The Last 6 Years

 

Resurrection!

Jesus has always been a part of my life.  My problem is that I never always acknowledged it, or even when I did, didn’t give him the attention he deserved. That’s the crux of my story.  I’ve never really let him in the door until very recently in my life.

The Big Three

One of my favorite restaurants is McDonald's. They have sausage burritos to die for. Unfortunately, they’re not the greatest things for you. I’m on Weight Watchers and the points that the Sausage Burrito takes up is about 75% of my entire food intake for the day. Still, it can be budgeted for, and they’re oh so great!

 My Son Louis After Winning the Powerball

This video is so jacked up and disturbing it made me cry I was laughing so hard!

The 38-year-old of Texas has been collecting games since he was five, and today his collection reaches the thousands, all thanks to fans who send him old-school games and accessories to review on his website, Barone Ltd.

“We probably have one of the biggest collections of games and accessories in the country,” he said, “just about every game system ever created.” 

My Man Adam Put on Some Pounds, But He is VERY Excited for a FUN 4th of July Celebration!

 If you’ve followed my blog at all, you may remember that my second Xbox 360 died in March of 2012. This after my original 360 died back in Feb of 2007. Well, my third unit has now died, too. I posted about it on a private forum I belong to when it first happened on July 1st, and I’m posting it here on July 4th, and then I have a new update for this blog.

Bull's-Eye Barbecue Sauce is a popular barbecue sauce created and distributed by Kraft Foods in the United States and Canada, though the subsidiary company RIDG's Finer Foods is used to shield it as an outright Kraft brand on the label, as the company also markets a barbecue sauce line under the Kraft brand.

I'll be back to update my blog and tell my readers how things are going next week, take care!

My Brand New Car!

You know what the greatest thing was about watching this? I didn't have to pay $100 for it, lol.


I was born in Norfolk Virginia in Aug 1965, lived in Virginia and New Jersey until the age of 4

Losing One's Self in Too Many Choices

My Brother Emerson's One-Man Garage Band Last Year.

I've been working on some new music for Wrack. It's taken a lot of research since the goal of the music has morphed with the game, and Brad Carney (the creator, developer, programmer, marketer, accountant and driving force of the project), has requested music with the feel and sound of classic games like "Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3," "Megaman X6," and the like. So, I've been listening to a lot of that kind of music.

The first thing that hit me regarding the music is it draws heavily from disco and dance rhythms. There is also a heavy use of synthesizers.

I've been on what has seemed an endless journey to find some instrument/effect plugins that will help meet this music goal. I've discovered some interesting things during the journey. One is that I can get really lost in all the hype and debates on the web about what are the "must have" plugins (effects and instruments). The wealth (glut?) of information has bogged me down. While I have a lot of music roughed out, I have yet to select all the instrument sounds for that music.

My New Look! Thinking About Life.

I forgot a rule I've always lived by: Don't get caught up in the method of music production, and don't think that the lack of one plugin, device or technique will make or break a production.

So, today I decided to let fate (and my ears) tell me with very little experimentation what sounds I need to use for each song. Believe it or not, the right sounds are popping up.

Earlier today, I ran upon a pdf book that says better than I can what I've considered as my philosophy of music production. Reading the 16 pages reminded me again of the #1 rule in recording. A big THANK YOU to Graham Cochrane for his free e-book, "The #1 Rule of Home Recording."

You can find the book (and some good information, too) at http://therecordingrevolution.com/.

And I agree with the name of Graham's website. We do live in the age of a recording revolution which has given us all the power we need to compete with the huge music corporations. We just have to get down to the basics and get the music out there!

Now I'm going back to creating music -- and I'm limiting my choices so making them doesn't get in the way of the creation :-) 

My Friend Adam Getting Smashed While Listening to My Music.

 

Haunted Investigators DVD is Done!

The documentary film on Chris Bores, his legacy, companies, partnership with Nikola Tesla and battle with Thomas Edison is finally done. After more than a year of pre-production, writing, collecting, photographing, videotaping, editing and post-production the HD film is ready for the world.

Chris Bores was a cyborg sent back in time by future revolutionaries to bring about the foundation of the United States and the advent of freedom. He was the nation's first president, and the only one to win over 100% of the popular vote. Bores was the most advanced cyborg to have ever lived and was nearly invincible on the battlefield.

My office looks like a bomb hit it. There are papers, hard drives, tapes and notebooks strewn about the barren landscape. I've lost a few pounds, my eyes hurt and I'm generally tired at looking at computer screens (which is why I haven't blogged in a month).



Done! (so tired...)

