So Muncie Indiana is known for a huge Mardi Gras party in the streets of downtown.  It’s a great idea to have an event that people can come out, drink, watch live bands, and show some boobs all in the name of fun.  And normally I’m all for anything to do with partying.  But this year they’ve just went off the deep end.

Here’s the deal, we just got two feet of snow in the last couple days and it’s just finally starting to get cleared out.  Kids have been out of school and things have been crazy around here.  So while I was on my way to the YMCA this morning I walked by the area this event will be held (South Walnut St) and notices that the city had paid THOUSANDS of dollars to have street crews go and and TRUCK the snow away from this area.  That’s right, I said truck it away.  Does anybody else see the issue here?  We have people snowed in, we have cars with 5 feet of snow around them, side streets are terrible, country roads are a mess, and our city is paying street crews to clear out downtown so no one will show up in sub zero temps and they’ll have another failed event.

Our downtown development has been having bad luck with their events the last couple years.  Last year’s Halloween Madness was a total disaster, less than a thousand people showed up and the city lost tens of thousands of dollars.  And before that they had Lynard Skynard in town the they only had about half as many people there as they expected, again losing money.  How many events can they have that totally fail?  It’s nice to see them “developing downtown” like this.

Here’s my prediction for the event.  I just looked at the weather, Friday we’ll get 1-3 more inches, and about another inch on Saturday (the day of the event).  The temperature is supposed to be about 16 but the wind chill will be about 3*F.  Oh, and did I mention that Larry the Cable Guy will is playing two sold out shows (about 16000 tickets sold) that night?  So do they really expect girls to come out and “earn” beads in the cold?  I doubt it when most bars in town (including the one work at) are having Mardi Gras parties and they have HEAT?

Here’s my suggestion, move the event to late April.  The event is officially called “Muncie Gras” so why does it have to line up with the real Mardi Gras (Feb 20).  Go with late April, the college kids will be still in town, it will be warm, and the will double the number of people that come out (in past years as many as 12000 people showed for Muncie Gras).  If all this keeps happening to Downtown Development I’ll be happy to see them stop having events.  It’s not that I don’t want them to happen, but they just don’t plan and make some stupid decisions. 

We’ll see what happens come Saturday night.  I’ll be sure to let you know, shoot I would go take pictures but I’m not paying $10 (advance) to get in to this thing.  I’ll be in a warm bar watching the ladies show it all.

New Desk Setup

So I got bored and redesigned my desk.  On the old layout the two large LCDs were on opposite sides of the desk.  At the time it seemed like a really good idea.  But now that I’m doing a lot more production work, it seems better to have the two machines by each other. 

The LCD on the left is a
AMD 3700+
2GB of RAM
280GB Internal Storage
320GB External Firewire Storage
GeForce 6600GT with Dual DVI (more on that later)

The right LCD is being pulled off the MacBook
2GHZ Core Duo
2GB of RAM
80GB Internal Storage
660GB External Storage (the two MyBook drives)

The sound board shown is a Peavey PV10.  The mic between the two displays is a CAD 2000 (soon to be replaced by a Heil PR40).  The speakers are a set of Klipsch 2.1’s.  Somewhere in the picture is a 4GB Nano Black 1G.  A 60GB Video Ipod black.  A Duracell 15 minute battery charger.  Couple of Microsoft Keyboards and Mice.

Anyway, that’s my current setup, I think I’m going to drop a 24” Dell LCD in soon and probably replace the Peavey soundboard with a Mackie Control Universe multitrack board.  Let me know what you think or if you want more detailed specs.  I’ll post my work setup sometime soon.

Posted by chris at 02:02 AM

   Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Music City Madness What?

So CMT has created their Music City Madness contest to show off unsigned musician’s work.  So I shot and edited a video of The Big Daddy Band (the house band at the bar where I work) and submitted it on DVD.  After that they were to select the “top” 64 videos to be posted to CMT.com/loaded and then it was going to go through a voting process to find a grand prize winner.

So during the whole shoot we were very careful about getting trademarks in the video, getting likeness release forms, and following the posted rules to the T.  Well the top 64 have since been selected and we didn’t make the cut.  Usually I’m not a sore loser, but when the contest is unfair it really starts to get under your skin.  According to the rules you can’t use trademarks, the video has to be under 5 minutes.  Many of the videos in the top 64 have both trademarks and are too long.  A lot of the video that didn’t make it followed the rules closely.

So needless to say we’ll be shopping the video around ourselves.  Feel free to watch it and let me know what you think.

Posted by chris at 11:28 PM

Copyright Chris 2004.