Anxiously Awaiting

We played a show this weekend at House of Prayer in their new Family Life building. The thing was huge. The show was for HOP’s annual Bible Camp–which we play at almost every year. It ended up being a pretty darn good show, and BTB’s first appearance as a 4 piece. After our initial 4 song introduction, the speaker for that week–a man named Chip, hopped up on stage. Unfortunately he was kinda boring, but once I looked past the boredom and got to the meat of his message it was actually pretty cool. The two points that I took from his talk:

“I do not believe what I say I believe; what I believe I do.” This is actually pretty obvious, but I like the prose.

Read your Bible.

He told us a story about a guy that told him a story (confused yet) involving an old scottish dude that read the Bible over 4 times a year. Seeing as how there are approximately 929 chapters in the Old Testament and 260 chapters in the New Testament you would have to read (1189 * 4) / 365 = 13.03 chapters per day in order to meet that goal. Note that this calculation doesn’t take chapter length into effect, so maybe a verses per day estimation would be more accurate. Shall we? There are around 31,103 verses in the new and old testaments plus 137 or so unnumbered verses.

( 31,103 * 4 ) / 365 = 340.85 verses per day.

Again, this estimation doesn’t take verse length into account, nor does it factor in some of the verses not included in some Bibles (like Matthew 18:11). But regardless of how you package it, the fact remains that that is one old dood who reads alot, and when I heard that story I was convicted. I average less than a chapter a week, which is pretty pathetic. I could probably count the number of times I have read completely through my NASB on my hand. Again, pathetic. Naturally I cite business as my excuse, but it really comes down to laziness. I’m so busy that I’m too lazy to make time in my schedule to sit down and read a chapter or two of the greatest piece of literature ever written. The original reason I decided to start writing these posts was to self document my quiet times during the week, and the only thing I have seen from it so far is my enormous need for a quiet time.

All of this reinforces what happened at 7:22 a week ago. Louie was giving a talk, and at the end he called for people to stand if they weren’t in the right place and they knew they should be. I stood. Not because I have some deep dark sin in my life that needs to be revealed–we all have those, but because I knew that I needed to make it public that I needed help with this spirituality thing. Like an Alcoholic and going to an AAA meeting, so was standing that night to me. It was a public confession of my need for prayer and to simply be uplifted.

So to sum it all up, I accepted Chip’s challenge. I am going to try and read through my Bible twice (Hey, baby steps) this year starting August 1st. I would challenge someone who reads my blog to follow along with me, mainly because I will need accountability. Right now accountability is something that is completely void in my life. I get the feeling that this is probably the source of a lot of my problems. Someone like me thrives off being self-sufficient, independant, and a loner, but that also opens up doors for secret sin that can eat me alive if left unearthed and unchecked.

The version of wordpress that I am using only supports Atom 0.3 Feeds. Since those feeds are currently deprecated I decided to update the Wordpress source so that all my comment and post feeds conform to the W3C standard for Atom 1.0 feeds. Hence, I now have a niftly little badge below the feeds portion of my sidebar stating that all my feeds are W3C validated. Those of you who were having problems with Firefox Live Bookmarks shouldn’t have troubles anymore. Just right click on the LB and click “Reload Live Bookmark.” You should see the top seven posts when you reload the bookmark, and if you are still having problems then simply recreate the bookmark in Firefox’s Bookmark Manager.

The big thing that was causing Live Bookmarks to bomb was the fact that I use the trademark entity in my The Sunday Post™ category. Turns out I have to use the entity number instead of the entity code. Meh.

I have a very bad track record with handheld devices of any kind. But specifically I have a hard time with Cell Phones. I don’t exactly know why, but every cell phone that has ever been in my possession has either been stolen, broken, or lost for a long period of time then rediscovered when after I had already made an insurance claim on it.

My first cell phone was a Verizon branded LG flip phone. It worked fine for around 3 months, but then I started getting malloc errors. Yes that malloc(). I warranty claimed this phone 3 times before I saw the light and switched to Cingular due to the 90 bucks worth of overdraft fees that Verizon caused me (long story).

