The Beginning of a Scholarly Career

I checked out google scholar to search for myself in order to see if i'm on there yet. I am. I figure that if I plan on being a legitimate scholar, I better get started with the publications. I'm wondering why only one of my conference presentations shows up though. If they include those, I should have like 10 or so things up there.

Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century

A blog dedicated to one of the most bad ass things in life, mustaches. This blog has got them all:
the astute mustache observation, the melancholy mustache, the well-composed mustache, and my personal favorite, the tiniest of overhand twists.

For me, this is proof that the internet is awesome. Prior to the internet I would have had to purposely go out of my way to find this information, but with the interweb, I can find this kind of stuff by chance, and it's still awesome.

Zombies for days...

I'm a big fan of zombie movies. In fact, I'll go as far to say that my favorite genre of films is zombie movies. I found this site which addresses some important issues. It lists "5 scientific reasons a zombie apocalypse could actually happen."

In short, these are the 5 reasons:
#5 - Brain Parasites
#4 - Neurotoxins
#3 - The Real Rage Virus
#2 - Neurogenesis
#1 - Nanobots

The article also includes movie references for good measure.

I Built My First Effects Pedal

I'm serious, I totally did. I wanted to build a pedal that I didn't have already, so I built a tremolo pedal. I got the kit (and the picture above from Build Your Own Clone (BYOC) and put it together Saturday afternoon. I was too impatient to take photos or video of the process, so I didn't. I also took it over to my bands practice space to show some dudes and I left it there, so I don't have any pictures of it right now. This is a video of the same pedal with the same circuit. Mine is just a plain metal enclosure with nothing on it except knobs (like the one to the left) and a green LED at the top. More info on this specific pedal is available here.

The circuit is based on the Electronics Australia (EA) tremolo which is an extremely hard to find and expensive vintage tremolo pedal.

The only real downside to the pedal is that (like vintage analog circuits) it is kind of noisy. I'm going to look into it and see if there is a way to reduce the noise. After reading the reviews at Harmony-Central, many of which say it is a quiet pedal, makes me wonder if I made a mistake or have a bad solder joint. I'll post on their forums and see if I can pick up some info and quiet it down.

I think that I've found a new hobby, and have planned on getting a few more kits from BYOC and building them. These are the one's I'm the most interested in now: here and here. Once I get those done I'm going to try to build this spring reverb pedal.

Sorry For Being Absent for So Long

I've just not really been in the mood for updating for a while, so I didn't. I'm going to try to get back into posting stuff again in a more regular fashion but I'm really fucking busy with school, and now I'm applying for several research grants and designing a study, so it's just a lot more than the average work I am doing. Plus it's that time of the semester where I have to get to work on all my papers and whatnot. So I apologize, but I've got a few posts ready now and will hopefully be able to get those posted periodically.

The Knuckles Years

My band is almost over. It's kind of weird I guess to say "almost over." Usually when bands end we say breaking up, but to me that implies a violent rupture or bad vibe involved. Billy Knuckles is quitting because our bass player is moving to Vermont to go to cartoon college. To me this is the only acceptable reason for a band to quit, particularly a band with members our ages. I'm pretty bummed because we've been pretty active band for 2 years, and we just recently got a new drummer who brought so much to the table in terms of songwriting and performing that it's a shame that the new era is so short lived.

The drummer and I are putting together a new project though and we've jammed a few times and it's going to be pretty sweet, but hopefully pretty different from billy knuckles. In two years, BK

- performed over 60 times

- released a demo (6 tracks, december 2005--sold out)

- released our first CD (14 tracks, april 2006--sold out)

- recorded a second CD (21 tracks, unreleased as of yet)

- and is hopefully going to record for two upcoming nebraska hardcore compilations (6 songs or so just to fill up the catalog).

It's been a long two years for me, except for the band. And even with all the stress that the band and the associated work and cost, the band was fun and really just sped by.

A few people have asked why we just don't get a new bass player to replace the one who's leaving. I have argued against it because if we did that, there would only be two original members (1/2 of the band) which to me means that it's a different band altogether. Thanks to anyone who has been supportive in the past, and to anyone who continues to be supportive of our new directions.

come check us out on Halloween at box awesome (6pm) and we'll try to have a final show sometime later in November, check our myspace for dates.

On to new things.
BK (2005-2007)