New Gerbers.

I got my new knife and multi-tool today. Gerber. Needless to say, Gerber is the new Le*therM*n. Gerber simply makes better tools. Here are some pics!

Taxday was awesome…

I worked from 9am 4/15 to 12am 4/16. Elton John was there, I got to mingle with the claire guys, I DIDNT HAVE ANY RED BULL (oh so sad about that). But the real reason for this post is because I look amazing right now.

Oh I also got to meet Michelle Kwan, she is cool.

New camera.

FinePix Z5fd key features

• New colours: Raspberry Red, Mocha Brown, Silver
• 6 Megapixel Super CCD HR
• Real Photo Processor II
• ISO 1600 at full resolution
• 26MB Internal memory
• Intelligent Flash, Natural Light & Flash, Continuous shooting
• New slim design with tripod mount
• Illuminated product logo on sliding front cover
• 2.5” TFT LCD with reinforced glass coating
• Blog mode

(Source)

This new camera is very nice, it is small compact and light weight, strangly enough it came in a box that I would use to carry bricks. As far as picture quality, I went out back and took a series of pictures enjoy!!:

This is roughly 15 feet away from the final destination

This is about 10 feet

This is about 6-7 feet from the final picture.

This is about 3 feet.

This is about 1 foot.

and 5 inches.

I think I like it!

Gig in Beverly Hills, CA. (Part II)

Upon arriving today, the place was about finished, sweep some stuff here, plug in a few cables there, nothing big.

I’m having a hard time explaining what exactly went down, the event coordinator was a nice guy, but as for organization, it was terrible. The actual ceremony started around 8PM, just like I thought. But we did not get out until around 10:30PM and I got home around 1AM. I have nothing else to say about this gig, other than the guy was a total jerk, so full of ego that he needs a 50k sq. ft. house to hold it all in. The house has enough space for each of them to have 25,000 sq. ft. to them selves if its needed.

A highlight of the night was the 70ish year old man that played the stand up bass, he was the funniest guy ever, we talked about steam power, skinny women, and some other random things.

I was sitting around waiting to strike when I came across a booklet with all the information about the wedding, it was full of information, even the part about Tyson being the best man. Now who can say that Tyson was your best man?

LOAD OUT —

Cakewalk, easiest way to describe it. Pulled the van right up to the cases, rolled them into the back closed the doors and left.

PICTURES —

My camera seems to have broken, so I was forced to take the pictures on my phone.

(Click to enlarge)

So after a speculated 11-13 hours of work from the day labors, with no overtime, the project was finished.

It came together VERY well, last minute touches were added then everyone sat back and waited for the show to begin.

The band played some good music for the guests as they walked to their seats.

Last night was long, glad I got at least 6 hours of sleep.

Gig in Beverly Hills, CA. (Part I)

So, this being my first Blog I will put some time into it while I wait for Stargate Atlantis to finish downloading.

THE BEGINNING —

I arrived at the shop this morning around noon to meet Jeff and head up to the gig up in the hills of Beverly Hills, the ride up was cool, chatted with Jeff about rock climbing, about what we were going to do with the gig. Jeff had been the the estate a few times in the past week for meetings/planning/etc… Actually let me jump back and give a brief history of the property, keep in mind this information is second hand from me eavesdropping on conversations —

Roughly around 2001 the land was purchased by a man, no one I talked to knew the name of the first owner, but he found a VERY large piece of land that is roughly 27 acres, by no means a small plot. He then began to build a house on the property, which is roughly 50,000 sq. ft. Soon after the building of the house he was divorced and was forced to sell the property off to pay for legal fees etc. The house was sold to another man, now this story I heard two different versions, I will start with the first version I heard; A man bough the unfinished house and start to build it but ran out of money and sold it a friend, the current owner; the second version I heard was that the second owner of the house died and the current owner purchased it for fairly cheep and is now finishing it. The second owner of the house paid quite a lot to get the house wired for power, CAT5, phone, etc. before the drywall went up and saved a lot of time for the current owner, which the people working on the system were very ecstatic.

— Back on topic now, Jeff had been telling me how the property about a week ago was no where near finished, but he had seen about 200 people working on the house trying to finish everything, he was expecting more to be done, but when we arrived he was surprised to see that not much in actuality had been finished sense his last visit.

THE LOAD IN —
Upon first arrival, around 12:30PM, to the property we drove up a small 1 1/2 lane road that was very run down, not that impressive. After getting up this road there was a temporary booth for the security guards/gate crew. Getting through there was easy, no problems. The problems began on the actual load out, we didn’t have very much equipment, Mixer toprack(O1V96), 4 JF300’s, 10 Hot spots, and cables. As you can see, not very much at all. Now the problems began, the hill that we needed to either 1) push up, or 2) back the van up the hill, we went with option 2. The hill was too steep to back the van straight up, eventually we figured that we could “see-saw” up the side of the hill just go back and fourth until the van was easy to get up. After a few minutes of navigating the side of the hill we made it on the ‘service’ road unloaded, everything was smoothe from there, well we almost tipped the toprack over, but we saved it.

