right on bro!

It’s hot here in Los Angeles. Mostly the heat is just plain wack, with the exception of sunset. I really love the feel of desert evenings, when the sun is going down, a slight breeze is blowing, and you can feel the heat on your skin gently baking you. It even makes the Vons parking lot tolerable.

Somebody asked me what my opinion of boba is. Well, here it is: I like boba, but I don’t really drink it that much anymore. My favorite place to get boba is Shau May in Monterey Park. The tea is probably a bit thinner than you’d expect, but man, is it tasty. And it’s cheap, too - something like $1.25 for a tall glass. They also have shaved ice over there, which is good when it’s hot out.

I used to go to Shau May a lot when my company was located in Pasadena, but since we’ve moved to Koreatown, I hardly get a chance to go out there. In K-town, there’s Boba Delight, which is OK, but pretty expensive, like $4 per drink.

And that’s is what I think of boba. You ask, I answer.

So Matt is going away to Australia. We are meeting up with him for drinks tomorrow to either wish him well or say “C-YUH YOU BASTARD!” You can choose whichever one you want when you see him. I’m going to send emails out to everyone. Please join us.

I am home. Went to Philadelphia for the weekend for my brother’s wedding. My brother and my new sister-in-law have been living together for the past few years and it was cool to see them finally tie the knot. Everything went off pretty smoothly, and it was great fun. I got to hang out with a bunch of family and friends that I haven’t seen in ages, and it turns out my new in-law family is super nice as well.

After the wedding I took a short trip to Atlantic City with my old friend Monk, where I mostly watched him play blackjack at the Wild Wild West after I got worked in the first fifteen minutes by bad cards. Kelly asked me what the difference between Atlantic City and Las Vegas was, and I’ll sum it up for everyone else: a) blackjack minimums are higher ($15), b) there’s a boardwalk and the ocean instead of the Strip and the desert, and c) they make you pay for parking in the hotel/casinos. Otherwise it’s pretty much the same, even down to the cheap souvenir stores that line either the Boardwalk or Las Vegas Blvd, depending what city you’re in.

This morning I met up with my friend Pearl, who kicked off my day of boozing by taking me to Ten Stone for brunch. Then it was off to the airport. I got to fly first class (seat 1A) back to L.A., which was cool. There was a lot more room to bust out the laptop, and free booze to boot. Actually, I did most of my drinking this weekend in airport bars, due to having to sit around in both airports for several hours. Booze makes flying more pleasant as long as you stay hydrated. Not sure why I haven’t really done it before.

Thanks again to the 81st Street Airport Parking and Limousine Service, whose new employees include Brian and Kelly. I owe you guys.

I’m feeling super jet-lagged so I think I’m going to sleep in and take the morning off. Then it’s back to regular life.

Blah blah blah…the week is going by. The Cubase SX 2 upgrade is working out fine. I just ordered a 2nd monitor for use with my audio rig - jam the project window on one screen, jam the video playback, mixer, effects, and synths in the other. Whee…

Umm, what else? Last weekend, I played Halo, ate at Kabuki, and watched Kill Bill v2 with Matt and Regul. Kabuki is like an upscale fast food joint with good sushi, and it’s cheap and good, and I would totally go there again. Kill Bill was dope - it was fun seeing Gordon Liu bust, 25 years after all those Shaw Brothers movies.

Geek notes: Gigabytes of space used to be a lot, and now it’s not enough. I remember dropping $200 on a Seagate 32MB RLL hard drive back in the 80s. My uncle drove me to a hamshack in Flushing, NY, to buy it. It was OG hamshack steez - guy was like “Two hundred,” and my uncle said, “No tax.” Dude said, “Okay,” and that was it. It was so much space that I couldn’t fill it with the pirated games I downloaded over my 2400 baud modem from BBS systems around the country that I dialed using codez.

Now, I’ve got about 250GB between two PCs and I’m gonna need more. I might just get a DVD-RW and do archiving that way instead. We’ll see.

Got some cool shit coming up, will tell you about it after it happens.

