing work. Within his field, he is highly rational, focused and innovative. Yes, an innovative dentist. What do I mean by that? I mean that he is never satisfied with the status quo methods. He strudies new techniques constantly. He finds ways to do the job better, in fewer visits and with less pain for the patient. In contrast to my former dentist (who must have had a contempt for his patients, for his methods involved tools of torture and excuses for not using anesthesia in areas where he lacked the ability.) This was my second root canal by my current dentist. I had one by another dentist ten years ago. That one lived up to the horrible image of what a root canal can be. The two that my current dentist performed were nearly painless. At the slightest signal of discomfort, he would shift tactics, determine whether it was the file he was using, or whether it was time to add more anesthesia to the root pulp. And the work would progress and I could hear the file grinding in the canal, but felt nothing. One the whole, the most discomfort was keeping my mouth wide open for an hour and trying not to choke on my own saliva. Hardly anything one could call pain. So I am done with phase one. I go back for a post next week, and maybe a crown, when I can afford it. Second random thought: It would be relatively easy to turn Anthem into a movie. Being a short story, and the nature of it not involving costly effects, all we'd need is a location that fits the visual imagery of the novel, and a group of dedicated actors. This movie could be shot with digital video. I know how to do this. I know how to edit, and how to author it into a DVD. It would be a fascinating project. Of course the logistics would be another story.

March 29 2005 The last time I read Anthem was the autumn of 1968. I did not fully understand it then, as I was much younger and had less context by which to reference the work. Tonight, it was my intention to continue reading a Michael Crichton book that I had just purchased, however, thinking about how I might introduce my wife to Objectivism in a series of small, pleasant steps, I went to my Sacred Books, which I keep in a place out of reach of all but myself, at the top of the bookcases. I took inventory of the books which I have read so long ago, the books written by the hand of Ayn Rand. And thee it was, Anthem. I thought, "this would be simple to read" (for my wife's first language is not English) and it is a story that she could comprehend. I stood there, in front of the bookcases, intending to skim through Anthem and refresh my memory a bit. That was many hours ago. For I have fallen again to the almost mystical power of Miss Rand's writing. I read the book in its entirety, while standing there. Yes, I was standing. It did not matter. I was too engaged in the story to think about the status of my body, it's position, or any discomfort I might have felt from standing for many hours. I read the novel, and became completely absorbed in it once again, this time with the conceptual ability of an adult mind, which allowed me to experience the novel in a manner that I had not experienced it when I was much younger and possessed less wisdom. The wording of the last two chapters of Anthem struck me as the most eloquent words I can remember reading. More elegant and graceful than any scripture I have read, more meaningful and fundamental than any poetry I have read. The words had the immediacy of innocent discovery--of Truth. They were simple. Axiomatic. Their beauty was in their directness, unadulterated by meaningless fluff so often found in "great" works of literature. There is no longer any question in my mind as to the greatness of literary work by Ayn Rand. I have always been in awe of her philosophy, but now, in my elder years, I am in awe of her way of expressing ideas.

Michael, I had to give some serious thought to whether I wanted to continue being an active member here, for the reasons I mentioned, but some overriding considerations are the degree of tolerance and the generally less robotic and indifferent attitudes present. I, thinking from an Objectivist point of view, would seriously wonder if a person with my perverse appetite for bass, along with the attendant rights violations that it brings to hundreds of neighbors within a couple miles of the place, would be considered immoral on two counts--that being a self-destructive behavior, and the other being the rights violations of others. I am indeed, a selfish person, who lives for my own pleasure. I suppose Ayn would be proud of me. ;) I didn't mean calling this forum a place for the Brandens' as a compliment. I meant it as a statement that I am aware that I am treading inside the viper's nest. Now I have not read either Branden's book or the Valiant book, so I don't know all the facts, and I suspect neither book may present all of the facts in an unbiased fashion, but suffice it to say, I have enough personal issues to discuss here that I don't have time to worry about whether Ayn and Nathanial had sex. Yes, I believe in the primacy of existence, which is why I have trouble with Napolean Hill, the teachings of Abraham and "The Secret". Unfortunately, Primerica, the company I became a representative for last June, seems to be touting a lot of primacy of consciousness ideas. I do believe that my thoughts and true desires seem to steer me in the direction of certain goals. Quantum physics and Shroedinger's Cat seem to suggest that consciousness has an effect on particle/wave behavior. This is an interesting topic for the scientifically-motivated. I'll probably move my blog from OOL to OL and close my account there with a stern letter to David, expressing my disappointment with his bias against me. I must also state that I think there are few true Objectivists on any of these forums. There are many who are interested in certain aspects. I don't claim to be an Objectivist either, but I prefer not to waste time discussing issues important to me with pseudo-Objectivists. That's why it is a challenge for me to read and understand the point of view of each of the major contributors on these forums. I made one good friend on David's forum. He and I are in full agreement on all issues we've discussed in private. I do hope that I make a few good friends here. It will be tough, because I can count all my casual friends that I've made since the last century on the fingers of one hand.

