This is a 1/5 second exposure of the groovy light over our stairs with the lensbaby. This is intentionally blurry and weird, because that’s how I roll today. o

Caught this yesterday in the afternoon right before the sun got behind the pine trees. The very same pine trees that are oozing gobs of pollen this year.

Last week, when we had the basement furniture outside for the recarpeting, we noticed in the few hours stuff was outside it was coated with yellow pollen. Coated. The allergy shots must be working, because I wasn’t as affected by that as I was by the dust when the original carpet was removed. The next day we had wind and rain. Before the rain came, the wind ripped through the trees and the resulting yellow clouds of pollen had Heather pretty freaked.

Spring!

Only a few more nesting projects in the wings and we’ll be as as ready as we’re gonna for this kid. o

I sat down with Former Congressman Henry “Buck” Chucklesworth Hamilton Armstrong to discuss the state of the economy and how he was going to help by buying a car:

It would appear the Former Congressman is noncommittal. o

I cleared out the furniture from the basement in a couple of hours and the patio looks like the Universal Tour version of the Sanford & Son set, complete with dismantled antique brass bed. But the new carpet in the nursery is luscious:

Heather talks about the wallpaper here.

They are motoring pretty hard with the carpet, with one room done. Although now that they’ve turned off the Rush Limbaugh, I’m not sure we’ll see the same levels of productivity.

I’m going to have to move all of our crap back in when they are done, which means all of Leta’s crap as well. But the nursery will be one step closer to being complete. Which is nice. o

We wrote this song in the late winter/early-spring of 1990. This was the first song we wrote after the initial creative burst that got me thinking we could write more than just a few songs. I believe we debuted this song at a show at a dance club called Jillymax (formerly called Plastique) that was above a Mexican restaurant in downtown Provo. I mention those names merely for the handful of people likely to stumble onto this post… Also: Plastique! Very 80s name for a club.

The week prior to that show there was a bit of drama behind the scenes. Jeff, our bassist at the time, had a kidney stone that he had removed or had to pass and was hospitalized the Sunday before we were scheduled to play. I remember visiting him in the hospital and asking him if we needed to cancel the show. He said he’d see, but he was going to try to do everything he could so we could play the show. It was insane to expect him to play, but he wanted to. He was released the day prior to the gig and said he’d do it, but his doctor told him to play sitting down. We got him a couch to play on, which he did, but when we played this song, he stood up and the dancing got so heavy that we had complaints from the restaurant below that pieces of the ceiling were falling on dining patrons and into their food. The story was that the club had to be closed after that show due to structural damage to the beams. The restaurant is still there, I think.

I have three distinct memories of this song, all of them good. The first was watching Jeff arise from the dead and stand up to play this song after seeing the crowd response that first time we played it live, despite doctor’s orders and despite any fatigue. The second is that the horn line always sounds like the first warm day of spring and you feel like anything is possible. Third, of all the horn lines we did that first year, this one is probably my favorite. After we took the summer of 1990 off and had our first rehearsals with Sam, our first sax guy, hearing these notes got me very stoked to start playing again and also relieved me because I was worried we’d be able to keep it going after a summer off. BYU was a hard place to keep a band alive. We had two marriages in the band that summer and you never knew if the spouses of your bandmates would be down with their new spouse playing in a band. Once it was clear that we’d get together again to rehearse, this song represented the renewed hope that we could go further with the band.

My memory is foggy about this, but I believe the inspiration for the lyrics was Rod getting his haircut and his stylist started asking about male butt hair patterns. The conversation turned awkward when the subject turned to his butt hair. Amongst the Mormons, I believe this song’s content allowed people to be mildly shocked as well as express a kind of micro-rebellion on their personal stereos. “He’s talking about butt hair! He said ‘butt’!”

Production notes:
As with the rest of the Raygun tracks, I’ve added a ton of bass and tried to open up the sound a bit. Sam had been with the band less than three months when he recorded the sax solo. I missed the session where Sam overdubbed his solo, but I believe that he was unduly pressured into playing outside of his normal Paul Desmonesque zone. I’ll leave it at that.

