Evan Agee: Live from Richmond Indiana

I walked outside this morning into the blistering cold, which reminded me why I want to move to Arizona soon… I cannot stand the painful cold that Winter brings to Indiana every once in a while. We’ve continued to have snow and rain for the past few days and I’m not sure when it’s supposed to stop. It hasn’t been too terrible, most of the schools have had 2-hour delays instead of closing for the day.

I went last night to Hastings to rent a movie or two with a gift card that’s been burning a hole in my pocket. I knew I was going to get Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers extended edition, but I wasn’t sure what else. Well, I found the LOTR movie and then I looked around a bit. I eventually came across a movie called A Map of the World. I had heard of it because Pat Metheny wrote the score for the movie, and I was interested in checking it out so I rented it. It wasn’t bad. Kristen said it was exactly like most of the movies on Lifetime ,but I thought it was pretty good. However, upon inspection of the 4-disc LOTR set that I rented, I realized that it wasn’t The Two Towers, but rather Fellowship of the Ring, which I rented about a week ago… I was pretty mad. So, I’m going to go to Hastings tonight hopefully and try to get them to switch them for me since the DVDs were behind the wrong box.

That’s about it for now. More later!

We had a pretty good winter storm last night. I was almost positive that we were going to have terrible road conditions today, but as it turns out it wasn’t that bad at all and the only people closing up because of the weather are the schools.

Kristen and I watched the Golden Globes last night on one of the three channels that we get since we don’t have cable. It was a very nice change from the otherwise boring day we spent cooped up in the house. I was very happy the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King won so many awards. Whenever they were nominated, they always won that particular award.

There’s really not a lot going on right now. I’ve been doing some work for the Life on Main Street series and trying to get everything sorted out in my head as far as which footage to use, etc. Chris and I went to a workshop at the local cable access studio and it was very informative. We learned all about framing shots as well as some information about their studio.

Well, that’s it for now. As soon as something exciting is going on, I’ll let you know.

Here was a point made by someone on a popular tech/nerd website I visit. It relates to the book The Golden Transcendence by John C. Wright. I thought it was interesting.

As an example as just one of the concepts presented, we can look at the idea of ’sensefilters.’ Perception is no longer what organic senses directly tell the mind. The signals received by the body or remote bodies are processed to be acceptable to the person’s particular preferences. If a person doesn’t like to see advertising, their mind eliminates the advertising from their vision and fills in the scene with what would be there if the advertisement wasn’t there. Consciously, the person isn’t aware of this, only that they have requested not to see advertisements. Sensefiltering can be used to remove (or add) objects, people, and even ideas from an individual’s perception. The plot devices are interesting stuff that Mr. Wright explores in just enough detail to keep you wanting more throughout the trilogy.

Something struck me about this idea…

Something worth thinking about is the idea of the merge between life experience and advertising. For example an advertisement might display a woman roller-blading or smiling. How would your sensefilters be able to tell a difference between an “advertisement” that contained nothing but a picture of a woman’s face, and a woman sitting still on a park bench, say… reading or something?

The idea of sense filtering is pretty interesting at first, but there are several important implications. If the purpose of the “sensefilters” was to filter out things (and people) that you don’t want to see, then how would you ever learn about anything new? There would be no chance of retribution from that person that told you off one day only for you to remove them from your “accepted contacts” list. You’d essentially be turning yourself into a machine with no room for the exceptions that inhabit our everyday lifes.

Maybe I’m weird, who knows…

I’ve been reading my butt off lately. I usually go through phases when it comes to reading. I read lots of technical stuff all of the time, but I very seldom start and finish a full book.

I just finished reading Decration, which is one of the Left Behind books. It was very good. I was trying to rush through that one so I could start reading Lord of the Rings. I started Lord of the Rings last night and I have to say that so far I’m very surprised that it’s a pretty easy read. I thought it would be very hard to grasp and very drawn out in it’s descriptions. So far so good. I started out with Fellowship of the Ring of course skipping The Hobbit. I’ll return to that book later.

For those of you who aren’t that familiar with The Lord of the Rings books, it is a 3-book set (not a trilogy). Each one builds on the same story, which is started in The Fellowship of the ring. The title of the books are The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. I’ve seen all of the movies multiple times and can’t wait to compare the film and books.

We’re having trouble with our stove… It isn’t actually ours, it belongs to the people we rent the house from. They’re having someone come and look at it and hopefully everything will work out well. I don’t think we’d get by very easily without an oven and we don’t have the money to buy one right now. Oh well…

That’s pretty much all I have for now.

I’ve been playing guitar a lot lately, and I have to say that I’m excited about how I’ve improved even though I haven’t been playing very much over the last few years.

When I was in high school I had chops. I could learn about any song by any band unless it was Steve Vai or any of those other increadible players. I was very happy with my skill level and it worked well for the band I was in at the time, Caje. However, by the time I graduated from High School the band had disformed and John and I were playing our little duo thing. That was a great musical time for us and perhaps when I was at my peak.

Well, fast-forward a few years and here I am. I haven’t been playing more than one or two times every couple of weeks. My creativity is lower than it was but my chops are better.

About a year or so ago Jamie and I recorded a song. I played guitars and created the drum tracks and Jamie did the “vocals” if you’d call it that (you’d have to hear the song to know what I’m talking about). I played a guitar on that song that was pretty good, but it was mostly improvised because I’ve never been very good at memorizing lead guitar parts. BUT, last weekend I decided to re-learn that solo and try to improve it the way a real lead guitarist would. I listened to it a couple of times to get the feel of it again and see if I could internalize it and then I set about the task of figuring out what I had done to achieve certain sounds.

It didn’t take long, maybe five minutes and then I knew how to play the solo exactly as I had on the song. This wouldn’t seem like a big deal to most people, but if you knew the way my head works when it comes to guitars you’d see that this is a big step for me.

I’ve been playing the solo over and over again when I get the chance to try and make sure that I remember it. It’s wonderful to be able to memorize a solo and play it about the same way every time. Great stuff.

I’m going to try and keep playing and recording stuff and get my skills built up to be better than ever. I’d love to play in a band again some day.