Since virtually no one responded to this topic, I must deduce that either, a: no one cares about this matter or even uses vitamins, or b: my letter was effectively written and needed no further comment. So... I faxed the letter to my two senators, and I also added my signature to the docket mentioned in the video linked in the above posts. I'm somewhat surprised that no one expressed even the slightest concern about this pending legislation, especially as Objectivists.

Here is an interesting video put out by the Natural Solutions Foundation http://www.healthfreedomusa.org TITLE: Nutricide - Criminalizing Natural Health, Vitamins, and Herbs http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5...634&q=codex It has been long in the planning.

Here is a letter I am proposing to fax to my senators and congressmen. Please feel free to critique and edit it--I'll consider all rational suggestions: Dear Senator Dodd: I am writing to express my opposition to the FDA’s proposed plan to reclassify all vitamins, supplements, herbs and vegetable juices as FDA-regulated drugs. That such absurd ideas are being floated on taxpayer dollars is beyond reprehensible. It should be thrown out and completely invalidated as a blatant and criminal attempt at collusion between the FDA and the big drug companies. Government has no moral right to dictate what goes on in the personal lives of the citizens. This legislation is an invasion of privacy, an affront to freedom of choice and is a dangerous and bold step toward totalitarianism within US borders. I strongly urge you to vote against this, or any similar proposed legislation that aims to bring government even deeper into our private lives. The only legitimate role of government is to protect individual rights. It should do that by preventing the initiation of force, by any party or organization, against any individual who has not commited an initiation of force against another individual or party. We are way beyond the scope of moral government, but this FDA proposal is so sinister that I had to speak up specifically about this matter. If this matter comes before you for a vote, I ask that you consider what kind of world you want your children and grandchildren to inherit. Will it be a world where people are free to choose a healthy lifestyle, or one in which a totalitarian dictatorship has force individuals to become medicated slaves, beholden to a massive pharmaceutical cartel. The choice is yours. Sincerely, Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

Mary Ann and I went to our local Chamomile health food store to buy some supplements today and we were handed a four page Xeroxed document about new legislation that will be voted on at the end of this month. We have three days to voice our opinions to congress. I found the article that was on the printed copy at this location on the web: http://www.newstarget.com/021789.html Apparently, this proposed legislation is far more invasive and harmful to those who rely on supplements and natural foods than prior attempts at regulation. The article link above explains in detail, with a copy of the proposed legislation. At the very least, there is a docket comment form where you can voice your opinion on Docket 2006D-0480: http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/oc/d...&AGENCY=FDA Contacting our local congress people via phone and FAX is also effective: For Connecticut people: Chris Dodd Ph. 202-224-2823 Fax: 202 224-1083 Joe Lieberman Ph: 202-224-4041 Fax: 202 224-9750 We have until April 30 to comment on the docket. This is very important, if we are to remain free to buy supplements, use raw vegetable juices and other remedies without a prescription. This is one of the most blatant steps toward totalitarianism in the US. GET YOUR VOICE HEARD ON THIS ISSUE.

I remember that fiction title from the late '70s. There were a slew of books written about various coming calamities and Hailey's story came at the peak of that era. It was somewhat precient, given what California endures now. I feel that the most dangerous trend now is the so-called 'global warming' movement. It is the most hysterical, irrational and dishonest piece of propaganda ever foisted upon the world. Fortunately there are some people standing up to the lies and lack of evidence. It is a new form of 'economic jihad" and I regard it as just as dangerous to America and civilization in general, as fundamentalist Islam. - - - - - - Why I haven't been posting here... How do I word this non-offensively? I felt that, as a person holding an ARI point of view on the philosophy and politics, I was in the wrong camp here. It's a friendly group, for sure, but it seems somewhat liberalized compared to the Objectivists that I dealt with in the 1960s. A lot of the banter here does not even sound like that of an Objectivist group at all. I was spending quite a bit of time at OOL, however, David and I got off to a bad start, with me bringing to his attention a malware infection of his board software early last year, followed by his bombastic accusation that I am not competent to operate a PC. As it turned out, their board's "skin" was infected with malware. I never received a formal or other apology from David, for his remarks. And our relationship went downhill from there. The moderators over there acuse me of not being an Objectivist and have put me on moderator watch, essentially because I made some cynical remarks about economic slavery in America. They have been rather belligerant and inhospitable to me all along, but have made it clear that they do not appreciate my presense there at all. So I'll take my chances here in the Branden's corner of the world, from time to time.

