fuzzyraygun

As if I didn’t have enough music to do I have started another music collaboration thing with a friend in the city. Our working title is “Liquor Store Venus”. It’s a pretty cool setup because we both work with the same recording setup, even down to the same Universal Audio plugins. I will post some songs when we have some mix downs with vocals in them.

Alanna and I were at Magnolia brew pub last night. After years and years of going there, I can safely say that we probable won’t be going there for a while. The owners have decided to totally change the food and the vibe of the whole place. Both Alanna and I agree that this is a bad sign and probable spells the end for the place.

Magnolia used to be this great little place where you can have a great beer and lots of great pub food like fish and chips and burgers and lots nicely priced salads and things. Not to mention the best fried chicken Thursday night ever. Over the years the menu has changed slightly adding things and taking things away but has been pretty much the same. People come for the beer and stay for the tasty and nicely priced food.

The ambiance of the place is decidedly down to earth as well. The walls are done with murals depicting various incarnations of Grateful Dead and Phish tributes, and though I don’t really like either band they are well done and give the place a decidedly Haight Ashbury feel. The wait staff has been super cool and does a great job of getting stuff done is such a small and crowded place.

Enter Alembic. Alembic is a the sister restaurant that went in down the block and is more upscale. It has a full bar and only really serves small plates of food. We went there a couple of times and didn’t really like the vibe or the food. Unfortunately, Alembic is the template for what the owners want for Magnolia.

Magnolias winning formula was the fact that it is a locals spot for a nice beer and food that is reasonable priced, it has nice wait staff, good service and nice music. It fills a niche in our neighborhood that no one else covers. The new place will have a more expensive menu, totally changed decor, different music and wait staff due to people quitting over the changes.

The locals have already stopped coming even before they have changed the decor to match their new menu. On a Thursday night which used to be a packed night, we were able to walk right in and get a table, and there were open tables the entire time we were there.

A classic case of killing the golden goose. The restaurant is doing really well so the owners decide they could do even better by totally changing the place. Wrong. What they are doing is moving the restaurant into a different price range that their regular customers don’t like and can’t afford. This new price range will also put them in a new bracket as far as food is concerned and their new food does not measure up to similarly priced places elsewhere.

So Magnolia it comes down to that old song “Who are the people in your neighborhood?“. Who is your customer? Who is your regular?

As the country sinks into a recession, the locals that have sustained the place and come there over and over again may not be coming regularly now. The new menu and decor has to be good enough to sustain a totally new customer that will have to come to the neighborhood specifically for your food and decor and you will have to compete with other places in the city that are similarly priced. We don’t want a velvet curtain and $15 burgers as the cheapest thing on the menu.

Goodbye Magnolia! It’s been fun. We wish you all the best.

I took yesterday off from work as a little mental health day. It was more like a “Double Sunday” kinda thing. just wanted to laze about and not feel like I had to do anything. I still managed to get stuff done though.

My Motu 2408 MKIII audio card is becoming the wack a mole of computer problems these days. It works, it doesn’t work. It works for 2 days and then doesn’t work for a week. I have switched PCI slots, taken out other cards, tried to work out the booting order with the hardware and the computer. I have done just about everything but display burnt offers and perform sacred dances in my living room. (Maybe that would help)

I have posted a ticket on the Motu support site but haven’t heard back from them yet. In the meantime my card has already taken me on another ride on the roller coaster.

I just want to test out my new black telecaster that I bought last week.

I had to make a small Flash demo the other day and part of it was showing a bunch of search engine logos, so just for fun I decided to use each search engine to find the logo of the respective engine. It was just another way to illustrate why Google is the king of search.

None of the search engines could find me a decent logo for the respective company besides Google. While Google could find lots and lots of logos for each search engine. Kinda funny.

Each of the other engines could find me all sorts of other things like other searches that I might like, or lots of sign up pages or other things that I don’t need like super sporty ajax interfaces with in page frames to display the content. But when it came down to it, I found the best versions of the logos that I needed from Google.

I have been up late the past couple of days. Friday night I was up late because George Soros was on Charlie Rose. I’m not that big a fan of Charlie Rose anymore because I think he talks to much and doesn’t let people finish their sentences but I like to see George Soros. I think he is smart and incredible insight into financial markets. I would love to watch George Soros, Warren Buffet, Alan Greenspan, and John Bogle trapped in an elevator for a couple of hours. Not sure if it would be a lovefest or a bloodbath. Either way it would be interesting.

Saturday night I was up late after spending 3 hours napping. We had been out in the hot sun and then walked back the house from the Golden Gate Park Apiary. Alanna and I had a nice light dinner of some salad and hummus then she went to bed and I watched some Lord of the Rings (Didn’t even make it all the way through The Return of the King.). I got a new Telecaster on friday so I have been really enjoying that. I played for an hour or so and then got sucked into a Ramones biography on PBS.

