February 2006


Personal27 Feb 2006 05:04 pm

Remember this?

Mom sent some more today! My wife will be pleased, she hasn’t come home and seen them yet.

Daffodils
Daffodils
Audio&The Den of Iniquity24 Feb 2006 07:37 pm

It can get very loud in the Den of Iniquity. And I’m not even talking about the radio.

Awhile ago I told you about how me and my buddy Mark often enjoy yelling at each other. We haven’t been doing it as much anymore because we’ve been pretty much outclassed.

Brian came to work in floor set later last year. Big guy, tough guy. Loud guy. My goodness he’s loud. And he likes it that way!

It’s usually too loud to communicate very far away, and sometimes I need to get the attention of a co-worker up on the mezzanine. I often just grab Brian and say, “Will you yell at Dan for me?” He lets it rip and they hear right away! Works much better than me doing it, and saves lots of time.

Brian loves to shout, and has favorite phrases he likes to toss about for no apparent reason. Things like “NOW WHAT!!!”, “I WANNA BE A COWBOY, BABY!!!”, “WHAT’S UP?!!!!”, and “(insert day of week here) STARTS THE WEEKEND BABY!!!!”, are thrown in with the ubiquitous “MOVE THE LINE!!!” It’s entertaining and definitely breaks the monotony!

I knew you would appreciate this, so one day I smuggled in some sophisticated equipment and caught a small snippet of Brian yelling (36KB, 0:08).

ITF Business22 Feb 2006 04:42 pm

Thanks for the comments, and good ideas about the link colors, I darkened them up a bit. Now if I could only figure out how I want the header. I don’t even have a clue right now, so that might be a while. Probably as long as the old site’s graphic design was taking.

I made the move last Sunday afternoon. I posted to blogger, and lo and behold it spit back an authentication error and refused to publish.

I think it could sense its impending demise. Somehow it knew it was getting the boot and decided to throw one last fit.

I waited and waited, usually those dumb errors just go away. But this one held on for two days! Stupid stupid. I finally just created a new ftp user and then it went right through. Dumb dumb. It had been using the original user account for over and year, I don’t know why it thought it had to have a new one for its last post.

But those days are now over.

I reminded myself, ITF is just over a year old! I knew it was sometime in Feb., but by the time I checked the actual date was already past. Still could throw a party though I guess.

ITF Business19 Feb 2006 03:25 pm

The new ITF is now up and running.

http://www.icedteaforever.com

I finally found a WordPress theme I could live with! Of course it was missing a bunch of things that I needed, so I’ve spent a bunch of time hacking it and making the necessary modifications. I’m not the php guru like I am a css guru, so it took a little doing.

I wish I knew php anyway, so it’s a good learning experience. I still have a bunch of work to do on it yet, categorizing posts, adding links to the ‘roll, and various other tasks, but we’ll get there.

In the meantime, make yourself at home at the new ITF!

Music16 Feb 2006 09:28 pm

I just found out that the long-awaited album from Voice of Praise, Deliverance, has arrived!

I discovered this wonderful news when I perused my buddy Ben’s Blog just tonight. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. You boys better get mine in the mail pronto!

AHQ&Music15 Feb 2006 10:20 pm
This is a guest post I did for the by-log way back on July 19, 2004. It was recently brought to my attention and I thought I should post it here.

I love stories that tell what happened behind the scenes. You know, stuff that most people never find out. The near catastrophes on stage, the story behind the song, how a group got its start, or what happened on that song in the studio.

For instance, on my wildly-popular and much-raved-about cover photo for Purpose, there are no lenses in my glasses. Betcha never picked up on that! But I have an even better story to tell.

AHQ recently sat down together and listened to our new CD, Purpose. One of the more attention-grabbing moments on it is the ending of I’ll Live Again. I had Kon pause the CD while I told the story of how it came to be.

We recorded this project ourselves on my computer, and experimented with several ways of recording. We tried recording a few songs one vocal at a time, and I’ll Live Again was one of them. The guys came in to the studio individually as it fit their schedules, and one night Byran was in and we were cutting his parts. I was running the control board while we worked on the tag of I’ll Live Again, and suddenly a bit of musical inspiration struck.

“By,” I said, “try this.” I demonstrated the vocal lick I wanted him to do, and he laughed surprisedly at the daring genius of my idea.

“Are you sure?” he asked somewhat reservedly. “Is that something we’d want to put on the album?”

I assured him it was something that we wanted to at least try, experiment with. Sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone, push the line a little, take a risk. You don’t achieve wild success by playing it safe. The greater the risk, the greater the reward.

So I cued up the tag, and By launched in. We recorded several takes, and he was getting the idea. I gave him some pointers and direction as to how I thought we might achieve the best result, and he was taking them to heart.

Once again I hit “record.” By jumped in, pouring his heart and soul passionately into the part, wailing on the high notes, moving the line just right, resolving the chord exactly as I had suggested, getting the cut-off perfect. Containing the emotions welling up inside me, I waited a few seconds, hit “stop,” took off my headphones, and turned to By.

That’s it,” I said.

I’ve often reflected since then on the subtle understatement those two words had, yet the powerful punch with which they underscored the grand nature of that momentous event.

Sometimes you just know when something huge takes place. Mountains may not have been picked up and tossed into the sea, but it is obvious to you that a watershed moment has occured, things will never be the same. “That’s it.”

ITF Business14 Feb 2006 04:16 pm

So I wanted to document these horrible Hoosierville winters, and what do you know. The first full day of the webcam is the nicest day in recent memory! It’s 52.5 degrees!

Wow. It’s nice. I would like a way to show the temp also, but I haven’t thought of a good one yet. I have this wonderful digital wireless indoor/outdoor thermometer we received as a wedding gift, I wish I could put that in part of the webcam shot or something.

I had some problems with the massive huge expensive software suite (that’s sarcasm) I’m using for this project, so I increased the webcam update time. It seems to have taken care of the problem. So now there’s a new image every five minutes or so or something like that, I forget exactly. Oh yes, I wanted to mention. I’m open for donations towards a higher-rez webcam, this one is the five-dollar variety. As if you couldn’t tell.

It won’t always be on the backyard, there are some other wonderful things I have in mind for it.

Iced Tea Forever Webcam

ITF Business13 Feb 2006 04:42 pm

It’s arrived!

Oh wait, I don’t think I dropped hints and alluded that it might be coming. At any rate, here it is. Now you can see exactly what the weather is doing in the backyard of the Iced Tea Forever.com office!

Iced Tea Forever.com Webcam

You would’ve saw white yesterday, but the Lord saw fit to deliver us at this moment. The image is updated every half-hour. I don’t know how often I’ll have it running, maybe most of the time for now anyway. I’ll eventually integrate it a little better, things are pretty basic right now, but it works.

Music11 Feb 2006 09:00 pm

Before I get into the topic for my post, I must mention my good buddy, the piano-playing Darin. In a recent post entitled “S(no!)w” he offers this brilliant observation:

Snow is beautiful. However, so was Delilah.

I wish I would have came up with that.

Anyway, here is the playlist I used for my therapy today in restoring purity to my ears:

Acoustix – O Worship the King

Gas House Gang’s Fifth

Swingle Singers Best of (can’t find a link to the album, is it not available anymore?! What a shame.)

First Call – Concert Medley

Go Fish – Out of Breath

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