mikebeauchamp.com

Apparently, I have an exam tomorrow that I have to study for. More importantly, it's past 6AM and I should probably get to sleep first. I only need to pass the exam anyways, well, I could probably fail it by a bit. I've been listening to "RustRadio" all night. I'd give you the link, but it goes offline in a few hours anyways. It's some guy/girl in the Netherlands that streams all Neil Young bootlegs for the weekend every now and then. Next time it's happening, I'll try to post a heads-up in the Message Board.

I'm so sick of looking at text on the computer screen. I've been doing website stuff for about 6 hours now, and my brain just can't take it anymore. A few years ago, I'd be able to do 12 hours of programming straight no problem with the right amount of carbonated beverages. Now, I can't seem to keep my eyes open. Maybe it is because I've been drinking water. I can't even remember what has happened in these past 3 weeks. I'll try to go in reverse order...

I found out this weekend that Revo will be playing in Akron Ohio at a Devo fan get together that I was hoping we could attend regardless. I also have some plans for some more home-made guitar equipment, which I plan on building next week once I order some of the parts. I'm still quite happy with the cheap-ass Fuzz pedal that I made, and I'm now using it full time as a sort of a solo-boost pedal. I can't bring myself to even attempt to go to the local music store and start purchasing effects and all that crap. The low end shit is low end (although fine if you don't break it), and the high end shit is all digital modelling shit. It's fairly hard to find a regular Analog Delay (my favourite effect), instead you get pressured into buying this gazillion dollar miniature computer that digitally pretends to sound like analog and instead of having it's own sound, it tries to emulate other sounds. Then there's the vintage stuff, which is either overly-hyped up because a certain guitar player used it, and therefore way too expensive, or it's cheap because it's broken or because it sucked back then, and it still sucks now. Granted, there's a good amount of vintage guitar effects that are reasonably priced still and are quite decent. But, the main thing I'm working on is basically just an oscillator/function generator that I can strap onto my guitar and the sound will just come out of the output along with the guitar. It will sort of be like when I used to own a Theremin, only it will be a part of my guitar, and not such a hokey interface as a theremin (and at 1/10th the price). I mean, lets face it... the theremin is famous because of it's unorthadox interface. I owned one, and I'd like to think I'm pretty musical. I couldn't play it worth shit. The thing it was great for was Jimmy Page style sound effects. Nothing melodic, just atmospheric. I'd even go so far as to say that it's used just as often as a stage-prop/gimmick rather than an instrument. That's why I tried making the Electro-Theremins (see "Stuff Mike Owns"), to make the same sound, but playable. This is going to be all the innards of my Electro-Theremins, but mounted in a metal guitar pedal type case with a few controls, one of them simply being a "frequency" knob. I figure I'll run that through my analog delay, and use it's modulation and I should come up with some pretty raw synth-type noises. Frankly, I'm not even sure what to expect yet.. It'll only be like $30, so I'll just build it and find out. If it's decent, I'll be using it for Revo, and I'll add a page to the site about it. As you can tell, thinking about music stores make me bitter. Don't even get me started on amplifiers...

Friday was amazing. It was "pinball day". My friend Dave got a pinball machine in his basement, so we all went to play. The machine is called FunHouse and it is awesome condition even though Dave plans on cleaning it even more. It's nice to actually play pinball with a machine that you know is 100% working, and when you have the owners manual to read about the actual purpose of the game, what you have to hit to get points, etc. While there, his sister also let me copy some of her CD's, letting me finish off my "The Smiths" collection! After that, we came back to my house and played some Road Hockey in the lot of my old grade school. All was well until my stick broke. After that, we contemplated going to see "Full Metal Jacket" at the downtown theatre. We all agreed it was too much money, so we brought my "Hard Core Logo" DVD to The Chiefs to watch and picked up pizza along the way. Definately a fun night! Too bad my loser girlfriend decided to stay home... if I could have gotten some action that same night it would have went down as a perfect evening.