Okay, so the Cubase SX 2.0 upgrade is buggy, or something is jeetered. Besides the directory problem, somehow in the process, Windows stopped recognizing my Hammerfall and driver updates kept terminating with a “The system could not find the specified file” error (of course, it wouldn’t tell me what the file was).

So…I took the most retarded-yet-safe route and re-installed Windows and all of my applications. Then Cubase wouldn’t recognize the copy protection dongle. Finally, I got it to work in a different USB port. At 5 A.M. in the morning.

Incredibly, incredibly weak. Fortunately, my projects are loading OK except for some VST effects, but none of it was mixed anyway. Compared to SL, the new 2.0 UI is pretty nice - all GUI’ed up - and the three sound panning modes are useful.

rrrrrrrrrRrrrrrRRRRRRRRRR……

I was at work really late last night. The internal application that I own is having lots of problems before its launch, and in order get it launched, the technical team was attempting some rapid bug fixing and QA. Well, it’s not really like the application I own, it’s more like the ugly, new user interface I hacked onto an ugly, old user interface I inherited. Sometimes shit doesn’t have to be good, it just has to work.

Anyway, being the product person who is supposed to know how the application works through-and-through, I hung around and helped them with the QA stuff. They fixed a bunch of bugs, launched a version of it that didn’t work, and at about 1:45 A.M., they ended up rolling back to the original. So I guess they’re going to try again today. I slept in, woke up a few minutes ago, and as soon as I’m done drinking coffee I’ll roll into the office.

It’s been awhile since I’ve hung out with any of the tech team. The nature of our company’s organization has kind of created an adversarial relationship between our two teams, so we haven’t really been speaking that much outside of solving problems and getting shit done. They’re pretty cool, but I’d generally prefer that if we hung out again it wouldn’t be being stuck late at night at work fixing bugs for an application that was supposed to be launched yesterday. But whatever.

In other news, I received the upgrade disc to Cubase SX 2.0 yesterday, so I’m dying to try it out this weekend. I’ve been running SL 1.6 for the past six months, and while it’s way better than the old pirated copy of VST/32 that I learned Cubase on, it’s never seemed like a completely finished product. With Steinberg’s upgrade pricing it seemed better just to upgrade to SX instead of SL, so I busted. When I get done with my current project I’m gonna try mixing something in surround sound just for fun.

What else has been going on this week:
* Taxes. Whatever.
* Bush’s speech. Whatever.
* The left Alt key on my keyboard isn’t working. Wack.
* Thanks to Toby for recording last night’s episode of CSI for me.
* It’s Friday, thank fucking God.

Of course, on the weekend, when it’s generally OK to sleep in, I wake up at 7 A.M. Nice work!

Yesterday I received a check from my credit card company (a card that I haven’t used in about a year) for thirty-six cents. I have no idea where it came from, it’s just marked “Schwartz credit.” (Insert Spaceballs reference here?) It cost them more to print and mail me the check, than it’s worth. I’m still going to cash it. Bia!

Umm, what else? I bought the third season of CSI on DVD. It’s pretty decent, although I’ve already seen the entire third season like six billion times already from the ‘net.

Oh, I also got the new CSI game last week, but I haven’t installed it yet. Got a bunch of other crap to do first…

On Friday, I bought the new Guns ‘n Roses greatest hits CD. It’s dope - I’ve been listening to it all weekend.

Played poker that night as well. It was pretty ugly - cards weren’t coming my way. I think I got two pairs the entire time. Ouch. Need to learn some more strategy - anyone recommend any websites or books?

Went to Vermont last night, the first time I have been there in the five years I’ve lived close by to it. Not really my scene, but the interior design is absolutely fantastic.

Today I went looking to see if I could score a cheap LCD at Gateway, who is closing all of their Gateway stores. None to be found. I did, however end up going to Circuit City and buying a new 120GB USB/Firewire external hard drive for quick laptop backups. I named it Trinity.

Waiting for laundry to get done. I’d like to go to bed soon.