Category — Geek Stuff

I was going through old folders on my iBook tonight, looking for large files to get rid of, when I came across some fliers I had made for a few of my student radio shows while at Grand Valley State University.

Fair warning, this could get geeky.

My favorite part is the horrible clone brush job in the upper right hand corner

Ah yes. The Electric Challenge of the Powerslaves, a title that was not only a reference to the Go-Bots, but also Iron Maiden’s seminal 1984 album, Powerslave. Oh, here’s a live video of the title track. Better still, the entire background of the flier is the cover from Dio’s The Last in Line album. These fliers are a great time capsule of my Photoshop skills in college. I had probably only just learned the program at this point. Oy. I did this show with my buddy Erik.

The “premise” of this show, even if there was ever such a thing, was a combination of late night talk radio and music. All three of our listeners enjoyed it. In all seriousness, one of our friends commented that he enjoyed our varied musical tastes. Erik would play some Joy Division and I would follow it up with Iron Maiden. Hilarious.

Moving on.

This one was a bit better, look at all those images in the text!

Next up was Büllit Bëlt, my “old school” heavy metal show. This was a solo affair and a decent step in my Photoshop know-how. I had learned how to add images to text (and how to bevel/emboss said text). I seem to remember painstakingly cutting that flying V guitar and the ring of fire out of their respective original images. I also tracked down a Metallica font (called Pastor of Muppets, I believe) as well as an Iron Maiden font (Metal Lord?). For those curious, the images in the text are L to R: Eddie from Iron Maiden, the Motorhead logo, the cover of Dio’s Holy Diver and a Slayer album.

Next!

This is probably the best looking of the three, design wise.

Oh, Blades of Steel. My darling hockey talk show. Interestingly enough, it was a fairly landmark show at the time. WCKS was mainly music and a little bit of talk, but no one really did a sports show, let alone on hockey. They even did a story on me for the school paper. Obviously, this is just an ad for the Blades of Steel video game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. I didn’t have to do much, which was probably a good thing, but I did change “game” in “the hottest game on ice” to “show.” That took some creative Photoshop work. I got the S, H and O from “hottest” but I had to swipe and flip the M from “game” to complete show. I was pretty happy with that.

Ah, college radio. Good times, good conversation (well, not really, except when Erik was around). Doing LansingNext with Julielyn is bringing back some of those memories and that is part of the reason I am enjoying the show so much (and like a million times more people are listening).

I can’t say enough great things about Ignite Lansing 3.0. It was a spectacular event that blew away my highest expectations. The crew was amazing. The venue was amazing. Everything was, at the risk of being repetitive, amazing.

I arrived on scene at 6:00 PM as the speakers were told to do, the interior of the Knapp’s Building was a buzzing hive of activity. Lights. Lasers (yes, laser). Cameras. They were all alive.

I had my pre-show briefing with show runners (Nick, Ben), the MC and the stage manager, Melissa. I was happy to see I could use a hand held mic, as I wanted to be mobile during my speech.

Around 7:00, the floodgates opened and attendees started arriving. It was energetic chaos (I mean that in a good way). Dozens filled the line for the Cravings Popcorn bar (my LansingNext co-host Julielyn helped as a volunteer).

The evening was pretty much a blur for me until I had my cue to head for the stage around 9:00 PM. I was in Group C, the last of the three groups of presenters. The crowd had thinned a bit by this point, but it was still very much a packed house.

I was pumped, primed and ready.

I took the stage and killed. My choice to go for the silly, crazy presentation worked. Had a lot of great crowd reactions (although my spork joke at the open didn’t seem to go over that well). I’m glad I decided to wear an eye-patch and to do a “character voice,” the crowd ate it up.

Five minutes later, it was all over. I received scores of compliments afterward, both in person and online.

Better still, I took First Place for my group. Bam.

I think I had third place overall. I don’t know when the video will be on YouTube, but I will post that asap once it becomes available.

Thanks to everyone at Ignite Lansing for putting on a great event!

This scene from ERNEST SAVES CHRISTMAS inspired my presentation a bit.

Here it is kids, the first episode of LansingNext — the Internet talk show I co-host with Julielyn Gibbons for TalkLansing.net. I talked about the show in a bit more detail in a previous post.

To Listen: click on the gray play button below.

 

 LansingNext 2-17-10 [59:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

To Download the MP3: Right Click on the Download link, choose Save Target As or Save Link As from the menu and then choose where to save the .MP3 on your hard drive.

We talk about Smoke Free bars/restaurants in Lansing, urban chicken farming and Foursquare. We also talked about Ignite Lansing 3.0 with Nick Kwiatkowski and Lansing’s global appeal with Suban Nur-Cooley.

Keep in mind this is very much a work in progress, so things are a bit rough around the edges. I also apologize in advance for all my horrible jokes.

