There's one way to get a single...

Not including the money I have in the bank (which I'm not touching as it's less money than I'll need to have come Christmas time), I have about thirty cents to my name. I did have $5.55, but had to make an emergency trip to Rite Aid for a toothbrush and deodorant. The deodorant; I simply ran out. The toothbrush... let's just say that if you drop your toothbrush on the floor in a college dorm bathroom, you know what's been on that floor before your toothbrush and you DO NOT thereafter put said toothbrush in your mouth, no matter how clean you think you may be able to get it. I didn't want to spend my entire five dollars, but really, you can't say that one is more important than the other when you're trying to decide between a toothbrush and deodorant, and I didn't see an alternative to buying both. So I'm down to thiry cents.

The reason I only had five dollars was because it ended up costing me $100 to get a new battery installed in my car. I did manage to pick my car up on Saturday without having to drag someone out of bed at 7 am. My buddy who monitors at the Comm building on the weekdays asked me Friday night if I could work for him on Halloween so he could take his kids trick-or-treating. So I told him that I'd do that if he would come in for an hour on Saturday at around 10 so I could get my car. (I would've worked for him anyway, but when he mentioned the deal with Halloween, I figured it was a great way to make it seem I was doing him a favor instead of the other way around.) But anyway, my car has a new battery now and she'd better appreciate it.

AESCon was awesome. It was a gear junkie's heaven. We got to meet Dave Moulton (who wrote our audio book and did a kickin' job of it and has also been nominated for a few Grammies), George Massenburg (Neil Diamond, Linda Rondstadt, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor), and Eddie Kramer (Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Kiss, The Rolling Stones, Traffic, David Bowie). I could go into a bunch of detail about the whole thing but it would mean all of nothing to virtually everyone reading this, so I'll just say that I got a whole bunch of free stuff including a Mackie® T-shirt and laptop bag, a few keychains, two bars of bias® SoundSoap Pro soap, and piles of stickers. I told my audio teacher that I want an SSL board for Christmas. He said maybe.

Next year's AESCon is going to be in San Francisco, and my audio teacher said that if there's enough interest in it, he'll take a group to that one as well. Of course, including air-fare that would amount to over $1000 and at the moment I can't even afford to buy a stamp, so we'll see.

You know you're an audio engineer when...

The other day I was recording my U2 Achtung Baby Interference VHS onto DVD down at the school because the school rocks and lets me do that. The dubbing has to be done in real time, so I was sitting watching it while it was recording. The first One video came on, which opens with a shot of the band in a studio all mic'd up and performing the song. Last time I watched this video, my first thought was, "I love this song..."

This time?

"I wonder if that's a Neumann [microphone] that Bono's singing into. That looks kind of like a U87."

It struck me as we were driving back from NY after AESCon that we are all geeks to the bone. A group of people that talked about audio engineering for nine hours on a drive home from two days at a convention for audio engineers.

Sign up for next semester's classes is Monday. Next semester I'll be making up for my lack of any audio classes this semester: History of Rock'n'Roll, Music Theory, and ProTools Audio Editing. A couple of less exciting classes on the side, but I guess you can't have too much fun; this is school, after all. But I am hoping to take the new creative writing class that they have.

Anyway, I'm heading down to the studio now; just because I don't have any audio classes doesn't mean I'm not down there every night.

Peace Out.