The World According to Josh

Went out to dinner with the family last night. Was good.

There’s a place on Nasa Road 1 called Chabuca’s, a family restaurant, that has an interesting specialty. They have a rotisserrie menu buffet, in which you help yourself to standard buffet items, then as you sit and eat, waiters bring out actual skewers of meat and slice them for you at your table, if you want.

The slices are usually pretty thin, but you’ll notice that after about 10 minutes or so, you can’t keep up with how fast they keep bringing it out, and you almost feel pressured to hurry and eat more. Crazy! But, the meats were quite tasty, even though the turkey was very dry.

They also brought out various sausages and grilled veggies, even grilled fruits, like pineapple and honeydew (very good grilled. Who knew?).

The kids were well treated to the buffet and seemed to drift more toward the fancy fruit and sugar-laced salads. Our waiter was extraordinarily nice and professional. I was telling Trish that I almost felt intimidated by the waiter being nicer that I am to ANYone at any time. Always calling me sir, always checking up on us. I even asked him to bring me some tortillas, even though they are at the buffet, and he did it. I believe we left a good tip.

The biggest problem with eating at Chabuca’s is this: You can barely move after you realize you just ate about 10 pounds of meat. Vomiting isn’t very polite, so that’s not really an option, but very odd things did creep into my mind as to how I should deal with my newfound overstuffed belly. I ended up walking a couple of laps in the parking lot before making the attempt at getting into my truck. Once I did, though, I realized that I couldn’t (more accurately, shouldn’t) reach the pedals and steering wheel. I had to scoot up the chair because my full belly was forcing me back into the chair. I also had to undo my belt and button on my pants to relieve some of the pressure. Made it home, changed, went to the bathroom, sat on the recliner, woke up at 3 am to realize I had fallen aslep right there, went to bed, woke up and here I am blogging it.

Thanks (I think) to Justin and Brooke for the gift certificate that brought us to Chabuca’s in the first place. Justin warned me about the pain I would be in after dinner. Boy, was he right.

Food

Another great King’s X song that we are trying to lay down tracks for. This time Nik joined us and added a couple of takes. Justin finally fixed his computer, which had two versions of Cakewalk Sonar installed at the same time. BUT in his efforts to start fresh, he inadvertently blitzed all of his cakewalk project data. Gone. Just like that. Just goes to show ya I guess. So I burned a dvd-full of our projects, at least the copies of them that i have. So we’re OK. Also, we recorded a few tracks and structure for a Justin original song. Sounds pretty good. More later.

+josh

Making Music

At work, I was asked to create a database tracking system for production on the reprographic side. I made some headway, but there will be much work to do in the following weeks. I’ll try to post my most significant finds and things I learn about Access and SQL.

The system will most likely be named MAXINE. At work, the website for our intranet is named MAX, so I figure MAXINE should fit in well. Merrill Automated Xtremely Intelligent Networked Entity is the name. For now. We’ll see what everyone thinks of it. Anyway, it’ll be great to get it finished. More later then.

Personal

Apparently, one may add to one’s blog by using one’s email. This is
one’s test of one.

Tech

Been trying to find a program that will, with apt stability, create OCR-ed PDFs from existing PDFs in batch mode. Yes, one may use Acrobat’s own Paper Capture and Batch Processing features, but I have found them to be unreliable and buggy. I would prefer not to convert to tiff, import into OCR app, ocr, export to PDF, since the number of steps is many.

Anyone with ideas, please post and let me know. Mahalos.

+josh

Tech

Well, not really. It’s a song by King’s X and Justin and I are trying to recreate it. It’s pretty raw for now. You can laugh at it here.

Been using Sonar Producer 3 to put it all together: midi drums at first then rendered to audio, added bass, guitar, backing vocals, lead vocal, in that order. We are now in the clean up and mixing phase, although we will probably go back and re-track a few items, like maybe the whole thing. :p

Nice to have a PC that can handle all of this, and a stable platform.

Making Music

First post, woo-hoo!

Personal