Tuesday 28th January 2003
If I hurry, I can still write and upload today's What's New before it's not today anymore....
Spam of the Day
More Later....
Very weird day. We've been set up for weeks to get some stuff for BEASUR.com today; then we had to call it off because our model got leprosy. Or something. Hives. Bad things. Of some sort.
So we didn't do that today.
We got a few things done, though. Not that any of it really went as well as our model getting leprosy.
Since Dino [the other half of BEASUR] is also the photographer for ColdMoon, we were able to play with that site instead. So the Just in Time version is complete and online now. Which is to say that, while it's not even remotely finished, it's at least done. More specifically: all the necessary elements are online now [albeit split between three different servers]; but it's not the final version of the site.
To be realistic, the JiT version is mostly for industry insiders who are trying to get an idea who ColdMoon are, in addition to ascertaining how they sound. Mostly because you're no longer allowed to succeed on talent alone; you have to look good as well.
Mtv was a good idea. But that was twenty-three years ago. Meet the new boss.
Strike that. Pete Townshend would never have succeeded in today's ImageCritical record business: no one knows what it's like to be a cowboy behind a big nose.
Video killed the radio star.
There were, of course, other factors. For example....
So we went off to get a few pickup shots for the website. For HellhoundRecords.com; not for BEASUR.com. So we went down to Fairmount Cemetery with the DigiCam. That didn't lead to much of anything useful. Although it is highly entertaining to walk through a mausoleum wearing a shirt reading life after death: for those without lives before death.
When that didn't work, we gave up and went through the archives. Which are Dino's images of the band from last year. Which are actual prints, and not digital files.
Which presents the next problem, since I just blanked the laptop the other day and I haven't had a chance to reinstal the scanner yet [don't believe for an instant that WindozeXP can actually guess for itself what a scanner is or how it should be used; you get things like USB device detected--does it make coffee?]; we hit Kinko's thinking that it would take less time to scan the snaps in on their computers and burn them to disc.
We were wrong.
First of all, their 'computer' was a reasonably newish Dell. If you've never used a Dell before, factor two things about them. First of all, Dells historically contain farmers; and that's never a good thing. Second: these are machines being pimped out by a meth zombie who makes Bobcat Goldthwait look like Steven Wright; I might look to someone a little more stable to tell me whether a given computer might be of use to me.
Anyway: the ninety-second job of scanning in four snaps, smashing them into jpegs, and burning them to disc somehow amounted to fifteen minutes of wishing the fucking machine would stop freezing every .exe it was running, except for the timer keeping track of how much money we owed it at twenty cents per minute. Partly because they didn't actually have any blank CDs to burn, and could only give us a couple of 1.44meg diskettes for only a dollar each. You may remember diskettes: those useless little things that AOHell can't even give away anymore.
Anyway: after fifteen minutes of fighting with PhotoshopSix [the Dell apparently couldn't actually handle PS7], we had what we needed. Although, by then, the price of a diskette had jumped from ninety-nine cents to a dollar forty-nine. Which, being only ten times the price of a blank 700Mb CDR, was...well, it was a Bait and Switch, which is a factor of fraud, which is a neat way to go to prison for twenty years in an effort to scam fifty cents out of someone.
So we got the diskettes containing Dino's intellectual property for a dollar each after all. Yay.
In the end, we were able to use the images, too. Which is why the background of HellhoundRecords.com has changed to something more consistent with the sound of ColdMoon now. And all for only ten times the effort of just giving in and faking the same shot in LightWave.
Oh well. If people didn't put more effort into making me want to kill them than making me want to pay them, I suppose I'd be too boring to have a website, wouldn't I....
Are there corrupt files lurking inside my PC ready to cause harmful destruction? No.
How would I know? Because I'm a little better with computers than the luser fucktards who would actually buy this bullshit software; that's how....
--Gremlin