Ariendor.net The Endless Road

Wow, the 2008 Beijing Olympic opening ceremony trumped and completely surpassed all others to date, in nearly all respects. It was the most beautiful, creative, intricate, expensive, and lavishly pyrotechnic show I've ever seen. Seeing it live remains the only way I could like it better.

And now, in the typical spirit of things, a bit of technical info for those interested...
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Beijing Olympics Technical Information
(incomplete, being updated as I find more info)
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Lighting gear:
- (308) Vari*Lite VL3500 Spot
- (316) Vari*Lite VL3000 Spot
- (180) Vari*Lite VL3500 Wash
- (112) Clay Paky Alpha Spot 1200
- (980) Martin Mac 2000 Wash
- (162) Martin Mac 2000 Wash XB
- (12) High End Systems Showgun luminaires

Video gear:
- (86) Christie Roadster S+20K projectors (with HES orbital heads)
- (63) Christie Cinema CP2000-ZX projectors
- (120) High End Systems Axon media servers

Lighting consoles:
- (6) grandMA full size consoles (3 main, 3 as backup)
- (2) grandMA Lite consoles
- (6) High End Systems Wholehog 3 consoles (for media server control, 3 active and 3 backup)

Last night, some friends and I went to see Weird Al at the Ventura Theater. I've attended two of his concerts before, but this one greatly surpassed the others, not only because of all the great new music Al and his band played but also because we got on the meet and greet list after the show.

It was a pleasure to finally meet Al, get his autograph, and tell him "Cal Poly rocks!" to which to he agreed. Outside of the show, I also got to meet Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz (drums), Jim West (guitar), and Steve Jay (bass).

All in all, the whole night was a blast (quite literally! I wore ear plugs, and the sound was still amazing) and I had a very enjoyable time.

And for those who have an electronics fetish as I do, here are some specifications to assuage your interests:

Weird Al - Touring Equipment

FOH Sound Console: Yamaha PM5D
Monitor Mix console: Unknown, it was mostly out of view in the wing on stage left.
Subwoofers: L Acoustics SB218, 4 per side. (owned by Ventura Theater)
Tops: L Acoustics ARCS, 6 per side. (owned by Ventura Theater)
Amplification:
- (4) QSC Powerlight 4.0
- (4) QSC Powerlight 6.0
- (2) Crest PL9001

Lighting console: grandMA full size, 2 DMX universes used, direct from console.
Lighting fixtures:
- (6) Martin Mac 600 NT washes
- (14) Martin Mac 500 profiles
- (4) Martin Atomic 3000 strobes
- Assorted conventionals, mostly PAR cans, I would estimate about 100 of them.

That's about it! :)

Quarter of a century old now, and on Friday the 13th nonetheless. Superstitions can go die in a fire. :P

It has been over a month...time for another blog I guess.

Life in general remains mostly routine, not a whole lot has changed in the day-to-day. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel content.

Hopefully, I will start drum lessons soon.

I've been out recording some more stock footage for my steadily-growing sound effects library. Soon, I will have a fair amount of audio editing work on my plate for a film project. More on that in a later blog post.

Anyway, that's about it.

Prices on computer components just keep falling.

I just bought an additional 4GB of DDR2 RAM for my audio workstation. And I could get 4GB of Corsair DDR2 for my laptop for about $70.

This is getting ridiculous...but in a very GOOD way. :P

I am very lazy sometimes. The chore could involve almost no work, it could be sitting right next to me, and I wouldn't always do it. As much as I try to figure out why, I cannot seem to determine how my motivation gets so misplaced.

Other people deal with this too from time to time; I wonder how they cope with it and motivate themselves...

A few days ago, I arrived at the polls to vote for the California primary elections. I had just signed in when one of the ladies there said "Is this your first election?". I was a bit confused, so I responded, "No, this is about my 5th or 6th time voting." At which point everyone started laughing and the lady said, "What, did you start voting when you were 11 or something?"

Apparently, I don't look 24. My own Mother even says I look young for my age and could possibly pass as a high school senior. I just wish people didn't have to be so rude. :(

Happy 2008 everyone.

We went to see a Brian Regan comedy show tonight at the Thousand Oaks civic arts plaza. I don't think I have laughed as hard as I did for a long time. The entire show, with the exception of one short skit was completely new and by far some of Brian's funniest work. And nothing beats seeing him in person, with all the hilarious facial expressions and voices.

At the end for the encore, he took a few requests for some of his well-known routines and he delivered them with some additional improv and they were far funnier than the first time I had heard them.

Notes to self:

* Windows XP setup tends to die/BSOD if you try to boot and install from a SATA CD-ROM drive running through AHCI or southbridge RAID.

* Windows XP is STILL a pain to install due to requiring either a floppy disk or a cumbersome slipstream to get custom RAID controller drivers installed.

Hopefully soon I will succeed in making Windows XP actually INSTALL correctly.

Sad thing is: Vista doesn't have these same problems (except Vista has a whole load of its own problems).