With my switch to Cingular came a RAZR. This has been by far my favorite phone so far, but they are so cheap now I won’t buy one out of protest. I paid the full 200 bucks when I bought mine. Anyway, I had went so far as to make custom ring tones from my favorite Muse and Demon Hunter songs, unlocked the phone, and pimped out the firmware with some mods. All meaningless. It was stolen after 4 pithy months of ownership. =(

Next came the Treo. I got this phone from my company after my beloved RAZR was jacked from my locker at the CRC. It worked fine for about 2 months, then it gradually degraded to a point of technological retardation that any mild shock to the casing “knocks” the phone out. It literally turns the phone radio off if you bump it a little bit past “retrieving catsup from a glass bottle” force. It’s usually characterized by a high to low crecendo of chimes coming from my pocket at various times of the day.

In addition, this little phone doesn’t like batterys. I can’t enumerate the number of times that I have missed a call only to find that my phone radio has turned itself off in order to save battery, or it has been “knocked out” as described above. Oh and there was the time that the car charger broke. In the time it took for me to head to Office Depot and spend 30 bucks for a new one I had 13 voice messages.

So the moral of the story is I hate handheld devices, and they hate me. The only one that has been decently reliable so far has been my Crackberry that I use for the office. If my busy life didn’t require a cell phone I wouldn’t have one. That’s 80 bucks a month that I could put to some credit card or student loan payage.

After 45 minutes of desoldering and resoldering my first creation is alive! I took my experiemental guitar (ExG)–which is not the Telecaster, to Chang’s house and we attempted the first wiring of my custom designed double-volume circuit. It was a miserable failure. But we learned quite a bit about the mechanics of soldering things together. Turns out I didn’t have the circuit correct, and in addition we could never get the volume pots wired correctly. Now I know why:

Take a look at how the poles are numbered, its opposite of what you would expect. So I had the poles wired inversely, thus the pot was backwards. The first run wasn’t exactly grounded correctly either, so there was alot of hum.

On Friday at work I redrew my circuit and corrected some errors that I had made. I took the ExG home with me for practice and rewired it. I played it at practice to get a feel for the pickup combination and I absolutely loved it. I have a Fat Bastard paired with a Seymour Duncan SH-JB4 and they actually turned out to be a pretty decent mix. The SH has a nicely rounded metallic crunch and the FB compliments it with a bluesy tone. I did notice, however, that when I rolled the volume back on the FB I lost all my highs. After emailing the guys at stewmac I was instructed that I need a 0.001 µF capacitor connected to the in and out of each volume pot. Noted for the next wiring experiement.

Basically, I have a nice little Les Paul clone here, and for a fraction of the price. The Fat Bastard pickup I have was donated to me (thanks Steve!) and I spent under 50 bucks on all the wiring supplies. This guitar still doesn’t have the southern attitude that I would like, but it sounds absolutely amazing on any Muse or Indie Rock song you can throw at it. I’ll post a review on the FB whenever I get used to it and use it at a couple of gigs. Heres my finalized wiring schematic:

The Capacitors are 0.001 µF. All the neat little icons I drew myself in photoshop then printed the diagram and drew the wires. This is a scan of my original diagram, which is probably why it doesn’t look so good. All of these icons will most likely make it in NAGSS v1.0

My new project goes by the code name of NAGSS. The idea sprung from all the TCP posts I have been writing, and talking with a fellow guitar geek of mine online about the miscellaneous ways to wire a pickup circuit. In the spirit of every freeware program ever written, the codename for my project is an acronym. It stands for Nightmarish Automated Guitar Switching Software (all credit to CTheHammer for that).

Basically, I want to write a logicworks-like program that allows you to create circuits and test them from within the program. Not only will this project be fun, but it will also be a very educational experience for me. I will have to understand all these wiring diagrams in order to be able to simulate them inside a program. And after about an hour of trying to figure out how a rotary switch works in a high end PRS circuit I think I have my work cut out for me.

My basic feature set will include:

• Ability to build circuits via an intuitive drag and drop interface for components such as pickups, potentiometers, switches, and wire
• Support for all different types of pickups, pots, capacitors, and switches
• Ability to test, detect, and animate serial/parallel and in phase/out of phase circuits
• Ability to toggle switches and interact with the simulated circuit
• Ability to print the diagrams
• Ability to export the diagrams to popular image formats

If any of you other guitar geeks out there have any feature suggestions, please post them here.