Why I don't care for Andrea Bocelli

I try not to be too opinionated, but I can't sit still and take this anymore. I don't care for Andrea Bocelli. Who is Andrea Bocelli, you ask? Well you are obviously not a woman, and you aren't dating.

This is him:



From now on, I will try to recreate an image from the Internet, rather than outright stealing it. It also lets me take more freedom with how I see things. This, by the way, is how I see Mr. Bocelli:



Already someone is crying fowl, I am sure of it. "You can't say anything bad about Andrea Bocelli, he sings so beautifully and he is blind!" I have to admit that in that statement lies part of my problem. When I first started hearing about him a few years ago, I kept hearing the familiar tagline "and did you know that he's blind?" I don't understand why that matters anyway. It would be a real statement if it went something like this: "Andrea Bocelli paints such beautiful pictures, can you believe he is blind?" See? That would really *be* something.

But his visual skills have no bearing on my assessment of him. It's just something that bugs me about his followers. My problem with Bocelli is that he really is not that outstanding of a vocalist. I could walk over to the fine arts building on campus, swing a dead cat, and hit a few vocal music majors that could match (and exceed) his capability.

What's worse is that he seems to get the same popular respect that Plácido Domingo or José Carreras gets. He is no where near these guys. Want to know how to figure this out? One word: microphone. A true vocalist doesn't need one of these in every venue. I know that microphones are a staple of recording, and are nearly ubiquitous in performance entertainment. However, I have never seen this guy singing without a microphone two inches from his face.

Simply put, he does not have a big enough voice. Axl Rose can outsing this guy (or at least he could between 1987 and 1992).

I cannot sing better, though - so I will hand him that. Next time I hear something about him, it better be "Andrea Bocelli is such a wonderful singer, he sings much better than Greg." Yeah, that sounds more appropriate.

--gh

My weakness

I have a major weakness to confess. Is it just me, or is Women's Billiards about the freakin' hottest thing on television. What is it about these athletes?

ESPN had a semi-final on this evening between Allison Fisher and Jeanette Lee at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. You only have to do a Google Image search for Ms. Fisher or the Black Widow to know what I am talking about.


I was a little worried about just posting copyrighted photos, so I took two of them and worked them into one piece here.

I think it must be their arms. I have always been an arm-man. I am feeling filthy...

--gh

LASIK@Home... uh.... UHHHHH......

Is this a joke? Surely a web page called LASIK@Home is meant to provide some kind of social commentary. I mean, it does have a funny picture and all:

However, usually the joke pages are obviously written to provide humor. I see nothing funny on Lasik at Home that makes me think it is a spoof or anything.

I think I will try it out on the dog first.

--gh

Squared Circle

I was trying to find the relationship between the circumference and area of a circle for a maps exercise utilizing Miller's C. This is the ratio of a shape to a circle who's circumference equals the perimeter of said shape. I never could find out how to calculate the area of a circle given it's circumference, and had to work it out on my own:

It took me 28 seconds to derrive this simple relationship (equation) based on Pi-R^2. But I spent about 20 minutes idly searching for it. The first search I found , however, led me to proof that Jesus did indeed create everything, which works out good enough. I think I need to read the links from that page, they look interesting...

--gh

Further proof that I are sucked

I saw a great one-time only blog entry idea on Livejournal. What you do is enter your birthday (no year) in Wikipedia and share three events, three other births, and three deaths that happened on your birthday. Not a bad idea for filling the web with more links to useless information.

Except nothing really happens on my birthday. I have to limit my event-birth-death to just one each:

Event: 1887 - Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show opens in London.
Birth: 1949 - Billy Joel, American musician
Death: 1903 - Paul Gauguin, French painter (b. 1848)

Not really much to comment on. Sorry. Under deaths, Schiller was the only other name I even recognized. I don't read poetry in German, so I thought it would be pretentious to even include that. I did notice that an Afghani singer, one year younger than me, died last year on my birthday. Wait, I just looked him up and the wiki entry says he died a day earlier. (Errors on Wiki? No way!)

