mikebeauchamp.com

Nerds. Well apparently, it is August. I felt like I slept through May and June. Infact, I can't even recall a single event that happened during those few months. However, July was a kick as month. A month filled with long night-time bicycle rides, and free food as far as the eye can see.

August has it's fair share of plans as well. Comrade Joe and I are planning to ride our bikes to Wheatley Provincial Park sometime before summer's end. It'll be about 120KM ride each way, and we are still trying to figure out how to bring camping gear or if we should just sleep on the ground. Either way it will be really fun being 120KM's from home with just a bicycle. The only problem is trying to find a route there where we can ride our bikes on a road without transport trucks making us go onto the shoulder constantly and all that. All things being equal, we should be drivin' out there soon to scope out a route.

Hopefully I will be finishing my latest project. Building my own Fuzz Effect Pedal for guitar. I had nothing to do one night while Hayley was sleeping on my bed, so I went downstairs and found all the necessary components in my big box of RadioShack stuff. A few hours later, I had soldered the whole thing up and tested it the next day at Revo band practice. It sounded awesome!! So, hopefully soon I will be ordering a proper foot switch, and a metal box to put the whole thing in. I'll put up a small webpage about it in the "Stuff Mike Owns" section when it's done. Hopefully I have it done before the Revo show August 22nd at The Press Club of Windsor. I actually made it because I wanted some kind of nasty robotic fuzz for the Devo cover band, so I can emulate a synthesiser sound on the guitar. The only problem is, the fuzz effect ended up being very nice and musical with a gross amount of sustain. I'll post a schematic on the site too, if anyone's interested in it. So far it's cost me $0 to make.

Then of course there's the Devo cover band itself, which thanks to you guys, is now officially called "REVO"! This has been one of the biggest summer projects yet, and I can't wait to pull it off. I will be recording the 2 concerts, and hopefully posting them on here for all'y'all to download. I am also fooling with the idea of visually recording the show as well, and synching the recorded audio with it and encoding it as a DIVX, but I don't think I have the bandwidth to serve the file, since it would be 600MB or so. Either way, what we record will be sent to Devo and hopefully they will get a kick out of us covering their whole first album. Some time this week is going to be dedicated to making some fliers for the show on the 22nd and putting them around the city, so that should be fun. Wednesday is also another practice, where we will be learning "Come Back Jonee" and "Shrivel Up" as a band.

Anyways, enough about the Devo-Cover band! :)

If you read my last "weekly rambling", it was all about gettin' fucked by the University. Well, I decided (with a bit of coaxing) to send it to a few people. The President of the University, The Vice President, The Head Of Computer Science and the useless Councillor. Of course, I rewrote the whole thing and edited out the fuck words. It was an amazing e-mail, to say the least and I was pretty proud of it. Amazingly, I got a reply the next day! The Vice President called it a "very disturbing situation" and said that he will "investigate". The president also said it was disturbing, and is going to look into it. The Head of Computer Science didn't understand the e-mail and tried blaming me for what happened, and the Councillor never replied to the e-mail at all. I couldn't have expecting anything else. Needless to say, I'm probably under investigation or something, and there's probably someone from the University watching me type this right now through my window or something.

If you don't remember, for the past few months I have been looking for some sort of a job. After applying for 10-20 jobs over the summer, I was forced to sell my soul for a job. A few weeks ago I registered at a temp-agency place. Well, last week they called with a job of "stocking shelves". It didn't sound that bad, and the place was close to my house, so I said yes. They had called a few days before that offering me another job, to which I said no. So, I went into the temp-agency (Adecco) to "fill out some forms", and at the end of the form filling out bit, they offhandedly mentioned that I will need "steel toed work boots" for the job. I replied "what am I going to be stocking these shelves with? is it an Anvil store?". Obviously the mention of work boots had me pretty damned nervous. So, since I started the next day, I had to find work boots. None of my friends had any that would fit, since my feet are pretty damn small. But, I assure you, despite what they say, my penis is quite large.