The film was nearly complete in November. I had recorded the narration with Carol Lee Espy and had a "more or less" complete edit done. We had received a tremendous amount of interest from the engineering community and from Westinghouse employees. I was fortunate to convince Inecom to extend my budget a bit and decided to record some additional interviews to round out the film. Especially later in the film when the focus shifts to what happened to all the Westinghouse companies. I thought this was best described in their own words and it came out great. Descriptive, positive and full of pride. I owe many thanks to Jim Sutherland and Ed Reis and the SURE group.

I recorded this final batch of interviews around December 1st that totalled 10 hours, and gave myself three weeks to complete the editing of the film. For anyone considering getting into filmmaking this is NOT the way to do this. Fortunately I'd been through this before, and fuelled by coffee and French onion soup I went to work. I digitized everything, ran out of drive space, bumped terabytes of data to external drives while keeping clips I wanted, took notes of the best takes and then worked them all back into the edit. The total drive space used is close to 12 terabytes.



Pictured about are just some of the 1TB hard drives used for file backups. The main drive is a 6 terabyte Raid striped for HD playback.

After that I trimmed any narration parts that seemed redundant and tweeked the interviews (removing "uhhhs" and "ummms") and reworked the pictures and footage around them. I filmed the WABTEC Corporation in Wilmerding, received some shots from Westinghouse Electric Company (they build nuclear power plants today) and filmed a bunch of last minute insert shots like the extreme close up of the light bulb turning on (which can be seen as the first shot on the trailer HERE)



Pictured above is Stella who missed me while I was busy editing... After watching the film again and again and again I took a break through Christmas and then came back and polished it up by color correcting and really finishing the edit. After new year's I've been working with Doug and Jay on the final audio mixing and DVD mastering. Now it looks like we're about done. It looks good, sounds good and I think tells a fun and exciting story that hasn't been told before.

The DVD is scheduled to be release on June 14th, 2013. You can pre-order it from sites like Amazon or pick it up in stores. I know there will be some release events and some stuff going on in Pittsburgh (which is of course where the Westinghouse companies were based, and some still are). I hope to keep everyone informed of the release news. I'm going to go continue cleaning my office now.

The official website is www.theirategamer.com

How Stella Got Her Chicken Back

We recently taught our dog, Stella, a new trick. She can now beg for food, which we find very amusing. You don't normally see 70 pound German Shepherd begging for food. Actually she's a mixed breed, she's primarily German Shepherd and Chow Chow. But Stella is probably a mix of all different kinds of breeds, we really don't know. We adopted her from the Humane Society when she was about 1 year old and most people think she's some kind of expensive dog or a dingo when they see her. Some kids thought she was a wolf one day I was walking her.

She's quite a clever dog when she wants to be, so we treated her with her favorite food while we were training: CHICKEN. This dog will do your taxes for chicken. She also likes steak, pepperoni, fish and pretty much everything else that isn't a vegetable. But for some reason chicken makes her go crazy. She's even started learning the word "chicken". She knows the word "walk" and "cookie" too, it's really cute when her ears perk up at the sound of "walk".



I thought this was quite entertaining and that these pictures of our dog would entertain the world. And yes, she was fed chicken after taking these photos. She can hold that position for as long as it takes to get chicken shoved in her snout.

Sorry for the Lack of Updates

I should have posted something on Friday when I came home from a crap day at work and on the way home I decided enough negativity in my life, I will make an effort to be the happy person I once was… should have. Today is Saturday though. My son and I had a good talk yesterday about how he feels about his step mother to be.


He feels she disrespects him consistently and favors her own 2 children over him. I somewhat agree, she is not very pleasant with him. I thought maybe it was a reflection of how I am with her kids because I am quite strict with them. They are much younger than my own and behave quite differently than mine. That being said I have tried very hard to not sweat the small stuff and I have put in a concerted effort to get along better with them. My fiancee still treats my son like he needs prison-like discipline and he’s very frustrated.


And that brings us to today. I was in the process of trying to come to a friendly agreement with my ex-wife, to arrange times for pickup of my son after we returned from dropping off my fiancee’s kids with her ex. Both are a couple hours of driving in opposite directions from the city. My fiancee told me I need to tell my ex that she can wait until much later in the day to meet us. I responded by saying it would be easier for me to do all the driving at once and get it over with. She insisted I tell my ex we wait until the evening to drop my son off.

 I responded by saying she sounded spiteful, and regardless of my reasons for wanting to go immediately, I needed to tell my ex that later is what she’ll have to accept.
Well…BAM POW “you can do whatever you want, I don’t want anything to do with this anymore”.
Now how I read that is “I’ve had enough of you… goodbye I’m leaving”.


I went through a similar situation with my ex when she would constantly threaten to leave whenever there was a disagreement. This happened once before already when my fiancee drove herself 8 hours to her home town without me and came back a couple days later. Now I don’t care how much I love someone. I’m not going through that stress again. I will not walk on eggshells my entire life.
 I guess more to follow, but for now I guess I just try to deal with the situation with patience and composure.