--gh

To being, or not to being.

--gh

Woulda-coulda-shoulda...

Oh man, my amp would have turned out much better if I used these knobs for my volume and tone controls. Lets see, I have 5 knobs on my amp, so that would be... $2,425.



Yes, in case you think there is more to it, it is just beech wood, with a nice lacquer. And no, it is not a joke. And if you can afford components like that, then you may be interested in some $30,000 speaker cables.

--gh

Project completed

Okay, here it is...

I am really glad that I got that dovetail template. I used no fasteners to put these cabinets together, and only used Elmer's carpenters glue.

If you are looking for amp porn, you will have to read an earlier post. This is the most I will give you.

In case you think the Sears Tower and Mr. French mean anything - they don't. Think of it as a postmodern flair. I did it because I can.

A few hours ago, this was just a sheet of expanded metal and an length of aluminum angle-bar. Fabrication is something that I have never done in my previous lives. I think I would have enjoyed it. I loved building custom plenum for a plumbing and heating company I worked for.

I think that's why I like those shows where they build motorcycles from scratch. I don't want to build motorcycles - I just want to play with the fabrication tools.
I am not proud of the jack plate on the speaker cabinet. It is the only thing that did not arrive before I started building (Musicians Friend!)

The speaker cabinet is a 2x10, and the switch below gives me all options (just A, just B, both in series, both parallel). I was going to put that cool looking metal jack plate in, using a nibbling tool to make room for the switch. Right now it is a horrid plastic deal from the shack. Here's the wiring diagram in case you missed that before.


This is a lot more satisfying than finishing the upstairs hallway and starting on remodeling the master bedroom. I think I can start those things now that I got this out of my system.

Oh yeah, it sounds great too.

--gh

Slight 120hz hum

When I got back from Chicago, I had no time to put into the amplifier. It took me a week to get the board soldered up.

I was very nervous about wiring the components. Some things can be destroyed if they are wired incorrectly - and this was the first time I ever attempted something like this.

If I blew a transformer or damaged a fuse - then I would be sunk. I doubt I can find some of these components any where around here. Here is the final build with the tubes installed. I do not plan to modify this into another amp, so I finally filled the extra tube socket hole with a little Sears Tower souvenir. (Note that it will protect the tubes if I do something dopey like turn it upside down to work on it!)

I did not have much free time last week, but this week is different. It is Spring Break, and this is what it looked like outside on the first day of Spring.

Now it is time to build the cabinets for the amp head and the speakers. Right now they are downstairs being glued up. Here is what they looked like this afternoon, before glue.

The mini speaker cab is going to be cute.

Oh man, I didn't talk about the amp. Luckily I have a sad amp with an 8ohm speaker in it. I pulled the cable so that I could plug my new amp into it. I will fix that amp some day, but I didn't mind using its speaker as a test.

So, I fired it up at just before midnight, Sunday night and it worked! There was a fairly strong 120hz hum. On Monday morning I moved one of the filament wires on the output tube and knocked most of this hum out. It is still a little too much for my taste, so I will keep playing around with some of the lead dressing until I find the culprit. I might test some of the filter caps, I should have picked one up today when I was at Radio Shack. The 120hz might be some ripple from the power stage.

But, I will keep working on the cabinets and make it easy to take the amp in and out of the head to make adjustments and poke around. The sound is incredible - I cannot believe I went this long without a tube amp.

--gh

Chicago, Day 2

Playing Peek-a-boo!


Our second day in Chicago was pretty full. If I had to guess, I would say that we hiked 8-10 miles yesterday. We walked to the Sears Tower twice, because the sky deck wasn't open the first time.

I was taking a picture of this advertisement when the owner flipped the closed sign on the door to "open." He came out and asked us questions such as whether Grills like these were popular in our town.


The kids got a big laugh out of that.

Today, we'll have the Art Institute, I have a chairs lunch -- oh yeah, and my presentation is this afternoon. Should be enough for a day.

--gh