badhatharry

29 posts
badhatharry used to do surgery for girls in the eighties but gravity always wins. He can be reached at [email protected]

The New iPhones Are Here! The New iPhones Are Here!

This morning, In Cupertino, Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPhone 4s.  Not 4Gs, because the previous iPhone wasn’t the iPhone 4G.  It was the iPhone 4.  4G is a cellular data network.  The reason the 3G was named thusly was because it was able to take advantage of AT&T’s 3G network.  If anyone starts calling it the 4Gs in the comments, I will firebomb this motherfucker.

Now.  Because I had to sit through like 75 minutes of crap to get to the one thing everyone wanted, I’ve decided that I’m not going to suffer alone.  I’m going to go over EVERYTHING they talked about.

Continue reading →

Meet Your 51st State

Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone proposes that California be split in two. The new state, which he wants to call “South California,” will comprise of the counties of Orange, San Diego, Fresno, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Mono, Riverside, San Bernardino and Tulare. I live in Kern, so needless to say, I’m pretty interested in how this goes.

Stone has said, “Our taxes are too high, our schools don’t educate our children well enough, unions and other special interests have more clout in the Legislature than the general public.” OBVIOUSLY the only sane solution is to form your own state that consists of counties where nobody wants to live. Because the only thing keeping California down is the massive amounts of tax dollars coming in from Los Angeles and the Bay Area. The Riverside County board of Supervisors voted 4-0 to see where this goes, but with the proviso that no public funds be spent on it. I really hope this is their way of giving this guy a Kong to keep him entertained. Continue reading →

Why I’m Not Sad the Space Shuttle Program is Ending

I am a space geek.  A massive space geek.  In sixth grade, I saved up the money I got for delivering our HOA newsletter and bought a telescope, which I used to look at the moon every night, until my dad yelled at me to get off of the roof.  I talked my mom into pulling me out of class to drive 60 miles east to Mojave to watch the space shuttle land.  We were so far away that it was a white blur distorted by miles of heat coming off the desert floor, but I loved every second of it.  I ditched work to see SpaceShipOne take its two trips into space.  On Friday, weather permitting, the longest program in the short history of spaceflight is coming to a close.  Why am I not unhappy about that? Continue reading →

Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Early Review

NOTE:  I am not some computer genius.  I’m a guy who surfs the net a lot and tries to fix his computer himself.  I know a bit more than my parents about computers, but
I am in no way Tim Berners-Lee.

Thanks to the fine folks over at Demonoid, I grabbed a copy of 0x 7 yesterday and installed it on my laptop.

First things first:  You can only run this if you have a Core 2 Duo or i5 or i7.  Don’t think your old G4 Cube can handle this operating system.  Also, Core Duos, sorry, you’re out.  You guys are the new Power PC.  Second, there’s no installation DVD.  You download and launch the .dmg and everything else is taken care of for you.  This was especially welcome to me, because my DVD drive broke after I dropped my laptop.  Just double click the .dmg, and let it sit for around 45 minutes (my black MacBook – 2.2 Ghz core 2 duo – told me it would take 30 minutes, but that bastard lied to me) and then you’ll be done. Continue reading →

A $50,000 Steering Wheel Is Just the Beginning

Look at your steering wheel.  Now look down.  Look back up.  Your steering wheel is now this thing.

I’m using an old-ass clichéd joke.

This is an Formula 1 steering wheel.  It’s used to speak to the pits, adjust break bias, activate turbo boost (I am not kidding), move parts of the car around, even get you a drink.  Like almost everything else on an F1 car, it is made of carbon fiber, and is ridiculously expensive.  Why carbon fiber?  Because it’s light, and absorbs impacts extremely well.  The steering wheel has to be able to be removed in five seconds in case of a crash, since the seating area on this thing is so tight, you can’t get in and out with the steering wheel in place.