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Direct download – Swim Herschel Swim – I Wish I Had a Raygun – FUZ – Remastered, MP3, 320kbps constant

* * *

Cover illustration & concept: Merkley. Design and font design: Jon Armstrong

As a comparison and companion piece to these posts, I’ve toyed with the idea of remastering the tracks we put on our CD, Burn Swim Burn, which we released after Swim Herschel Swim broke up. In the spring of 1993, we were gigging every weekend; we’d travel to Los Angeles (played the Whisky! played the Roxy! Opened for No Doubt in Anaheim!), San Francisco, southern Utah and wherever we could to make money for our album and to tighten up. In the middle of all the travel, most of us were working demanding day jobs and rehearsing three times a week. At that point, we’d lost Rich (drummer), Rick (guitarist), Jeff (bassist then guitarist) and Sam (sax), leaving Rod and me as the sole original performing members of the band.

We picked up some great players along the way. Pat (drums) joined in early 92. Matt (trombone) joined the fall of 1991 after he introduced himself to me in a computer lab. Kent (bass) joined after Rick (original guitar) left and right before Pat joined) and Jeff took over guitar full-time. We added Andy (sax) after Jeff and Sam left the band simultaneously and also added Lou (guitar) in the summer/fall of ‘92. We broke up in June of 1993 after 14 weeks of shows where we performed upwards of 22 times. Not exactly grueling, but we were recording and rehearsing as well. I think we pushed it too hard. I recall a rather heated exchange over the CB radio coming out of Los Angeles late one Sunday as we caravanned back to Utah about whether or not we were going to rehearse in less than 18 hours that Monday night. We should have taken a month off, but we all wanted to do something big so badly at the point that there was an urgency to get something solid under our belts with this lineup.

Alas.

After we broke up, our last guitarist Lou worked at the same studio we recorded I Wish I Had a Raygun and offered to donate his time to finish recording the CD. Since we’d broken up and had never released a CD of the cassette tracks, we decided to take some of our favorites and redo them as they sounded when we broke up.

The CD we released (in late 1994, I believe) was produced by Lou and Merkley. The mastering job always sounded super thin to me and flat. The performances are polished and we have a harder, heavier sound thanks to the full-time horn section and Lou’s American Metal pedal. We often joked that Lou had two guitar sounds; clean and death metal.

Here’s the same song, Fuz, as it was mastered on the CD. You only need to listen to about 10 seconds of the song to see why I’d want to remaster it:

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I love the energy of the performance from the horns (especially the solos), the change in Rod’s singing style, my buzzyclunked keyboard sound and the triple-tracked super metal guitars, it all sounds dead. Even when you turn it up, it still sounds like it was recorded in a closet. After messing with the track and hearing how full the horn sounds could be, I further monkeyed about with it and after a half hour or so, got here:

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Direct download – Swim Herschel Swim – Burn Swim Burn – Fuz – Remastered, MP3, 320kbps constant

If there is enough interest, I’ll try my hand at the rest of the tracks on the CD.

* * *

I can’t imagine my life without those years of fun, arguments, road trips, drama and music. Thanks to Rod, Rich, Rick, Russ, Jeff, Sam and Merkley for sticking it out longer than a semester. Thanks to Pat, Kent, Matt, Andy and Lou for working to help take us to the next level. We spent a lot of time together back then. I’ve never experienced anything like it and I probably never will again.

Here’s to college bands everywhere. Play on, people. o

UPDATE: I’ve been informed that my dates are off on when people left and joined. I’ve edited them above. Merkley just informed me that he and Lou didn’t do the mastering. I’ve edited the post to reflect this info.

Another one right in the middle of the patio. I have no idea how this was planted. I assume birds? Wind? Aliens? o

Caught this guy on our patio last night. Crazy. o

Taken on last night’s dog walk.

dooce® – The Armstrong Bathroom Makeover Catastrophe

Just read the comments. So awesome. o

Yesterday I wanted to give Heather the ultimate Mother’s Day: unlimited napping potential and uninterrupted solitude. This might seem a little strange, but given the state of things with the nesting and the impending baby as well as the fact that we spend our days working together, I can’t think of a better thing to give Heather. Except breakfast at her favorite diner. I hope that place never closes, because we survived on it in Leta’s early months and because it has three foods Leta will eat on the menu.