SETTING UP —

This was pretty easy, 4 stands with articulating legs, throw the 300’s up on them, place the 10 hotspots, loop them all up. Ran a NL8 to a pinswap box, broke out the speakers to front and back, front being pin 1/2, and back being 3/4. Then looped everything to the toprack, everyone is happy. Now the clock has hit around 3PM, the rehearsal begins around 7PM, we had some time to kill. Jeff and I figured we would walk around the property and check out the house and the views and what not. I happened to bring my digital camera, so no more crappy photos from my phone, scroll down to see the pictures.

MEETING THE PROPERTY OWNER —

So, the owner of the property owns a house up in Malibu that is very nice, I also heard that he owns rental property all over SoCal. This guy named Jeff, not my boss, is rumored to own 1800ish rental condos/apartments and somewhere in the 300,000 sq. ft. range of commercial property. His income is based on the money he makes off of this I suppose, my father thinks that he is a drug lord, but it’s not my place to ask questions.

This guy, from first impression, is a total nut, weird, annoying, hard to work with, just to name a few things, but he signs the checks so it doesn’t matter what I think. Talking to Jeff, my boss, about this guy, he says that a lot of the meetings that they had this guy would not give anyone an direct answer, always just moving ahead with out answering the question at hand. They would be asking him if he approved the plan for ‘project X’ when the people would ask him, he would be on a completely untreated topic.

This guy is a jerk, simply because: He had all of these Mexican labors that he refused to pay over time for, not much of a problem, they are probably still working as I type this thing up. But he is angry because the people that he hired to do specialty work such as lighting, audio, pool, etc. left after 8 hours, because they were not getting paid over time. My personal opinion on this is, “If you are going to get a house furnished, landscaped, and tile work done in a week, you will need to pay for it.” This guy is a moron, I have no idea how he has made this money with his personality.

A phrase used to describe this guy was “slum lord”. He just seemed like a guy that has nothing better to do that make money off of screwing people. That’s no way to act, don’t take advantage of people to make money, it’s no way to live your life.

REHEARSAL —

What? Where? When? These words describe the rehearsal in detail. What rehearsal, it was suppose to start around 7PM. We find out around 7:10PM that they are running late and will be there around 7:25PM, not a big deal. Around 7:30PM the rehearsal group shows up, to do what? They show up half-hour late to socialize and walk through the house, this is not cool, we need to get sound check set and figure out all the details. To make a long story short, Jeff and I left with out ever doing anything related to the rehearsal, oh well.

CLOSING THOUGHTS —

This guy has been engaged to this girl he is marrying tomorrow for 12 years, yes years. That means that he got on his knee when I was 7 years old. What an epic fail. This guy seems to have no respect for people and their time schedules and I seriously doubt that this wedding will start at the panned time, 7PM. And I am willing to make a prediction about his marriage; I don’t see it lasting more than 2 years, sorry big guy, I don’t see how anyone could like you for anything more than your wallet. Tomorrow the job that we are doing should be over by 7:45PM and then we can strike and go home around 8:15-30PM, they will probably delay the start so far back that it will start sometime around 7:45-8PM, we strike and still get out of there by 9-9:30PM and get home before Sunday, not bad. This guys house is 50,000 sq. ft., he only needs to live in 10,000 sq. ft. but needs the other 40k sq. ft. to house his ego. Cant wait for this gig to be over, not enjoying this one.

PICTURES — (click to enlarge, should open in a new window.)


The property has it’s own vineyard.

I wish the front yard at my house was like this!

How many houses have a front gate?

I had a fountain in my drive way, once.

This is the property from the guest house.

This is a picture of the front of the house.

There is a ball room with a ‘bar’ like thing in the middle.

The kitchen was amazing, I was at a loss of words.

There was an upstairs wine room, but we are guessing that this was the basement to the cellar, you know for the hundreds of bottles of wine you will need to drink when you are rich. Drinking wine is a requirement of being rich from what I have learned.

This is looking over the downtown LA area, the tall buildings to the left is the “century city” area, I did a gig two weekends before there for the Grammies pre-party.

The all marble gazebo, you did not hear this from me, but that structure is not up to code.

I got bored and decided to mess with shutter speeds and moving the camera.

It will be done tomorrow, probably. It was about 90 min from being finished when we left at 8:00PM.

I will update this tomorrow night after I get home from the gig with more details.

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Stargate Atlantis Season 4 is going to be amazing, I CANT WAIT.