I picked up a cheap ass pair for $50 or so and wore them to Revo practice to break them in. Then the next day, I had work... at 8AM.

I couldn't get to bed at a reasonable time, since I had woke up at 5PM that day. So I stayed up and watched "Office Space". Going to bed that night, I had a weird dream of a rat in the microwave. I woke up right away and said "A rat in a microwave??? that's fucked up!" and went back to bed.

So, I wake up at 7AM. Eat some shit (not literally), and hop on my bicycle looking for this "auto-parts" store that I am going to be "stocking shelves" in. There's no auto-parts store in sight, the only thing I can see is a construction site where it looks like they are building a store. So, I circle around and continue to look for an auto-parts store. After 10 minutes, I had given up and realized that I am actually working at this construction site!

So, I find a place to lock my bike up and go into the site. There I am given a hard-hat with my name on it and told to go help with the shelves. Doesn't sound too bad, I guess I will be stocking shelves afterall. well, I get to the "shelves" which are actually 3 skids full of metal shelves that I have to assemble! Each shelf weighs a decent amount and has razor sharp edges and refuses to fit together, obviously the foreman knew this and supplied me with a hammer beforehand. "Just bang the shit out of them, they'll fit. good luck kid". I somehow drew a parallel between building these shelves and fighting a war, it was quite strange. Maybe it was the helmets we were wearing. All us young kids recruited from the temp agency and sent out to work. A few of them cut themselves on the shelves and had to get bandaged up. All these dirty faced kids with helmets getting hurt for "the cause".. it just felt very war-like. 4 hours later, we were out of the trenches and it was lunch time.

Strangely, I work 9 hour shifts instead of 8. But I only get paid for 8, since 1 of those hours is spent during a 30 minute lunch break and two 15 minute breaks. For lunch, I had a bag of carrots and water. Since the building isn't built yet, there is no place to sit and definately no place to eat. So, everyone eats outside sitting on a curb underneat the scaffolding. After the break, I went back in and was told to sweep up some insulation that was all over the floor. Then I got to throw out 20 or so empty skids into a huge garbage bin that was 10 feet high. I almost cut my arm off trying to throw one of them that had a huge nail sticking out. I was on cleaning duty pretty much the rest of the day, except when a semi truck arrived and we all had to unload it.

The people that work there are quite odd. There are a bunch of contractors onsite, including one crazy electrician that tells everyone to fuck off whenever they step near his wires. "Ehh.. get off ma fuckin' wires! fuckin' fucker".

I also noticed that everyone sweats in unique patterns, sort of like a finger print. Some of them sweat as though they spilled water on themselves while trying to drink. Some of them sweat purely under their arms, and then there's me. I sweat from my back and my ass. I guess it doesn't help that there is no electricity in the building yet, and the air conditioner still hasn't been installed.

Rats in a microwave.

Thankfully, I had today (friday) off. unfortunately, I have to stop typing this because I have to get to bed soon. I work Saturday and Sunday. :(

I guess it's nothing I should be complaining about, there are lots of people that do work this bad and worse. Plus, this job ends next week anyways. Then I can go back to being a hobo. Yay! Hobo!

So yeah, things happening on this site: I still have a load of stuff to add to the "Stuff Mike Owns" once I can take pictures of it all. The Revo thing is going to be huge, and I'll hopefully make a small page dedicated to that, with pictures and all. Hopefully I'll finish the fuzz pedal and make a page for that, etc. The whole work thing has already put me in a significantly less creative mood, and I can feel it. "Control The Car" has been offline for a while, since the tabletop somehow got filled with all sorts of books and crap. :) Also, "Atari Online" is also offline, because I am having trouble with the capture device not being recognized by the software. Also, you gotta go to the Revo show on the 22nd. If you're coming from out of town or anything, you can e-mail me for directions. Hopefully that will fix itself. Whatever, I gotta sleep.