I read an interesting article today regarding the results of so-called deregulation on the price of consumer energy. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070420/wired_for_f....pf=real-estate In a nutshell, the states that tried it saw huge increases in rates. Such as residential electric bills going from $280 to $700 a month in just a couple of years. I know. I've seen mine go up that much since 2002. It it getting really scary. The article points out that under regulation, a 10 year freeze on rates kept rates artificially low. When deregulation occured, rates rose immediately by 30-50% and more, a market 'adjustment'. Another factor pointed out was that raw energy prices spiked sharply at the same time period as deregulation's implementation. Of course, we know the leading factors causing power prices to rise: inability to build new plants and environmental prohibitions and regulations. But is that really all there is? Could it be that the energy industry is simply charging what the market will bear, and, like the oil industry, is realizing that they can make higher profits with fewer plants and higher rates? After all, why spend billions on new facilities to generate electricity if it means you'll be charging less per kWH? Like the cost of medical care, we are in the midst of a national energy price crisis. Rhode Island had 25,000 disconnects because of customers' inability to pay the increased rates. Sometimes a 300% increase exceeds a person's monthly income. I mean, who, but the wealthy, can pay $700 month for electricity for one's home? If you're a senior on a fixed $810/month income, such electric rates are unsustainable. What we need is to free up the ability to build new facilities, bring new players into the field and shake things up. But with the global warming hysteria gaining so much ground, I'm very concerned that electricity will soon become a luxury, and most of us will have to resort to using small generators a few minutes a day just to pump water from wells, fire up the furnace, or cook a meal, the rest of the time having the house dark, or with solar powered small LED lights. A message needs to be delivered to the right people that states that we need to stop this enviroNazism and get to the business of making energy profitable again, so that rates can go back down. I think the issue is complicated, but perhaps folks with more information than I can chime in with their thoughts.

I have only one thing to say about Chavez... (warning, graphic language) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PtbJ1jfohY

Alright, at the risk of sounding crass (but I'll take that chance, given the graphic nature of this thread so far), is there any truth to the assumption that a woman's vaginal excretions, applied to a bald man's scalp, can grow hair by suppressing dihydrotestosterone?

Well, I've listened to all but one of your example links (which refused to load after many attempts and a lot of waiting) and my impression of it is that it is monotonous, depressing and conveys a sense of death, rather than a sense of life--ie., a nightmare world. I couldn't listen all the way through any of them. This repetitive noise (to me it's not music) doesn't convey anything interesting musically to my ears. All this electronic music seems so easy to create with computers these days that there's a flood of it, apparently. About the only "music" close to that genre that I heard and considered mildly listenable was the soundtrack to Parasite Eve, particularly a track entitled "Arise Within You". But still repetitious, though cleverly crafted to metamorphose slowly with ever-changing sonic textures. But for me, bass gets tiring both on the ears and the body, to say nothing of the mind, when it occurs in predictable repetition like this. My impression of what I've heard so far is that this is the noise that suits a drug-induced hypnotic trance-like state, not a state of fully-conscious, critical awareness. Hell, if it's that simple to make this kind of music, and it pays well, I ought to get into this racket. It takes talent and a great deal of practice to be a virtuoso concert pianist and I am not on that level, so I can't make a living doing that, but heck, if this level of automation of beats by MIDI cut 'n paste sells well, I should switch careers! I certainly have the tools to do it, but not the motivation, at least prior to realizing the state of this genre. I could just see the reviews now... "Bass Pig approaches the genre of Industrial/Electronica with a sort of swashbuckling and bold irreverence, daring to inject innovative new originality into the scene." Yeah, just wait a year and check the record stores.

