Stan Ascher

In the spirit of volunteerism, I have decided to help the JMCA build their new website. In the interest of simplicity, it was decided to build it in Word Press.

After reading an article in the JMCA newsletter last week,? I went to meet with the website committee, which thus far consists of three people.

We met at Dave Green’s house, which has a floor plan that is a mirror of ours.

He was a relly nice guy who develops desktop architecture as a day job.? He set out a nice spread of food for us and he home was well kept.

The other member of the the team, Ray MacDonald is a long-time resident of Jefferson Manor and works a freelance web designer and photographer.

They both seemed like really cool people and I look forward for the chance to get to them and other poeple in Jefferson Manor better.

I’m very excited about it.

It’s amazing how a good video head seems to pull the package all together to make it look like a professional unit.

After screwing on, I remembered that I had to tighten the three base? screws on the Mnafrotto tripod.

Now it’s a steady as rock, and when I loosen the clamps a little, the pan is as smooth as silk.

It’s pretty light too, although with the head attached, it’s a little bit of tight fit in the opening of the bag.

Another plus though is that i can fit the monopod and fishpole in there with it.

My tripod came a day early.

The head and the bag will be here by Friday, but so far, so good.

I had the chance to play around with it last night and I am pleased. It is in fact as sturdy as a brick outhouse and has an extra function that will let me pull the center column out and put it on the horizontal plane. What this translates to is that I can shoot an object from directly above.

After struggling a little bit at Samantha’s wedding while shooting the ceremony, thinking about the same struggle I will face at Karen’s and Ali’s weeding and the seeing the constant request for a professional tripod by people posting wanted ads for videographers on Craigslist, I bit the bullet last night and purchased a new tripod last night

After weeks of agonizing over what to buy, I settled on the biggest name in tripods out there, Manfrotto.

I have had bad experiences with tripods so far.

The first one I bought weighed 25lbs and was way too big for my HVR-A1U.

The second one I bought from Best Buy is too light for what I need it for, It keep drooping and the leg keeps slipping when fully extended

I bought the tripod attachment for my Manfrotto monopod, and it works okay, but nothing will ever replace a good tripod.

This looks tough enough to do what I need.

I settled on the Manfrotto 190XPROB 3 Section Aluminum Pro Tripod because it was resonalbly priced and looks pretty solid

To decrease the chance of a shaky pan, I got the Manfrotto 700RC2 Mini Video Head w/RC2 Rapid Connect Plate. This is exciting to me because my monopod has the same RPC system si I can move the camera from the tripod to monopod quickly if I want to do some interviews.

I'm excited about the RC2 system!

Finally, I got the Manfrotto AW 3279BLK Padded Tripod Bag to keep it all safe. I had to put about $283 dollars on my credit card, but I look at this as more of an investment than a cool toy (which it is!) I think it will al be here by Saturday

I think it may be black... we'll just have to see

I’ve been working on getting the latest version of Moodle (v1.95) installed on my web server, but every time I do it, I keep running into one problem or another.

First it was that V 1.5 has it’s database laid out in simple SQL format and that it requires Unicode format which is only available by first uploading version 1.7, converting the existing database over, and then converting to 1.9

This did not work as I had hoped.

This morning, I uploaded a fresh version to another sub-domain, bu5t it wasn’t even recognized by the browsers. I tired building an hta acess file, but got nowhere…

So I’m on what feels like the eight hundredth attempt.

. I am now trying to start from scratch and avoiding the Install Central all together.

My music portfolio is up and running!

I intialy stated building it in Joomla, but quickly realized the error of my ways and stuck to Drupal. It will be a fun way to mess around with some features of Drupal that I haven’t had much room for in portfolio site.

Everything else in my life seems to lose it’s importance when my portfolio site goes down.I guess it’s more out of habit now than anything else since I got the job I wanted. I guess I’m still just hoping for that freelance gig to come along. I just don’t want to be caught with my pants my site down if the opportunity arises.

I spent a few hours for the past few nights getting it back up and tightening up the code.

Yet again, I have managed to screw up my portfolio site.. This time I accidentally installed a copy of joomla over my drupal installation…

Guess I’ll have to work on it tommorow because I am just too dang sleepy to deal with it tonight

I had some extra money during this pay period, so I decided to splurge a little a buy myself and Jenny two new MP3 players with FM radio tuners.

They were $60 a peice, and so far, I am satisfied with the product. I do lose FM reception as soon as I go underground in the metro though…. that sucks, but you can’t have it all I guess.

I also managed to get some stuff for the gym, like a new duffel bag and some shower supplies

Lastly, I bought Jenny a Cardigan sweater from Old Navy, she seemed happy, even though she wasn’t used to me spending so much money at one time on superficial things. Hopefully, there will be many more to come….