Here’s an Italian guy explaining how the steering wheel for last year’s Ferrari worked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6HFvF-QfTo

Now: all that stuff he said about how KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) isn’t in place anymore, and that makes the wheel easier to deal with?  That’s no longer true.  KERS is back in this year, in an effort to have more overtaking on the track.  Just like in your wimpy Prius, it takes energy released under breaking, and charges a battery with it.  That battery can then be accessed to provide 80 more horsepower.  You can use it all at once, or gradually over a lap, but once the battery is drained,  you have to wait until the next lap to use it again.  It was tried in 2009 to extremely mixed results.  Ferrari won the Belgian Grand Prix with it, but it also caused a fire in Red Bull’s factory, and shocked a mechanic for BMW Sauber.  Bernie Ecclestone, the commercial rights holder for F1 believes that F1 isn’t more massively popular worldwide because there’s not enough passing.  That’s a little like saying that soccer (or football, for those of you who actually watch it) isn’t more popular because the total score isn’t higher.  As a result, KERS is back in, as is the button that enables it, and the display that shows how much charge you have left.

Also added this year is a moveable rear wing.  The button for this opens a flap on the rear wing that stalls it out, reducing downforce, and increasing your straight line speed.  This can only be used if you are within one second of the car in front of you, and if you deploy it, the car in front of you cannot.  In the first race of the season, no one successfully employed this option to pass anyone, but a few people used it to spin out on turns.  So, mission accomplished!

Last year, McLaren employed a genius system to gain more speed on straights.  They installed an air intake port in the cockpit that the driver could block with their knee.  When blocked, air traveled over the car normally.  When opened, air bypassed the rear wing, reducing downforce.  Like every genius interpretation of the rules of car construction, this was kept secret until the first race, and then every other manufacturer simultaneously complained it was a breach of the rules, and came up with their own.  Ferrari’s required the driver to activate it with his hand, which became a safety issue.  While barreling down the track at almost 200 miles per hour, the driver had to take one hand off the steering wheel.  This year, drivers are making the same complaint about the steering wheel itself.

There’s so much going on with this year’s wheel, drivers feel they are close to becoming too difficult to operate.  Nick Heidfeld feels that the wheels have reached a saturation point, and the fuck up levels are extremely high, while Fernando Alonso thinks that he needs to stop being a pussy.

The argument could be made that if everyone has the same access to KERS, then the average speed of all cars would increase, leveling the field and defeating the purpose.  Also, the argument could be made that Sebastian Vettel smoked everyone in Australia without even having KERS installed on his car (this is actually true).

Here’s a link to a detailed explanation on what each button did on BMW’s 2009 wheel.  There was no KERS button, because after they shocked a guy, BMW decided not to run it.

Also, here’s another video, this one in English and from Lotus, explaining how their wheel works.

Don’t Mess with the Sound Guy

When I’m not awesomeing it up all over the Internet, I’m mixing live bands for money.  I have what’s referred to as a “house gig.”  I don’t tour.  I work in one venue, and bands come to me.  Sometimes they’re well-known national acts, other times, they’re smaller regional acts.  The bigger bands usually come with their own crew, and I just tell them where they can plug in and how to use the sound board.  The smaller acts, I usually have to mix them.  The following lists happens in both instances, but with the larger acts, I’m not the one who has to deal with it.  On the smaller acts, it effects my job directly.

The Person Who Plays the Tambourine

There are two people who play the tambourine:  The guy who has nothing to do during this song, and the girlfriend of the lead singer who wants to join him on tour, so she knows he’s not sleeping with the groupies.  (Trust me – if I’m mixing you, you have no groupies.)  Either way, you’re not helping the song.  You’re just shaking the shit out of a bunch of metal plates near a microphone.  That becomes the loudest, and most grating part of the song.  And then, right afterwards, you step up to the mic to say something, so if I take the mic out so I don’t have to hear the tambourine, it’s still out when you speak, and now you know I wasn’t putting the tambourine through the P.A.  And now you’re pissed, because nobody could hear the complex rhythms you were playing that like, totally made the middle eight of the song.  If I’m lucky, you’ll mention this on mic so everyone can hear, which brings us to number 2:

