A Crime-Fighting Source of Potassium

First, thanks to Trevin for being on the ball with "Odd News from Alpha John's Hometown". Given the current battle I'm having over my transfer credit from ACC, the timing could not be more appropriate.

Capital 9 News (our motto: "Not only do we blow, but we rake our teeth") broke the story about the mis-adventures of Banana Boy, a crime-fighting super fruit whose secret identity is none other than local ACC student Chris Phelps (motto: "Bay Road Polytech -- 7 years or bust!"). I'll let the crack news team give you the skinny:

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Chris Phelps is a mild-mannered 20-year-old ACC student and cameraman at WNCE-TV 8 in Glens Falls. His alter ego is Banana Boy, a crime fighter and cast member of TV 8's sketch show "The Ravacon."

[...]

While shooting a fight scene in Hudson Falls on Thursday a Washington County Sheriff's Deputy noticed Banana Boy and two members of his bunch.

The deputy mistook the act for a real knife-point attack and immediately took action.

Make believe mugger Luke Van Scoy said, "All the sudden we just heard screaming and I looked over and there was the gun pointed at me. It was such a serious moment for me. So I immediately dropped the knife and kind of put my hands up and took off my wig and mask."

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Now come on, are you fist-fucking me? A County Sheriff's Deputy thought a mugging that involved someone dressed as a food group demanded he pull his gun?

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Phelps said, "Banana Boy in this situation would probably fly away if he thought he was going to be arrested. But Banana Boy wouldn't really be arrested."

But Phelps and his crew were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. And in character or not, they'll be in Hudson Falls Village Court on December 15.

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This dude is a total fucking space ranger. Then again, I've come a long way from my ACC days, fixated on the popcorn machine, the master plan, and the SUNY Vortex.

More (Ad)Senseless-ness

theAlphaJohn: i see your adsensing
Trevin: yeah
Trevin: i figured...what the heck
theAlphaJohn: is yours as successful as mine?
theAlphaJohn: yeah i mean why not?
Trevin: i just started today
Trevin: nod
theAlphaJohn: lemme check mine
Trevin: like I said...if it buys me a cup of coffee now and then...well, that's worth it
theAlphaJohn: six fucking cents
Trevin: lol
theAlphaJohn: i clicked yours so you can get a couple pennies
Trevin: I clicked yours the other day
theAlphaJohn: !!!
theAlphaJohn: we'll make each other rich!
Trevin: exactly!

In academic terms...

I'm fucked.

Utterly, totally, completely fucked.

My current employer (who also happens to be my institution of learning) sent me my transfer credit evaluation in the mail this weekend, and I have to say I'm not impressed. Mason decided that they wanted to reevaluate everything themselves, so even though NVCC evaluated all of my credit from ACC, they wanted to do it themselves. When NVCC evaluated my 56 credits from ACC, they awarded me 40 transfer credits, but Mason decided to only award me 27. Since I went to ACC early admit from high school, I can certainly understand not giving me college credit for courses I needed to graduate from high school (well, I don't like it, but I understand it), but you can't just discard an entire year of course work I did because I was also in high school -- you don't fucking know which courses I needed to graduate and what I took just to take. Also, there are all kinds of errors in the report, on one line it says "ENG101 [tab tab tab] French II". I sent admissions an email and told them I wanted an appointment to discuss this before orientation this Thursday, because (presumably) I should walk out of there with a schedule of classes.

I've been pouring over my transfer evaluation for more than an hour now, and I've run half a dozen "what-if" scenarios in Banner. I've filled out half a dozen "Request for Transfer Reevaluation" forms and shot those out through inter-office mail.

Ultimately, even if I fight them on what transfers where, I'm pretty sure I'm fucked.

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!