Jabulani Jonny

Why I get excited over this stuff I don't know….but I do.  Since I didn't have anything going on at work today I brought my laptop in for some major surgery.  I've been following a thread over at Notebook Forums for about 2 years where people have performed a procedure called a Pin-mod on their processor to increase the speed.  For instance, my Dell 9300 came with a 1.73 ghz Pentium M processor with a Front side bus speed of 533mhz.  The pin-mod thread, found here , basically instructs how to take a Pentium M 1.6ghz with a front side bus speed of 400mhz (read: a slower, less powerful processor) jumper two of the pins together using a teeny piece of wire to make the processor run at 2.13ghz with a front bus speed of 533mhz.  So I found the 1.6 on ebay for $40, purchased it and just did the pin-mod.  I'll turn around and sell my 1.73 on ebay for $45-$50.  My computer is now humming along at 2.13ghz for an upgrade that cost me $0.  Of course I did go ahead and pick up a computer tool kit, but I needed to anyway.  So there's my sweet upgrade for next to no money and my efficient use of slow time at work.  Here's to geeks!!

For my birthday back in March Sunette gave me a fly-fishing trip with
my buddy Carl.  As some of you know I’m a fly-fishing guide for
Callaway Gardens on the weekends.  Carl is the manager of the fishing
operations for Callaway and he and I are fast friends.  Our trips
together are truly prized memories.  Here’s a video of  trip that we
took up to North Georgia.  The video’s not the greatest quality since
we only had the video feature on our digital cameras and we had to use
the compressed video format.  Next time I’ll get an 8GB SD card and not
worry about it.  So have you been fishing lately?   Oh yeah, music is Saliva’s Ladies and Gentleman and Evanescence’s
Tourniquet.  If you’re interested in replicating our trip you can
contact Unicoi Outfitters and Cannon Falls Lodge

I can feel the water hitting about my Adam’s apple right now.  I haven’t really felt overwhelmed yet, but it’s starting to get there.  If you’ve been checking this blog you might know that we’re expecting a child the first week of August.  You might also know that this child has been diagnosed with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, which means the lower left ventricle did not form and there’s basically only one lower heart chamber; which also means that the aorta didn’t correctly form and can’t support bloodflow to the lungs.  So the baby is going to require 3 open heart surgeries to correct the problem.  Well, not really correct as in make the heart right, but correct as in make it function.  The surgeries occur at 4 days old, 4-6 months and close to 2 years old.  So we’re already trying to prepare ourselves and our lives to accept this little one into the world and give it the best chance it’s got.

That’s part of what we’ve got going on.

I’m also trying to get our house on the market, get it sold and move to Columbus before the baby gets here.  I’ve got to finish up a bonus room before we can put it on the market, basically put up sheetrock, paint, tile and the like.  I’ll be doing everything after the sheetrock is up, not the carpeting though.  I really need to finish it up in the next 3 weeks and get this thing on the market.  That will give us about 2 months to get it sold and move.  Wow, kinda pushing it close.

That’s something else that we’ve got going on.

With a baby like this you pretty much can’t put them into daycare, that’s out of the question.  They have to stay at home, which means Sunette will not be returning to work once her maternity leave runs out.  That was really the plan all along, but it’s not a choice at this point.  That means we have her paycheck until February.  Our drop dead date for moving is by February. 

Another thing that’s going on is we are partners with 2 other couples in a local real estate investment.  I’ve pretty much taken on the role of managing the weekly goings on for this project until it’s completion.  Things are going fine on it so far, but there is an element of risk in that we won’t get this property sold and it will be one more thing we have to carry financially.  Being a banker I’ve looked at it 100 ways to Sunday to make sure we can do it and everything looks good at this point, but it is certainly something that plays on my mind with everything else going on.

So where does that bring us………

Oh yeah, this weekend.  That was just a long intro if you didn’t know. 

Saturday I had a guided fly-fishing trip over at Callaway Gardens.  I was scheduled to be there all day.  Sunette was planning to take Barley for a walk with one of our good friends.  Well apparently they met at the trailhead and were saying there hello’s when Barley took off and literally jerked Sunette off of her feet onto the pavement.  Barley’s about 110 pounds and a pregnant Sunette is about 120.  She landed hard on her left side and got bruised and scraped up pretty bad.  Needless to say she was worried about the baby.  So she and Elizabeth called the doctor and spent the next 2 hours at the hospital monitoring the baby. 