Alanna and I went to a bee class yesterday. It was super hot out in the bee yard, but well worth it. Alanna got some amazing pics. You can’t really tell how many bees are flying around from the photos, so I took a small camera video to give you an idea.

(Cool WP-FLV plugin fro Wordpress)

I thought I would write about the past couple of times that I have been to Guitar Center because I think it illustrates what a problem the company has with management and employees.

The first time I went into the Guitar center was over the weekend and I thought, “You idiot, you shouldn’t come in here on a weekend, every idiot who needs strings and picks is going to be in here.” What I did notice was that the noise was insane. So many people playing awful Eddie Van Halen licks, it was truely funny. I even heard someone playing “Stairway to Heaven” which is like an inside joke at guitar stores.

I was looking at Telecasters and the other thing I noticed was that they had like 10-12 telecasters on the floor and they were all screwed up. Missing strings, knobs, dings in the neck. I chalked this up to the weekend figuring that they didn’t have time to see that these guitars should not be on the sales floor like that. I couldn’t get any help and I wouldn’t have been able to hear anything anyway, so I left. Cash still tucked in my wallet.

I went back the next week and to my amazement I found an empty sales floor filled with all the same broken guitars. So I had some fun and started to walk around and count the problems.

So, out of 10 or so telecaster guitars on the floor:

• All were missing knobs of one kind or another
• one had a jack that was hanging out
• 5 were missing strings
• 3 had visible dings in the neck,
• 3 had visible dings on the body
• 1 had a pickup that didn’t work

As if this was not enough, no one could help me. I had cash in my pocket and didn’t look like a troll who just wanted to touch the guitars. Did I smell that bad? And before you can answer that, No I didn’t. The “manager” got on the intercom and asked for sales help to guitars and no one came. He finally put a guy right in front of me and I asked if “These were the only telecasters they had”. He promptly left and spent the next 10 minutes at the computer screen while I walked around.

After he came back his only answer was “No that’s it” and turned and went back to his computer terminal. So once again cash in hand I was turned out at the largest music retailer in the U.S. without being able to purchase one the oldest and most widely used guitar styles ever.

So I took my money and went down to Haight Ashbury Music store and was able to play a nice selection of Fender telecasters with a nice helpful salesperson (Thanks Steve) and came home with a great black Telecaster.

Scratch another major music retailer off my list. Don’t think I will be back there.

Alanna worked super hard this weekend to get her senior solo show up and running at CCA. Friday we had a nice night together, kinda like the quiet before the storm. Saturday was a whirlwind of driving. Down to Menlo Park for a childs birthday party, over to Berkeley to get some wine at Kermit Lynch, back into the city to get some paintings at my work and then home for me and down to the studio for Alanna to start getting her show together. Saturday night I made some pasta with sausage and Alanna worked at CCA until midnight.

Sunday was a full day of hanging out at CCA. I made a quick and useless trip to Guitar Center (Get hard center) to look at guitars. I will never go there on a weekend again. It was a frakin zoo. I actually heard someone playing “Stairway to Heaven“, and couldn’t control my laughter. I looked over and some other guy was laughing at the same thing. I decided to just head back to hang with Alanna at CCA. We got some visits by friends and family that made the long day worth it. We left CCA and had a couple of beers at Parkside, but got kicked out because there was a show that night.

Quicktime Movie of the Space – 6MB

We went home and had some snacks and wine and gabbed for a while in kitchen. Then we relaxed on the couch and watched “Dan in Real life”.

My family has a way of solving problems that is… well unique. At first there are arguments, then the arguments are diffused with humor then the humor passes into absurdity and then finally into sketch comedy.

Fictional Example that is not far off:
Sibling 1: “I can’t believe you would say such a thing! Are you some sort of fascist?”
Sibling 2: “It’s my opinion, it’s not like I march up and down the driveway in black boots!”
Sibling 3: “Besides its spring he can’t wear his black boots in the spring, what would the neighbors say?”
Sibling 4: “They would call the black boot police on him. ”
Sibling 1: imitating Black boot police “The party of the first part did willingly commit acts of gross shoe negligence on and about the premises of his driveway, with special exception toward blandishing his notoriously snappy footwear!”
Sibling 3: with announcer voice “The entire neighborhood of upper Chestnut Street was in a uproar earlier this evening when one of there own was seen with what neighbors are calling ‘Exceptionally Dressy footwear’. Police have surrounded the house and are calling in a podiatrist second class to assess the situation.”
Sibling 4: neighbor voice “This used to be such a nice neighborhood”