Heads up, there are commercials with our sponsors (and PSAs) and, full disclosure, Julielyn and I do get a cut of that money.

Lastly, unlike the Magic of Eyri Podcast, I was only the “talent” for this show–I didn’t do any of the engineering or production duties. I gotta say, it was nice not to have to worry about any of that for a change.

Make sure to become a fan of the show on Facebook.

Today at 11 AM, the first episode of LansingNext will be online.

LansingNext is an Internet talk show I am doing with my friend Julielyn Gibbons for the brand new TalkLansing.net

TalkLansing was started by a few local radio personalities as a way to go after the “iPhone Generation.” All of the shows will be streamed online (and available for download eventually).

I was honored when Julielyn approached me to co-host the show with her and I’m excited about this unique opportunity. Our slogan is:

A weekly Internet talk show focusing on the people, issues and events affecting Lansing’s next generation.

That gives us a bit of wiggle room when it comes to topics, and we’re already having a lot of fun. Julielyn and I are quickly developing a great on-air (…on-net?) dynamic, with me already falling into the comic relief role (which is fine by me).

The shows are pre-recorded (as I can’t do a live show on a Wednesday morning) and while the first one was a bit rough around the edges, we are getting the hang of things at a blazing speed.  Parts of the first show took me back to my college radio days when I actually had a co-host.

We also have a Facebook fan page.

And speaking of such things, I made one for myself a couple days ago. More on that later, as I plan to blog about it.

So tune (click?) in to TalkLansing.net today at 11 AM to give us a listen. Feedback appreciated, as this is very much a work in progress. Once I get an .MP3 of the episode, I’ll see about having it available to download from one of my sites.

Our first episode will feature a pair of guests and we’ll also talk about Foursquare, the iPad and smoke-free bars around town.

I’ve been writing my development stories for Capital Gains in TextEdit on my iBook as of late. I’m sick of using MS Word, and copying from Word into the Capital Gains uploading/editing/publishing site ain’t a good thing.

MS Word adds some kind of crazy coding that shows up when it is pasted into blogging software–I have the same issue here with WordPress and on the software the Examiner.com uses.

So, the other day I had a some text selected and did the ol’ Right Click and noticed the ‘Speech’ option, followed by the ‘Start Speaking’ command.  I had been aware of Mac’s text to speech in the past, but never used it. I figured, why not?

I greatly enjoyed listening to my iBook read off my short article to me–but then I realized this could serve a helpful purpose: proofreading.

I am a fast reader. Very fast. And because of this, I tend to mentally “skip” words when I don’t read aloud (this is pretty common actually).  I’m good about reading stuff aloud when proofreading, but even then I go too fast at times.

Because the Text to Speech voice reads at much, much slower pace it helps me stay on track. Plus, there is the addition of the computer just reading aloud, which helps if I missed a word while writing (I also type very fast) or mistype a word.

I also noticed that it helped with some of my word flow a bit. I would listen to a section and think “I don’t like how that sounds” and rewrite it.

If you are a Mac user, play around with the Text to Speech option in TextEdit, it is an easy way to aid your proofreading.

I’m toying with using it to record a character voice for the Magic of Eyri Podcast. We’ll see! It isn’t a perfect system, as the Text to Speech has problems with words such as “live” (as in “to live”) and “live” (as in “live at the Fillmore”).

I sitting around Friday night, trying to learning Bowie’s Moonage Daydream on guitar (or something at least resembling it), when I had an idea:  what would happen if I ran my Nintendo DSi through a couple guitar effect pedals and then into my portable Marshall amp?

I had the portable amp out because I plan on dressing up as a Spider from Mars for an “intergalactic” birthday party (which is why I was learning Moonage Daydream).

This idea came to me when I was curious if I could run my iPod Shuffle or DSi through the amp in case I didn’t want to try and play the song.

I decided against the Shuffle quickly because it has “issues.” It is doing this thing where one of the sound channels keeps cutting in and out and it is very sensitive to any cord movement–it pauses right away if the sound cord giggles too much.

So I went with the DSi.

I ran it through my distortion pedal and then my chorus pedal and messed with the tone and distortion on the amp itself.  It made for an interesting sound.

You can tweak the pitch and speed of the songs via the DSi, which I of course did. Listening to Rush’s Working Man sped up, distorted and in a chorus was  something out of this world.

I liked being able to tweak the output of the song live via the pedals and the DSi interface.

Does this have any sort of practical application? I doubt it, but it was fun.

The little Marshall, with its built in belt clip, makes for a great portable speaker if I need sound for a costume however.

I am going to have the guitar and amp with me for my costume and I am toying with attaching one of the pedals (maybe the distortion) somewhere on my costume, as the OD (overdrive) on the little amp leaves a lot to be desired.