"What did YOU order?!?!?"

"What did YOU order?!?!?!?" my wife shouted up the stairs.

Recently a box dropped on my front doorstep; non-descript, plain brown cardboard, shipped from "Fulfillment"... & I had no idea what could be inside. Which surprised me since I'm pretty diligent about knowing what's shipping to me & when it's scheduled to arrive. Not to mention, I'm a lot more budget conscious since there's 3 mouths to feed in our house now. Hmmmm... the box is a bit on the heavy side... now I am getting concerned... What did I order & how much did it cost?!?!?!?

Well, nothing else to do, I opened the box & inside was...

...another box!!! Whaaaaaaaaa?!?!?!? Apparently, it contained the parts & plans to create a rocket powered hamster wheel! Opened up the inside box & all I caught was a Google logo on a piece of paper...

"HOOOOOLLLLLLEEEEEE CRAAAAAAAAAP!!!!!"

3 months earlier I had seen a post somewhere that Google was going to be testing its Chrome Operating System by building laptops & was asking for participants in a pilot program. I entered my information on a whim, said I'd like to be able to give an "everyman" opinion since I don't work in technology... I hadn't thought about it since. With no notice or anything apparently I was in! Here it was! Google's CR-48!!!

That was a couple weeks ago & after working through a couple of bugs I'm finally getting around to really playing around with this thing. Seemed like a great opportunity to light the fire to resurrect this long forsaken blog by posting my "beta" experiences. The CR-48 specs have been posted all over the net, so I'm not going to get into that, but I will try to get a weekly experience recap going. So, stick around if you want & lets see what this bucket of bolts can do!!!

RIP Dewey Martin

I had the privilege of meeting Dewey Martin in the early 1990s... What's that?!?!? Who's Dewey Martin??? Did you click that link??? NO??? Google it dammit!!! Ah fine you lazy bastard!?!?!? Drummer/Vocalist - played with a few musicians you may have heard of:  Carl Perkins, the Everly Brothers, Patsy Cline & Roy Orbison??? No??? Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?!?! maybe you've heard of a little band he was in with a couple guys named Neil Young, Jim Messina, Bruce Palmer & Steven Stills called Buffalo Springfield?!?!? Ah, jeez... *sigh* Anyways...

I had the privilege of meeting Dewey Martin in the early 90s. A band-mate's father & Dewey were friendly & we got Dewey to come to come to a couple shows, critique our sound, etc. I was a dumbass then... MUCH more than now, & didn't give a rat's ass about anything he had to say. After all what could an 18 year old, "baddass in his own mind" drummer possibly learn from a professional drummer with umpteen records to his name & 30+ years experience in the delightful cesspool they call the music industry?!?!? So, I shook his hand, nodded & pissed away everything he told me.

Fast forward 2 or 3 years & I'm in another band with that same guy who's dad knows Dewey - although, this time I'm playing guitar & singing - & will jump at the chance to have Dewey sit in on a rehearsal. We were right about to hit the studio to record that band's first demo & HELL YEAH I'll take some professional advice - what a difference NOT being a "shit for brains teen-angster" can make!!! So, Dewey comes in, listens to the 8 songs we're thinking of recording & instantly calls out little things we'd never notice: "...the bass & the guitar are creating dissonance here. Can we push the bass to the off beat?" Done, great advice! Completely Funk-tafied that song!!! "...this part is just messy & muddy. What can we do to clean it up?" How his face lit up when I changed the guitar part. "That's it!!! That's got it!!!" & that change made the song...

Not long after that Buffalo Springfield "Revisited" - with everyone except Neil Young - played a show at Mancini's in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles & Dewey got us all tickets. What a killer night!!! It was all friends, family & longtime fans in the audience & felt more like being a fly on the wall in a rehearsal/jam session than a show! It was like watching master craftsmen make something for themselves, just for fun... & I still remember the look on Dewey's face as he was doing what he loved most...

Dewey Martin 09/30/1940 - 01/31/2009 

Evenflow

The senses we as humans are blessed with are amazing... a smell, touch, sight, taste or sound can stay with us for days, weeks, years... hell, a lifetime even. We can catch that same sensory detail again years later & it can send us right back to where we were the first time it had us...

The other day, leaving work, got in the car and the radio started spitting out Pearl Jam's "Evenflow". For some reason I was sent hurtling back in time to the very first time I had heard that song. Now, I've probably heard this song 500 times (minimum) over the years & couldn't tell you what about this time kicked the memories into overdrive...

Summer 1991, working in a small packaging/processing warehouse near Downtown Los Angeles, CA... Usually, I'd be one of the poor souls standing at a bin of industrial knee pads pulling penny sized chunks out of the molded rubber to make the slots for the straps to slide into. There was no special tool to do this. Someone had used a pneumatic punch to make the imprints for the slots, but they needed actual human hands to make the holes. Just pinch between thumb & forefinger and pull. Repeat until fingers bleed & then switch to the other hand. When those fingers started bleeding... well, hopefully your shift was over before then. But not today... Today I found myself in a small room to the side stacking newsletters into an envelope stuffing machine. The hidden beauty of this was that being away from the main processing room the constant deafening drone of machinery was missing, and I could actually hear what was playing on the radio through my knock-off Walkman.

Being a teenage wanna be rocker in LA in the early '90s the station of choice was 100.3 FM "Pirate Radio". Sandwiched in between the customary AC/DC, Scorpions & Metallica came this raw guitar sliding into a primal riff like I had never heard (This was the album cut, not the live studio recording used in the video that started with Eddie's yell). Somewhere between the Jägermeister fueled blaze of Metallica & the pretty boy, hair rock ballads of the day was a groove that just plain rocked! The energy of the intro completely shut me down... I cupped my hands over the headphones trying to drive their foam covered, craptastic speakers into my ears so I could soak in every sound...What is this?!?!?!

Then Eddie started to sing... It hit me like someone's soul crawling up out of their mouth... Whatever he was talking about... he fucking meant every word! Sure, I couldn't understand more than one word at a time until the chorus, and even then all I got was "...like butterflies..." but this was passion, and it connected with me like nothing else ever had. Then came Mike McCready's guitar solo, and I was done... hooked... sign me up... 

Put Pearl Jam's "Ten" on my Desert Island Discs list right then & there.