The Band that Calls the Mix from the Stage

Don’t stand on stage and tell me how it could sound better.  The speakers I use aren’t pointing at you.  You really have no idea how it sounds.  You’re getting the low end from the back of the cabinets, and then the reflection off the back of the venue.  Of course you think it sounds like crap.  Don’t start telling me how to fix it, because you are going to be wrong.  Then we’re going to get into an argument and I’m going to look like a stubborn dickhead house sound guy who doesn’t know how to do his job.  And, for the love of God, if you decide to poll the audience on the sound, I will shut you off.  No audience has ever collectively decided that the reverb time is too long or anything else that might be slightly helpful.  All they want is LOUDER.  And if you take that to mean that I should turn it up, and tell me to do so on mic in front of everyone, you’re not going to get what you want.  Barring some freak of physics, you’re loud enough.  Probably too loud.  And I have to do this shit for a living.  If it becomes too loud, I will walk away.  I have to listen to loud volumes for extended periods of time, and unlike the douches who are hanging out right next to the subs, I care about my ears.  I put a lot of time and money into educating them.  They are how I pay my rent.  If I break them, I have to find something else to do for money.  Four hundred drunk guys on the dance floor yelling “LOUDER!” are not worth my livelihood.

Keep Your Fucking Family Members Away from Me

That’s your brother playing guitar?  Great.  I’m not turning him up.  I can hear him fine.  I don’t need the whole night to be about him picking around on some chords.  There’s also some guy singing.  That part of the song is pretty important, too.  If you keep coming up to me and telling me you can’t hear him, and each time I don’t turn him up, guess what?  I’m not fucking turning him up.  Nine times out of ten, this results in family member getting pissed, and then telling the guitar player it sounded like shit and they couldn’t hear him.  Then I’m the jackass.

People Who “Do the Sound” at their Church

Please don’t come up to me with mix notes, or want to talk about gear.  I haven’t been to your church, but I’m guessing you’re back in the corner with a tiny console, and you mix by telling the band that plays those super-awesome Jesus Rock songs to turn up their amps.  You also probably read Mix Magazine and pour through Guitar Center catalogs searching for new gear.  First off, Guitar Center sells crap.  They’re the Best Buy of music.  Second, my work buys my shit, and unless it breaks and can’t be repaired, it’s not getting replaced.  I don’t keep up on the latest models of effects units because I ain’t getting one.  When it’s time to buy a new one, I’ll spend the two hours it takes to research them, and then buy the one I want.  I don’t need to study up on that stuff monthly.  Also, unless your church is run by Rick Warren, what I do is on a completely different level than what you do.   You have one guy speaking, I have five or more guys all doing loud shit.  It’s very different.

The Audience

You see this big, expensive-looking thing with a bunch of lights and knobs on it?  IT”S NOT A FUCKING COASTER.  If your drink gets anywhere near it, I will send that Malibu pineapple off in the opposite direction.  And, no, I’m not buying you a new one.  Also, don’t stand right in front of me.  I have to see when the guitar player decides to play an acoustic guitar on this song.

Tone Freak Guitar Players

My venue isn’t that big.  We seat around eight hundred maximum.  When I get a guitar player who needs to have his amp up all the way to get his tone, and can’t live with it facing away, or in another room with a mic in front of it, that means the show is going to suck.  It’s going to be the an evening of trying to get everything up to the same level as your amp, until I just give up because, like I said earlier, I need my hearing.  Then, I’m going to get a bunch of people telling me the guitar is too loud, and they’re going to be right.  But I won’t be able to do anything about it.  I hate these nights.

Bands that Screw Around During Sound Check

I’m good at my job.  Really fucking good.  I see a lot of acts and listen to a lot of mixes, and 80% of the time, I can put together a better mix.  I don’t tell them that, because it’s not nice. (You know who has a great sound guy?  Asleep At The Wheel.  That guy doesn’t do sound check, and within the first half of the first song, has put together one of the better mixes I have heard.)  I will make your band sound good.  But I can’t just pull it out of my ass.  I need like four songs, and I need you to play all your instruments.  I also need you to play at something close to show volume.  Most of the time, everyone walks through soundcheck, half-assing everything, and then come showtime, everything is different.  The guitars are all louder, and the drummer is beating his kit like it owes him money.  That means soundcheck was a complete waste of time.  It’s always fun to un-mute the console and find out your mix isn’t working at all.

Most of the time, I love my job.  Once in a while, I have to deal with these people.  Then,  I don’t love my job.  Whatever.  At least I’m not touring.