Leta and I spent the morning on computers. Leta is getting bored with the simpler Flash games and is requiring a narrative, a problem to solve and more hand-eye involvement. I found a couple of super girlie places online and Leta did well. While she was entrenched in her games, I started to fix metadata in old photos.

I started shooting RAW in the last part of 2006 using the Camera RAW plug-in and then moving to Lightroom. Both the Camera RAW plug-in for Photosohp and Lightroom will embed the tonal work, cropping, and other metadata that was added while working on the photo in its RAW state. The problem is that when I moved the files to the Drobo, we lost those changes. So I’ve been manually re-synchronizing the hundreds of folders of tens of thousands of images we’ve shot in RAW since 2006 and making sure that the collection has the correct metadata.

In doing so, I’ve been seeing a lot of really great memories and learning alot about how to manage a large library of photos. I have changed computers a couple of times since 2006 and that complicates things a bit. I also used to do a lot of my photo work on Heather’s desktop as well, further complicating the digital workflow. I thought I’d share a simple list that relates a little bit to this post where I talked about how to handle folders and files.

1. Store your central catalog(s) and images you’ll import into it on a super-reliable external storage unit that is automatically backed up every day. I’ve chosen Drobos for this task. Doing this insures that when I upgrade or move computers, teh library is always intact and does not require a certain computer to open files. If my computer dies, the library lives on. As a side note: store installer files of your apps on this drive as well for a quick and convenient way to be up and running should an emergency strike.
2. Since our library is so large (100,000 plus photos), I’ve split up the catalogs by year, importing each month/year folder with its corresponding folders of each shoot. Every year, I’ll start a new catalog that is stored on the exteral storage unit. Lightroom lets you do this fairly easily. The thinking here is that having the catalog spread out means faster navigating and preview rendering. As well as a concrete way to sort files and find files. Scenario: “I think I took that photo in February of 2007, but it might have been March. Or maybe late January?” With each month as a folder in the catalog, I can quickly select months and scan through thumbnails. There are ways in Lightroom to do this, but this method is quicker for me.
3. If you do external editing (Photoshop or other), save that image as a separate file in the same folder as the source, so that if you ever need to move a folder, any further edits you have made are not lost. As a result of not doing this, I’m having to spend a great deal of time across a number of catalogs to find images that I edited two and three years ago to make sure I have the source file. Note: this goes for any tweaking inside your RAW editor. Save/Export the XML sidecar files to the same directory as the source image. This will save you hours and hours of time in the future. I’ve had to find old catalogs, open them, re-render thumbnails (in order to see those images with obvious and not-so-obvious edits) and save out metadata in order to move the metadata files to the correct folder on the Drobo.
4. Back up everything every day. EVERY DAY. Use Apple’s Time Machine or SuperDuper! to clone your drive. I’m about to buy another Drobo for this purpose. I’ll automatically run that backup at 1 or 2 in the morning using SuperDuper!. I prefer it to Time Machine for these kinds of backups. Time Machine is great for a casual user, but I want bulletproof. I never ever ever want to lose a photo. Ever. Ever Ever Ever.
5. Use built-in rating/ranking and color coding to organize the definite keepers for quick sorting and searching. Develop a system and stick to it. I have a minimum of 3 stars assigned to a photo that I post and once I have posted it, I color label it green. I’ve been doing that since 2006. The problem is that I didn’t always save those edits out to a separate file (see 3, above). I’ll probably start rejecting files as well as a way to simplify the library.

I believe that this digital nesting instinct is my response to the final weeks of prep for the baby. I want to be able to add the tons of photos we will take of her without having to think about each and every set. Just shoot them and add them in. Once a system is in place, it makes working so much easier.

Heather’s system is simpler and likely better. She does a folder for each shoot and dates each folder. She just uses Camera Raw and Photoshop. Camera Raw on her machine is set to spit out a sidecar file (same name as the original file but with an .xml extension) that holds all of her changes to the RAW file. She does not save the layered work file (yet) in the same directory as the source, but I’m working with her about that. However, her discipline in working like this means that the only concern as a librarian I have is that I got all the photo folders and is the metadata current for all the images.

Lightroom has a quick way to look at a folder of images and grab the metadata from external files if there are any. It has become my best friend these past few days. Right click on a folder in Lightroom and choose “Synchronize Folder…”

Anybody have any other tips for dealing with large photo libraries? Please share! o