Turns out the baby was fine and Sunette’s fine, but they did notice that she was having contractions.  What?  She’s 27 weeks along, she can’t have contractions, we can not have this baby early, they won’t be able to do surgery on a preemie.  Well the contractions subsided a bit and she came home.  Of course I didn’t find all of this out until I got back from my trip. 

Fast forward to last night about 12:30am.  Of course I’m completely comatose in the bed by this point.  Sunette wakes me to see if I can get her a Tylenol, sure.  Then she asks for my watch, sure.  Ummm, what for?  Well she’s having contractions again, pretty regularly right now.  Her contractions were 4 minutes apart.  That’s not good for a 27 week old pregnancy with a baby that needs heart surgery 4 days after birth.  So off to the hospital we go at 1am.

We were there for 3 1/2 hours while they monitored the baby and monitored the contractions.  Luckily after that time the contractions subsided.  They would have had to give her some medicine to stop them if they didn’t stop on their own. 

With all that said, and it was a lot, we got home about 6am this morning. 

What the heck is going on?  I mean, why do I feel that we’re just being picked on at this point?  It literally is just one thing after another to worry about.  If it’s not about the baby, it’s about the house, or finances when Sunette comes home.  I’m just not sure how much deeper it can get. 

After seeing pics at RagamuffinSoul and DaleyHake and EstherHavens, I realize that my pics suck and I need some fresh, hip viewpoints to spruce up the blog.  In general this blog has a pretty bland feel doesn’t it?  I think so.  Alright, to those 5 people that visit my blog…wait, don’t I count for two of those hits?  Ok, for those 3 people that visit this site, who’s got some vicious Photoshop skills to help a brotha out?  Of course that means I’d have to get some sweet new shots, but I think that can be arranged.  Anybody have any cool ideas or wanna help?

Can you pimp my pic?

As some of you know I provide mobile audio recording services for local musicians and groups, which can be anything from local churches to drama productions to voiceovers for video.  I love the live recording aspect and I tend to focus on recording the Praise and Worship services for churches, my own included.  Typically it’s a 7 or 8 piece band with lead and backup singers which usually equates to between 15 and 24 tracks of audio.  I find that trying to capture the live feel of this type of setting and getting it to transfer to tape is a rewarding and sometimes frustrating challenge.

I’ve found that the more of this I’ve done, I tend to put my own recording on the backburner, way on the backburner.  Well after reading Carlos’ blog it prompted me to get back into my own studio to record some songs that have been knocking around my head for quite some time. 

Here are a couple pics of my humble studio.  It’s nothing special but it allows me to do everything I want and can provide some good results if I take the time to actually finish what I start.

I built some decent sound absorbers a while back and it has really improved the mix space by evening out the frequency response of the room.  You can see a couple behind me in that pic.  Basically I built a 2′x4′ frame of 1×4′s.  Then I found some insulation batts made of recycled cotton and cut sections to fit in the frames.  I then covered the frames and fabric with a porous cotton fabric that wouldn’t reflect sound waves.  They do pretty well and helps to keep the boxy room sound out of the mics.

  My desk is one from Ikea called the Jerker.  It is a great budget studio desk and I dig the workspace and the side monitor mounts that you can get for it.  Basically my setup is as follows:

Dell 9300 laptop (since I specialize in mobile recording)

Presonus Firestudio interface

2 x Presonus Digimax FS

ART Digital MPA tube preamp

Wharfedale Pro 8.2 monitors

M-Audio Axiom 49 MIDI controller & keyboard

With that rig I can record 26 simultaneous tracks and the ART tube pre gives some nice warmth for vocals and bass tones, while the Presonus Firestudio and Digimaxes have pretty clean preamps that I like to use for acoustics and drums. 

So that’s my humble setup.  Here’s to recording my songs again.  I’m currently working on a bluesy tune called Walk Like a Freedman that I wrote a couple years ago but never recorded.  I’ll post it as a work in progress when I get most of the rough ideas sketched out.