Hayley and I went for a nice bike ride a few days ago as well, it was quite nice out, although a little too windy. We rode down to Tecumseh Mall where I picked up some filters for my fish tank, some stuff at RadioShack, and a 6' long piece of threaded rod from The Building Box. Riding home with the threaded rod was quite interesting.. The rod is being used to build an offcenter-fed dipole antenna which I'll be mounting outside of my bedroom. The antenna is for my scanner that I bought a few weeks ago!! At some point in time, hayley and I also ended up at Devonshire Mall (Tecumseh Mall + more avrils + more sk8ers + more stores selling painted jeans + 10%) where she bought me the "Hard Core Logo" DVD, and "The Wall" on CD! Both were pretty cheap, especially "The Wall". A nice upgrade to my MP3 copy.

I got the scanner used off of a scanner classified site. It is a Radioshack Pro-95 and it's quite cool. I have all the Windsor Police stuff programmed in, as well as some other interesting things. My favourite is currently 900-927MHz, which is the frequency of Cordless Phones! I even brought it to school, where I listened just outside of one of the residence buildings. The best thing I heard was some guy convincing his girlfriend to go to the hospital and get a morning-after pill. Classic. I think I'm allowed to talk about listening to stuff.. I don't think it's illegal or anything. I guess I should find out before I start streaming the audio over the internet. I'm down with the whole invasion of privacy thing though, I find it to be quite amusing. I've already modified the scanner to add a special output that I can feed into my computer to decode data transmissions. I can view people's alpha-numeric pages and all that, as well as emails that get sent to pda's or cell phones (I think that's where they're getting sent to). I was considering writing some PHP to post them to a website, but I think that's most definately illegal. I'll add the scanner to the "Stuff Mike Owns" page, and include information about the modifications, antenna and the software sometime soon.

I had an amazing dream a few weeks ago, which involved Windsor getting bombed. Hayley and I were huddled up in the basement with only my scanner listening to emergency broadcasts. Then a Civil Defense volunteer came to the house and told me to shut off the bathroom light, since it was a "black out" situation, so the bombers couldn't find the city below. I call it an amazing dream because it felt terribly realistic, and I'm a fan of realistic, bad or good. It's sort of like a goign on a rollercoaster, but for free. It scares you shitless, but you'll go again.

I just checked my bank balance, and I have about $400 more than I expected! I guess that can be attributed to my tax return in-part. I guess I'm going to have to find something to do with that money. Suggestions have been made to use it to go see the Canadian Grand Prix, but I don't know if it'd be worth it. General admission for Sunday is only $50CDN, I guess that isn't bad.

In the meantime, Joe and I are planning to go to London Ont. for the 29th to go see LiveOnRelease! Thats right, LiveOnRelease. I'm not quite sure why, I think because they are a really bad band, and that's quite funny, and because they're on Bif Naked's record label, and she sucks. Or maybe because the bass player, Foxx is pretty damn hot. Or Maybe because they use really bad CG in their videos.. who knows. Either way, I'm trying to arrange an interview with them (or at least Foxx), which should be funny. Similar to the idea of when I wanted to interview Kelly Osbourne, only this time, I think it will actually happen. Ask them questions that nobody has really asked them, and maybe get a picture taken with me and Foxx. Either way, it should result in something weird.

Dave is suggesting that I propose another radio show to CJAM, but I'm not sure if I quite want to. It would be called "The Reject Pile", and we'd only play shit out of the stations garbage. If we find it to be funny/good, then we'll put it back into the "keep" pile, otherwise we smash the CD's live on the air in some fashion. It's a great idea, I can't deny that, but I don't know how I feel about being part of Community radio again. I'll save that rant for another time I guess. However, I do think playing shit out of the garbage makes a good mockery of community radio in general. At the same time, we get to smash shit. It all started when we found this really bad local punk band's CD in the trash, which is now in Dave's car CD player, amusing us on every trip to 7-11.

Anyways, I should really get to bed, since it's 7AM now. If you haven't noticed, I started up a new site for a comic strip that Joe and I are making, called "Oh David!". You can't really tell from the first episode, but I find it to be amusing as hell. At least it's something to waste your time on... go check it out!

I received my shipment of 400 blank CD-R's in the mail a week or two ago, and the picture on the main page is them, and all my empty CD-R Spindles stacked up beside me. I'm also holding a 256 CD binder and a 205 CD binder, both of which are nearly full. Sick...

Anyways, apparently there's some sort of a war on, I should get to bed!