Month: March 2007

Not enough / Too much

So I’ve been house-hunting for the last week and a half. I was planning on renting an apartment or house with my current suitemate and one of is friends. We went to a bunch of apartments last weekend, and I went to a few houses and condos in the following days. We found a condo that we really liked, and would have been able to afford with a fourth person (4 bedroom, 3.5 bath, 2000 square feet, just over $300 each for rent).Yesterday, my suitemate got a call from his parents and found out that he lost a lot of his financial aid eligibility and his parents are under too much debt to cover the difference in his tuition at CSU. He’s probably going to go to a community college next year, instead.

In all honesty, I’m not too surprised. A couple other guys on my floor are dropping out in favor of community colleges, and CSU is involved in somewhat of a funding fiasco – student fees are exploding, and Colorado’s public education board is basically giving CSU the shaft. In the last six years, CSU’s funding has increased by $55 million, while the University of Colorado got $202 million in the same time. That’s over 3 times our funding, for only 1.7 times our student enrollment. But the state of Colorado is sucking on a whole right now – Colorado’s support per student is currently $7,644, the lowest amount of all 50 states.

So to put this in perspective: CSU gets the least public education support of all the universities in the least-supporting state in the country. That doesn’t mean we’re the poorest university, but it does mean that something is wrong.

Anyways, I digress.

This means that I will probably live in the dorms again next year. I am fine with that, I was just hoping to live with people I know and trust. Unfortunately, I haven’t made tons of friends up here yet, and the ones I do have already know what they’re doing this year. But I have a nice room reserved in the towers – a three-room unit on the ninth floor, with a great view and my own bedroom. Even if I get the roommate from hell, at least I’ll have some privacy. The floor is reserved for upperclassmen, too, so that will hopefully be a good thing.

If something does turn around and I find a place, I lose a $350 deposit on the dorm reservation. Blar.

I spent ten hours at work today. And I’m going to go do some more to tie up some loose ends. And I’m going in again tomorrow to help with some extra projects.
Can you say tech zombie? I think I should go read a book or something.

Blast!

So my birthday present to myself was a brand-new Pearl PowerShifter double bass drum pedal. I’ve been holding off on this for about three years, because of the bad rap I’ve given double pedals (you see, they turned metal and prog rock into almost complete crap over the last 15 years). But some still know how to use a double bass appropriately, and they can make a fill burn in the right spot.

So I got one. It even works with my V-Drums and everything.

Now if only my left foot weren’t so darn retarded. It’s eight years behind my right foot, and I can’t play anything in sync. I’m sure that my neighbors are learning to hate me.

Spring, Summer, Winter

This has been a fun weekend… On Friday, about 20 people from my floor took me out to CooperSmith’s for dinner. Since then it’s been just general goofing off and random craziness.

I started house/apartment-hunting hardcore this weekend with Derek and his friend, Phil. I’m more interested in a house for drumming purposes, but we’re also looking at apartments.  We toured 3 apartments yesterday, two more expensive (but nice) places that were close to campus, and one that is pretty far away and rather old, but costs only about $250 per person, including all utilities.

Today we toured a condo for rent that seems really good… But it’s on the expensive end, so it might not happen. We have a huge list of other houses that are within a couple of blocks of campus, though, so we have a lot more to look at.

I’m also planning out the summer… So far, I know that I’ll be going to Cape May with my mom’s family for a week, and from there I’ll be flying down to Belize for a week of snorkeling. I need to study up on the language end- most of the people speak an English-based Creole, with Spanish being a pretty common second language. But I’m excited.

Spring is really great here. It’s warm and sunny pretty much every day, and my dorm has a huge courtyard which is pretty much constantly full of people playing frisbee or sunbathing. I went biking for a bit today, and it was really great. It kinda sucks that half of the school year is spent under some really nasty snow, but CSU is beautiful when the sun is out.

Awesome show – free download

A torrent of Saturday night’s ripping KVMW (Steve Kimock, Bobby Vega, John Molo, Ray White) show has been uploaded to COtapers.org – I paid for the soundboard tape from digitalsoundboard.net, but even the free audience tape should be good for anyone who likes good rock/blues/funk jam bands.

Get the torrent here while it’s hot and people are still seeding it. If you don’t know about bittorrent, you will need a program to download the show. I like µTorrent best.

This was a great run of shows… So check it out.

