Pro Sound Blog

Phone call this morning:

Large corporate client: “Yes I’m wondering where that order we need is.”

Me: “You haven’t placed an order.”

Large corporate client: “Oh, can we have it by this Friday?”

Me: “Does that mean you want to place the order?”

Large corporate client: “Yes. So can we have it Friday, in four days?”

Me: “Ok great. But as you recall I told you this job will take 7-14 days.”

Large corporate client: “Ok we need 10,000 of them.”

Me: “Ok great.”

Large corporate client: “Maybe 15,000.”

Me: “Um, well I need a number.”

Large corporate client: “I’ll have to call you back…”

Synopsis

Large corporate client wants to know where the order he hasn’t placed is, which is an unknown quantity.

I just finished a small audio job for a mime artist. Yes, they’re still around.

I had a bit of a hard time ascertaining what work he wanted done though, since he was “miming” his instructions to me, har har.

I haven’t been working in the big studio for a few months. They were all into having me work there and I did a bunch of sessions. Then one day they stopped calling to have me do gigs. The owner and main engineer wasn’t returning my calls or emails. I thought perhaps I’d done something wrong but nothing came to mind. It just happened that the economic downturn forced the owner to work the gigs himself to save money, rather than paying freelance engineers.

I do have a project coming up at the big studio though which I’m looking forward to. It’s a technical rock band I’ve done two albums for. They’re insanely good, fast, technical, anal etc. They’re a similar band to say Dream Theater and Rush.

This upcoming project is going to be a DOUBLE album. There will be at least 43 billion notes on this project, which should provide some good Pro Sound Blogging opportunities.

I’ve finished upgrading the site. Wordpress rules. They couldn’t make it much easier. I hope this keeps the spam out for a while.

A friend of mine who I help with a wordpress site was hacked. They didn’t take his site down, rather they placed a ton of spam links hidden in his code.

That made me decide to check all my sites and sure enough this site had literally THOUSANDS of spam links hidden in the footer. Everything from erectile dysfunction to medical pot.

So I’ve changed my password, removed the malicious code and I’ll be upgrading to the newest version of WP in hopes that whatever security hole they exploited will be plugged.

Today has completely sucked, and it isn’t over. Let’s see why:

My fridge in my new condo is dead. So all my perishable food went bad. Gotta love the taste of rotten milk. For two weeks I’ve been living out of the freezer. They call me “Mr. Swanson.”

I have a bad back yet still help load the new damn fridge up FOUR flights of stairs. But wait, the idiot who is replacing the fridge “forgot” to measure the opening. The new fridge is too big. I then have to help them load the new fridge back down the four flights of stairs and I still don’t have a working fridge. “Can I offer you a warm beer? How about some chips and rotten dip?”

Oh nice. Looking out the window: IT’S SNOWING. F’n great.

My biggest client (a fortune 500 company) owes me a pile of money. Someone “forgot” to submit my bill to accounting for stuff I did at the end of February which cost me a bunch of out of pocket expense for materials. I’ve called them 2x a week for four weeks asking to confirm that they’d submitted my invoice to accounting. They assured me yes. So as of today, nearly 2 months later I still haven’t gotten paid. Yes I “loan” fortune 500 companies money.

Another client (probably a fortune 1000 company) also owes me and they “mailed a check” 10 days ago. That would have been when they were 60 days past due. No check yet of course. I “loan” fortune 1000 companies money too.

For the sake of argument, let us say that these companies have mailed my dough. I wouldn’t know, because the US Postal Service has screwed up my mail forwarding. I’m receiving mail from two companies in two different locations, none of which are mine. My mail? It’s probably in Bulgaria.

A collection agency called me this morning. Woke me up in fact. They want to collect the $432 for the “leased equipment I failed to return when I cancelled my comcast account.” One problem. I didn’t cancel my comcast account. In fact, I’m still using said equipment. Comcast just told me to “ignore” the collection agency. It’s hard to ignore someone who calls you every five minutes and wakes you up. That has now supposedly been fixed.

WOA what was that? While writing this I just heard a big crash boom bang… My huge tool set in the closet just fell over spontaneously.

I just checked and it isn’t Friday the 13th… hmm. I wouldn’t recommend anyone come near me right now.

The apres ski gig went pretty well. It’s not a deal where anyone dances because all the people in the club are in ski boots.

It was a 3-piece setup: Drums, bass, guitar. The female singer plays a pretty decent bass guitar.

I finally figured out who the lesbian singer looks like. Linda Hamilton. Remember Sarah Conner from the Terminator movies? That’s her.

White Knuckle Drive Home

Apparently it had been snowing outside during the whole show. When I got to my car it was covered. I don’t have snow tires and my tires are fairly bald. So I put it in 1st gear and inched down the canyon, managing not to slide off the windy road to my death. I didn’t want to be yet another dead rock & roll musician who died a tragic death….

Got a call last night from a band I sub with now and then. They need a drummer for an “apres ski” (after ski) gig at Snowbird today. Sounds like there’s already a drum kit there too. All play and no load makes guru a happy boy.

Should be a fun gig, playing for a bunch of tired and drunk ski tourists. I wonder if the gay female singer is going to bring her amazingly beautiful girlfriend again. What does it matter anyway?

I had a gig scheduled for tonight. It was to be the biggest paying gig of the year and perhaps even the biggest paying gig I’ve ever had. I got a phone call from some lady I don’t know who said she’d been “calling the band leader for a month straight” trying to confirm the gig. She said she was getting someone else if I didn’t call the band leader and get back to her in 1/2 an hour.

I didn’t hear back from the band leader in time and she booked someone else. When the band leader did call me back, he said “fuck ‘em. I don’t feel like playing for them anyway.” Hmmm… Fuck them? Fuck me too. How about considering that this gig was going to pay a shit load of my bills?