I reached a milestone today.

I bought a new chair.

I had told myself and Jenny that I would not by a new chair until I felt comfortable with my employment and could spare the money.

Considering the fact that it was on sale for $49 and the fact that I may be working from home from time to time, I figured it was either now or never.

So here it is…

No screwdriver required.. just an allen wrench

On Thursday, I was given the word that a project we are working on at work needs some background music. JBS was reluctant to pay for a subscription to Killer Tracks and we needed music by next.

I volunteered my services as a composer, and sure enough, they said YES!

The project is called “Keeping in Touch” and it is a multimedia piece where users can select between three different narrations of teens telling their stories of how they keep in touch with their social workers.

I worked from home on Friday… AWESOME IN ITSELF, and I spend the whole day in a daze composing music

The first is just a slow piano piece with a little gong.

??

The second is a little more upbeat. I experimented with a woodblock here

The third is even more upbeat

I managed to get all three composed by COB on Friday..

Well, I brought in cables for the mixer today and when the moment arrived for the glorius event of the mixer powering on…nothing happened.

Thorugh some quick deductive reasoning, I found out the fuse was blown so I went over to Radio Shack in White Flint to get a few fuses.

I had questions They had cell phones…

Anyway, I got back t the office with the fuses and eagaly put them into board.. turned it…and after about a second of humming, the board died….

The fuse was blown again.

So I tried it one more time with the same result.

After a google search I came up with a hypothesis that one of the solid state rectifier diodes had gone bad ad then told my boss.

She got a wide eyed look about her and swore me to secrecy about this failure (it was her idea) \

She says her husband’s company may be able to fix it for little or no charge… I hope so..

I also bought some N batteries to replace the ones in those ancient mics.

My boss Kathy brought in the stuff she purchased from the nowdefunct United Way televison studio

I thought I picked out some of the best of the bunch to for our needs, but now that it is sitting in our shiny new office, the stuff doesn’t look as good as I had originally thought.

First and foremost, we scored a 16 channel Mackie mixer for only $100

This mackie mixer seemed like a diamond in the rough.. hopefully it won't turn out to be a lump of coal in my sad stocking

Next up on the list of yeterday’s stars are three Sony ECM 50ps laveilere microphones The y seemed okay in the studio, and I’m sure that they were the standard of their day (which I found out was the early 80’s). The are Electroset Condesor Mics and I am not exatly sure if they will accept +48v phantom power.. We paid $10 a peice for them and I turned around and bought one from JBS for my own camera kit.

These 80's era mics may be a boom or a bust.

I will keep my fingers crossed that they actully work. I may have to find the battery that powers the mic to see if it works because I’m not sure if phantom power was invented by the early 80’s

Third up on the list is a bunch of gels that we found laying around for use with a possible four point lighting kit. It is a very exciting time at JBS international because we just won a multimillion dollar contract to produce all educational materials for DSI (not sure what that stands for). What I do know is that the contract will be relying heavliy on the web flash and video based tools that we can offer, and right now I am considered one of the most knowledgeable in the company about it. Either way, it’s fun to sift?tbrough all this old equipment UPDATE The mic is a piece of crap… at least it doesn’t work worth a damn….. ten buck down the drain but a valuble lesson learned…

I spoke with an a friend and colleague from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram tonight about her radio show and her need for a producer for some of her podcasts.

She has a show on witn North Texas Radio for the Blind called Reading and Radio Resource., an outfit out of Dallas that I did some volunteer work a few years back.

Long story short, she wants to do some interviews over Skype and have inserted into her podcast. Problem is, she’s completely blind and only uses an audio recording program called Goldwave, which I have yet to check out.

I offered myservcies as a remote producer and she seemed intererested, so I’, going to explore some stuff over the next few days to see if this can all shake out.

I’ve been dying for something cool to do…

While I type, I’m ?recording what is apparently a bootleg tape of Neil Young live in California in 1982.

Bootleg Neil Young - Warbly after all these years

I am not a Neil Young fan, but I am a fan of not mowing the lawn with out big-ass monster if a mower that we brought from Denton, and so I struck a deal with our landlord.

I use my audio expertise to convert his ragged old tapes into CD’s – cleaning up the audio in the process.
In exhange he sends one of his guys over to mow our lawn.

This exchsange has yet to really work out yet… This is only the second tape, and I ended up having to wait so long for the first mow that I ended up having to do it myself to spare the cats and our neighbors the nastiness an overgrown lawn can bring.

I’ve fianlly gotten around to taking a look at the footage I shot on our up from Texas. It’s okay…
What concerns me is an apparent lack of quality I;m seeing on the screen.
I’m thinking it may some sort of DV or firewire problem.
God lets hope it’s not a firewire problem…