Spring Break

So I decided to stay in Colorado for spring break – partly for work, partly for laziness, partly for wanting to actually work on having a social life here instead of just missing the one I had in Arizona.

Then I realized that everyone leaves for spring break, and that the whole week was gonna totally suck.

Luckily, though, Cory was having the same prospects for his spring break in Arizona, so he decided to go on a spur-of-the-moment roadtrip and come visit me up here for a couple of days. Cory brought his friend John up, too, and he turned out to be a truly cooltacular person, as well. I won’t bore you with all the details, but Cory wrote up a good post summarizing their roadtrip from start to finish (photos included).

I really enjoyed having the both of them up. It was really nice having one of my closest friends around, since I’m still new to Colorado again. At the same time, it was really weird having people from the “Arizona world” sleep over in my dorm for a night. I guess I’ve always been used to having completely separate lives in different areas… I’m a child of divorce, I tell ya.

So I’m in Denver now for three nights of Steve Kimock concerts. Logical last night, he was sitting in with a different band, but logical tonight and actual tonight, he is having a reunion of sorts with some guys from one of his old bands. Tonight’s show really blew me away…. It was a very high-energy performance that I haven’t witnessed since at least the SKB shows for New Year’s Eve 2006. John Molo (Phil Lesh & Friends) is sitting in on drums. I hadn’t given him much credit before, but this guy is incredible – a rare example of high versatility in almost any music style. I want his chops, and his creativity. I want them badly.

I am definitely feeling the drumming bug right now. I really haven’t done anything in a year beyond playing along to albums on my electric drums. Nothing serious, nothing to actually practice, nothing to really challenge me or make me grow as a musician. I have definitely become aware that the thing I really need to work on this point is my creativity in a band setting – something where original tunes are being written, and the drum parts do not yet exist. Everything I’ve done so far has either a drum track or a pre-written part.

Which means that I need to find people in Fort Collins to play with. So far, I have had little luck, but you can’t really spend most of your time hanging around the College of Business and expect quality musicians to just drop from the sky. I need to find people who are proficient with improvisation, especially playing melody. Unfortunately, a lot of kids my age prefer pop riffs and technical licks over actual creativity. But that isn’t to say that there is a complete lack, I just need to start looking in the right places.

Another Confession

I just spent like… an hour and a half on MySpace. Again, I feel dirty.

I’ve had a profile for something like six months now, but refused to touch it because… well, it’s MySpace. No explanation neccessary!

But now it’s ever so slightly more bearable. Adblock Plus gets rid of the 25% clothed banner ad women that take up 40% of the screen, and Windows Vista’s new application-specific audio mixer mutes the music that people put on their profiles, without interrupting the music that I actually want to listen to in iTunes.

So that still leaves… the butt-ugly web interface (come on, people, at least throw some AJAX in there!) and, of course, the 75% of pEoPLe oN mYspAcE THat aRe jUSt aNnOYinG miDdLe ScHoOlerS whose existence is one whole drama revolving around who just dropped who off of their Top 8.
(Apologies to my sister, who happens to be a middle schooler, even though she herself surfs MySpace pretty often 😉 )

But it got me in touch with people who don’t really bother with Blogs, Facebook, e-mail, or really any other way of communicating with me. So I’m willing to downgrade it from “100% evil” status to maybe “Evil like Starbucks” status – meaning it’s still horrendous, but when there’s no better around, you can be really glad to have it.

In other news, Cory, one of my closest friends from Arizona, decided to come up on a spontaneous visit for a couple of days. So my spring break isn’t going to suck as much as I thought it would. w00t.

Bonnaroo

So Andy brought this up… and I think it’s a totally great idea. My spring break is shaping up to be totally lame, but a couple things from the last few days have made summer look very fun…

Would anybody in the Colorado/Arizona area be interested in going to Bonnaroo 2007 from June 14-17? I myself am very interested, so if I can find people to go, I would be ecstatic.

(For those who are still scratching their heads and saying “Bonna-what?,” it’s a four-day music and arts festival that takes place on a 700-acre farm in Tennessee. This year has a killer lineup, and I think it would be a blast.

So anyways. I don’t know if I would go via plane or roadtrip, but either way, it will be moderately expensive. There is a way to volunteer either before or during the festival, which gets you in free, so this could be an option.

So is anyone interested? If we got a sizable enough group, it would be awesome.