BuyOwner Watch...

I have now added my new "BuyOwner Watch" widget. It automatically keeps up with the number of days my house has been on the market. The rest I'll be updating manually. Stay tuned for all the excitement as time rolls on...

With You and Buy Owner...

...it's as good as sold!

... or so they say on their TV advertising. Jamie and I are in the final stages of picking out our new digs, so we're selling our first home, using BuyOwner.com.

If you're interested, or just curious, you can check it out here.

The Tale of the Rhodes, Part Deux

I visited my brother at his studio last night. I was there to try to take a look at that Rhodes electric piano to see if I could do anything to make it properly output sound. Not much, it seems. It looks like the volume/tone pots on it may be shot, since pretty much no sound comes of out it when we plug an amp into it. However, we got some sound when we bypassed the volume pots and went directly into the connector from the sound pickups. It was still pretty weak and noisy, tho.

There's a little board on the other side of the piano that has a capacitor on it, and when we futzed with it, we could get a little improvement (and more noise) from the volume level coming from the piano. I did my best to try to clean up some solder joints there, and it seemed to help a little bit, but not enough. Danny's gonna try to get the pots and 2 capacitors out of there and take 'em to an electronics parts house to get replacements.

The studio is pretty well equipped, and there were people there doing some recording last night, so I didn't want to get in the way too much. Here's a pic of the control room with Danny "at the helm", and another shot of the same room with Danny's business partner, Dan Hannon, working out some obscure musical detail with some of their clients in the studio. (Sorry about the picture quality - we're talking about a VGA-level (LESS than 1 megapixel) cell phone camera here.)

The Tale of the Rhodes...

Some months ago, my sister-in-law (My wife's brother's wife) asked if I could help her try to sell a "keyboard" she had collecting dust in a back closet. I said, "Sure, why not?".

Turns out this "keyboard" was actually a 70s-vintage Fender Rhodes electric piano. Now, to most of you, that may not mean much, but those old Rhodes pianos put out a distinctive sound that can't really be reproduced with modern electronics. It's kind of like tube amps or Leslie organ rotating speaker cabinets. It's pretty sweet.

Not wanting to let this great power fall into the wrong hands, I got in touch with my musician Brother, Danny Stephens, he of Smalltown Poets and Buckhead Church fame.

After some time sitting in my garage, the Rhodes is finally in his possession over at the studio where his new music venture, One Atlanta Music (more about that some other time), has its HQ. The Rhodes isn't fully operational right now, but I'm going over there to see if I can futz with it to try to get it working a little better. I'm no electronics engineer, but I'm gonna check solder joints and clean contacts, etc.

I'll report more on my trip to the studio tomorrow...

Knight Rider? Kinda...

So, who saw the new Knight Rider movie on NBC last night? Cool car. It had its moments, I guess...but is there ANYONE out there who didn't know who was gonna open the motel door on the room with the mom and the inventor in it when all of the baddies were opening motel room doors at the same time as the hero? Duh...

OK, here goes...

So, I'm posting on my own blog for the first time. Heck, who knows, it may be the last. I guess I got inspired from reading other people's blogs and seeing that sometimes random thoughts or scenes of everyday life are sometimes inspiring to others. From time to time, if I am again inspired, I'll jot something down here. It may be completely mundane. It may be life-changing. It may be frivolous. It may be serious. It may be worthless to anyone but me. It may be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Who knows? If I don't give it a try, maybe I'll never know...