Another Saturday in New York

I've been lucky that for all but one trip up to NYC for DJ school to have a friend join me for the trip. This week Greta made a hole in her schedule so she could roll up there with me and check things out.



I found it odd when we arrived at the Holland Tunnel that it has changed its name to "H-Wreath-L-L-A-Tree-D T-Wreath-N-N-E-L (HOLLALD TONNEL)", which I think is New Jersey for "fuck all y'all".



I've always liked the Chase building right as your enterting the tunnel. What I'd really like is to see it transform into a killer robot and crush all the Mercedes ML350s trying to cut me off as we merge.



Our lesson this week was on beat matching, and guest instructor DJ Spectacular (also from the Mutherfuckin Allies) stopped in to help us out and show off his battle scratch skilz. We have these two records that we use for our labs, and during his show off set he scratched up one of the tracks we use from that all the time to practice.

Incidentally, the blond in the picture has a DJ Spectacular booty.



I tried to grab a few shots of the studio to give people an idea what it's like there, but I really can't do it justice with my camera phone. The art and the styling makes it a very cool environment to work and learn.

Next week is my last week of class, maybe I should make cupcakes or some shit.



Once class was over, Greta and I ran by the post office to mail Fluffy to her new home. Someone snatched her up with "buy it now" so she's off to California. I'm sure she'll be happy beeping at her new owners. I had a lovely exchange with the cranky postal worker but got her in the mail without a hitch.

We drove up to 51st and 3rd and parked the car so we could wander over to Rockafeller Center and see the tree. Hordes and hordes of people also thought that would be a good idea, but we wandered around until we got to Times Square, neither one of us really interested to elbow people out of the way to chill in the Virgin Megastore, so we had dinner and this great Italian place and made out way back to the car.

Google Adsense(less)

During the process of creating a new blog on Blogger, you're asked if you also want to slap a few Google ads up top and make some phat phat phatty cash so you can buy hos and crack and all kinds of fun stuff.

I pondered whether or not I wanted fortune to go with my order of fame and decided "shit yeah", so I created my Adsense account and was off and running.

Now my webpage gets a fair bit of traffic, so I thought I'd include that in my Adsense account to shorten the wait until retirement. I mean, who doesn't want to retire to a private island and have hot interns fanning you by the pool all day?

Speaking of which, through all the natural disaster our country endured this year, where the fuck was President Clinton shouting from the rooftops "We must tap our Nation's strategic intern reserve!"?

Anyway, he gets book deals and speaking engagements to pay the bills, back to my plight:



If you click on the picture to blow it up, you will see that sending me a 1099 will be a waste of Google's time.

The end of the Robot era?

I think I was born obsessed with Sony's Aibo.

Since I first read about AIBO on Slashdot, I knew I must own one. For two years I hounded my then employer until they bought me one, then I left and bought my own in March of 2004.

Like all of the coolest gagets, almost the same day it began collecting dust.

My staff taunted me because I named her Fluffy and she had a male voice, which couldn't be changed (without a hack) until the recent AIBO Mind 3 release.

I have a rule now about expensive hobbies -- I'm only allowed one at a time. No Serrato Scratch Live until Fluffy has parked her tranny robot shell on a different corner. So as of right now my Robot child is up for sale on eBay.

Happy bidding.

Synchronicity

I'm done fucking around.

My personal Powerbook is almost identical hardware-wise to my work Powerbook, but software and file locations are all out of whack. I got 99% of my MP3s and my iTunes.xml file in sync, but today I'm not going home until both have all their files in the same place, in sync, my old .MyDocuments folder on my server at home is playing nicely, and my personal Powerbook is on 10.4

So basically I'll be sleeping here.

A Short Text Message

The protocol that Text Messages work over is called SMS, for "Short Message System". Now I get it...

theAlphaJohn (to Andrew): Omg midget in a touareg
Andrew (to theAlphaJohn): Poor thing 2feet tall and a check engine light

What I learned in (DJ) School...

Most of my friends know that I've been attending a six week (six Saturdays) class on DJing at Scratch DJ Academy in NYC. Our class of 25 has several instructors, the most famous being J-Smoke, the famous battle DJ from the Muthafuckin Allies.

One of the topics we discussed this week was the idea of a mixed tape, and how that's your calling card. Most DJ's don't make money off them, but if it's good it will get you gigs.

An example he gave was the Grey Album in which DJ DangerMouse mixed the Beatles White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album. Totally sick. More in wikipedia about it.

As for the rest of the lesson: having mastered baby scratch and dropping on the one, we spent most of the time working on timing as a precursor to beat matching (lining the beats up between two identical records playing at the same speed).

14:59 remaining...

Despite blogging privately since January 2001, I felt it was time to have a public venue to dispense my madness to the masses. Let see how it goes.

This is the official starting point, but I'm back posting some of the better/funnier posts from my private worklog.

Enjoy!

Sinners and saints...

Normally the Red Cross isn't open for blood donations on Sunday, but they called and had some special open house for regular donors, so I went and donated. On my way home, the Rev. Jane Halpburn decided to buck the trend and not stop when the rest of us did:





My buddy Andrew tells me that Jesus wanted her to hit me because I'm a sinner, but clearly her car took more of a beating than my poor WRX.

Now I have to convince her insurance company to total it.

Avalon NYC + DJ Irene == soiled underwear

George joined me for my first DJ School weekend in NYC, mostly because DJ Irene was spinning at Avalon NYC.



Before it became one of the hottest clubs in NYC (though it's about to get pushed down the list when Pacha opens up), Avalon was an a church. My camera phone didn't do so well in the low light, but you get the idea.

Irene is one of the coolest DJs I have ever seen. She gets so into the hard house she's spinning (when she's not checking the Spundae girls out) and she totally clicks with the audience. Most of the time we were up on the mezzanine, which looks right into the booth. She has a picture of me and a couple dudes being all stupid up there in her personal collection now.

Everyone thinks they are an editor

Especially me (to the tune of a free CNN Money Day Planner):

Subject: RE: Editorial Error
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 12:22:47 -0500
From: "Wastler, Allen"
To: theAlphaJohn

Okay, okay, we'll send ya something ... we're out of T-shirts tho.

And in our defense, that last story is pulled from Reuters, so THEY made
the mistake first ... although we shoulda caught it.

Send me your address.

-----Original Message-----
From: a.viewer@CNNmoney.com [mailto:a.viewer@CNNmoney.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2005 9:55 AM
To: CNNMoney
Subject: Editorial Error

Name: theAlphaJohn

Once again, do you read what your posting before it goes up? The errors
are killing me:

http://money.cnn.com/2005/11/02/news/economy/postage.reut/index.htm

"However, the commission said the rates sought for books and media
materials was too low to cover the cost of handling that mail and
recommended a 12.7 percent." [...] ???

I am not the spelling and grammar police, but when I catch something
it's probably really bad. I would think for the number of times I have
caught an error I'd get a thank you or a tee shirt or banned from the
website -- something.