Randmness

Portal, a apart of the Orange Box edition of Half Life 2, is a pretty fun game. It’s not a 1st person shooter; it’s a puzzle game. The basic story is that your character is in secret testing facility and is being forced to figure out how to get through a set of rooms using a ‘Portal Gun.’ The gun is able to shoot large holes in walls and floors that are big enough to walk through, making it easy to get from one side of a room to the other by just shooting a hole in a wall next to you and shooting a wall at the other end of the room. Below is a screen shot of what I’m talking about.

The Nintendo Wii is a pretty popular game system right now. It’s in such demand that Nintendo can’t even manufacture units quick enough for consumers. My brother stood in line at the crack of dawn to get one a while back and I have to say that it’s a pretty neat piece of machinery. Heck, even my parents are into playing Wii Sports with us every once in a while.

Cloverfield is out today but more importantly just before the movie starts there is a new trailer for Star Trek XI.

The trailer will be released on Paramount’s Star Trek Site, along with StarTrek.Com on Monday. The casting for Star Trek XI can be found on Wikipedia here.

After I got U-Verse installed the day after Christmas my fiance and I started to notice that shows would freeze for up to 10 minutes, that the picture would become distorted and blocky with pixels, and that the HD stations would have a hard time keeping up with the picture (we’d get colors from past frames in the new frame making things look like an acid trip).When the install tech left he gave me his card and told me to call him if I had any problems so I gave him a ring. After answering the basic questions he asked me to go to the U-Verse router’s information page. After reading out some of the numbers that were on the screen it was decided that the phone line going into my apartment was bad. Here’s a screen shot of that screen.

So here we are at Part 3. This entire post will be dedicated to tips on how to survive as a recording studio intern. It is important to remember that an intern is part janitor and part concierge service. While both jobs may seem mundane or stupid the both can teach you a lot and give you plenty of contacts for the future. The one thing to remember is that being an intern is a stepping stone to the job in audio that you really want. You may not care for the clientele that comes in to do work or the type of recording (live sound, ADR, scoring, ect.) that is done in one particular studio and decide to go to another studio to work. The thing is that regardless of where you end up working the skills that you learn along the way as an intern can do nothing that help you deal with whatever may come up in the future.

There are a lot of rules for what you can not do as an intern. Unfortunately being the ‘low man on the totem pole’ leaves little, if any, actual work that has to do with recording. For the most part an intern is the faceless and nameless person behind the scenes that helps get the session up and running, and is around to help keep the session running smoothly. I’ve come up with a list of rules and explanations below to try and help out anyone wanting to be an intern. If these rules seem stupid or obvious that’s ok - a lot of interns that I had were young kids that didn’t have a chance to work out in the ‘real world’ before going to school or deciding to get into the recording industry. My hope is that this list of rules covers as much as possible but if I’ve left anything out please let me know!

A week or two ago a friend of mine graduated from a recording school and told me that he was going to be interning at a studio and asked if I had any words of advise or any pointers that I could give him.

Recording studios are more than a place that someone rents to lay out some tracks; they’re sanctuaries. Recording studios are around to make sure the client feels relaxed enough to let loose and be creative so they can do their job. This means that the people working for the studio do their jobs, along with acting like a concierge service to ensure the client has everything they need to do their job.

I love Dr Pepper. I don’t know why - I just do.  I think it’s a combination of the way it’s bubbles tickle my nose when I have that first sip out of a can and the fact that it tastes good with just about anything.

Dr Pepper was created by a man named Charles Alderton at Morrison’s pharmacy in Waco Texas around 1885. Charles was a pharmacist at Morrison’s but in his spare time he would come up with different flavors for sodas for the pharmacy to serve.  After doing some taste tests with the pharmacy’s owner, Wade Morrison, they decided to start offering it to customers.  The soda got so popular that people from around town started to come to the pharmacy just to order the drink. Since Charles and Wade hadn’t thought up a name for the soda yet the customers started calling it a ‘Waco.’

Ah CES, the Las Vegas convention where techies, audiophiles, videophiles, gamers, and computer nerds like myself drool over the new toys that will be coming out over the next year. Today I was playing around on the internet and came across a company called OWLink that has a device that is on display at the show.

Do you hate having your home theater equipment in the same room as your TV or do you not have any room for your AV equipment where your TV is? Well the Digital Light Link is going to help you out with that.

This past weekend I had lunch at Philippe’s in Los Angeles. You may not have heard of the place before but you may have heard of the sandwich they invented - the French Dip.

Philippe’s opened in 1908 on Aliso Street. In 1918 the owner, Philippe Mathieu, accidentally dropped a roast beef sandwich he was making in a pan of meat juice. The person Philippe was making the sandwich for, a police officer, was in a rush and took the sandwich despite being soaked in juice. The next day he returned with a couple of friends asking for another sandwich soaked in meat juice. Philippe decided to put the sandwich on the menu calling it the ‘French Dip.’ No one is quite sure how Philippe got the name for the sandwich but the two most popular theories are that Philippe was French and named it after his heritage and that the police officer’s name was French.