All good points, Robert, and I think I address them all in my varied listening habits. I have two distinct listening modes: High fidelity--where the volume is at exactly orchestral level and the frequency range is natural. I use this for listening to modern jazz, classical and other orchestral music. Bass Pig mode: I use this for electronic music with a heavy bass output. I derive a physical and visceral pleasure from the sensation of overpowering subsonic energy--sort of reminds me of the terrifying thrill of watching the Saturn V rocket test at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, back in the '60s. That sensation of power, and knowing that I created and control it, gives me a "high" I cannot describe. The saving grace is that I keep the duration very short for the very loud sessions. I might play for 3 minutes with peaks of 139dB, and I might push it 10dB above that for a few seconds now and then, just to feel the air turn solid around me and to feel the pressure on my body. I only do this when I'm in a maniacal mood, or when I am enjoying a new piece of music that's got an interesting bass line. I too like to listen to the whole spectrum of music. My combined goals with this system was to reproduce acoustic orchestral music with uncompromising accuracy, while at the same time having the headroom to reproduce a cannon round exploding without clipping. Most of the time, there is an absurd amount of unused headroom, as I play with about 6 watts of power for full orchestral levels and slightly beyond. I have to emphasize that I don't listen at extreme levels for long. When it is up loud, I'm either out in the yard, or have my fingers in my ears, because it's possible to feel the midrange in one's skull bones when it's that loud, like feeling a snare drum with your eyeballs and your skull bones. Last summer, I was playing a Korean album that was especially well-recorded and featured a ballad with an extended range bass guitar. The fourier analysis in SoundForge told me that the two low bass notes that recurred frequently were 24Hz and 29Hz. On June 30th, I played the track, ripped to a hard drive as the CD player would not track with all the vibration, and pushed the levels up about as high as I felt I could get away with without causing a lot of structural damage to the house. I took my sound level meter outside and walked 1/4 mile up the road, over a hillside and took a reading in front of a neighbor's house. The two lowest bass noted registered 97dB from over there. Back at the house, in my yard, you could feel it. I was thrilled with the new Bassmaxx subwoofers, but shocked that the bass was carrying that far, so I immediately went in and turned it way down. That was pretty much the extent of my craziness. Over 90% of my listening is done at 120-125dB for most vintage rock music of the 1950s/60s. I go a little louder if listening to a Funk style music with a pounding beat and I want to really get hit in the chest with it. Most of the time, if it's modern Jazz, then 105-110dB peaks. With pipe organ, I tend to go overboard again, but again, the loudness is below 20Hz, where the main sensations are pressure on the eardrums similar to deep diving without earplugs, a disruption to breathing and a foreboding sense that the ceiling is going to fall down on top of me at any moment. When the carpeting suddenly lifted off the floor during one such excursion into the world of infrasonics, I suddenly realized, "hey, that's friggin' loud". I'd never gone that far with another person in the room, since they start to panic when the ceiling starts to visibly move and dust starts to fall everywhere and it's already quite painful to the ears. But I do these silly experiments while alone, videotape them with fire wire direct to Premiere Pro onto the hard drive and put them on YouTube as a sort of 'hi-fi freak show'. This bizarre trait of mine evolved over the past 35 or so years. Having been born oversized and ugly as hell, my social live was zilch for the first 40 some odd years of dating efforts. So I had accumulated substantial savings by not going to bars and dating over those decades and finally decided I want to build a sound system. So in the mid 1970s, I began building Bass Pig, which would become my "wife" of sorts, offering a sort of quasi-physical pleasure that served in place of the pleasure that normal, attractive people enjoy from romantic adventures. Since I was pretty much a failure at everything else in life, this was one thing I could do well. I never had any friends until I became known to some others as an eccentric hi-fi nut. By then, most of my other friends were similar middle-aged folks and appearances didn't matter--what mattered was what we talked about, whether it was woofers, tweeters, amplifier feedback gain, etc. For once, it didn't matter how much hair one had on one's head, we were all equal in the world of hi-fi nutcases. Eventually, after retirement, I did manage to go to the Philippines and meet a young lady who wanted to better her situation and we got married. There have been times when we'd get strange looks, and someone even thought she was my daughter, but for the most part, things have been pretty smooth. But my first love was and always will be music and hi-fi. It's been a part of my life for the last four decades and I don't see it going away any time soon, by my own choice.

Interestingly, the large majority of Kurz owners are Techo musicians. I hear them talk about how great the Kurz is for "Industrial" music (what the heck is that??) because of it's ability to mangle sounds with the Shaper and Wrap algorithms, among others. But I'm not into that. It sounds like noise and chaos to me. In fact, much of the samples I've heard from other musicians on SonikMatter forums sounds like twisted distortions of reality, rather anti-Objectivist, IMHO. At least the Kurz is so broad in its range of capabilities that it gives me the film soundtrack-making ability that I want, so all that extra synthesis stuff is more of a curiousity that I will sometimes dabble in on a slow night, but otherwise get overwhelmed with. Somebody needs to write a good book on VAST, because a lot of people don't "get it", and I'm among them. Those who do, manage to create beautiful sounds with it, while I find that it's hard to create something I consider musically useful from scratch. I can tell you that these speakers don't care anymore about the destruction they wreak on the neighborhood than the A-bomb we dropped on Hiroshima cared about Hiroshima. They'll just do their job and whatever collateral damage occurs, well that's up to me to exercise restraint. That said, I'll be glad to listen to a sample of your work and tell you what I think of it.