Well I have dropped the ball on keeping this site updated. Honestly the last year or so has been a bit insane. We remodeled then sold our house, I left my job, we moved 500 miles away, bought another house and remodeled it, and are now happily living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. I think …
Continue reading Heck Of A Year…
For my birthday this year I wanted to finally get our yard FINISHED so every weekend for the past month I dug and prepped and dug and raked and carried and dug and dug. I cannot even begin to guess how many pounds of dirt I moved, decomposed granite I hauled, or stepping stones I placed. As …
Continue reading My Future Back ProblemFAVORITES (doesn’t mean they’re the best) 1. The Revenant – Seriously, how is this not the best movie of the year? Have you seen it? Holy cow. I felt like I needed to sit in a warm bath for 3 days after watching it. It’s amazing. Also just realized that my favorite movie last year …
Continue reading 2015 Movie Roundup
It has a been a while since my last post and that’s because I’ve been super busy in mostly good ways. Late September we welcomed a new addition to our family, Quillan, and it’s just been crazy since then. Between the having a new born and being at work 7 days a week I haven’t had …
Continue reading Greening Our Home
The time has come! My daughter’s birthday came and went and on the night before the birthday fairies managed to put together our summer long project in under an hour! And without any unexpected surprises, though I guess all surprises are unexpected aren’t they? Not too far off from the original design. The only extra …
Continue reading Playhouse – Part IV – Finished!
This is most likely the last post about the playhouse before it’s finally done. I actually think that waiting for the next month and half to put it together will be harder than building itself. This past weekend my little helper and I put together the roof, built the front wall, and painted some shelves. …
Continue reading Playhouse – Part III
These past few weeks my daughter and I have continued building in the garage. She still doesn’t know what the final outcome will be but she does know what the individual parts are. In this case they are walls. Cedar wood frame and redwood fence posts mean that I don’t have to do any staining …
Continue reading Playhouse – Part II
I hate wires. I will be SO happy when we are free of them completely. And while I try to be great at cable management, inevitably it always turns into a birds nest behind my computer, entertainment center, and router. I’ve got a wireless transmitter for my projector so that I don’t have to have …
Continue reading Wireless Audio!
My work week averages on about 45-50 hours, not including commute time (another 8-10), so the weekends are a pretty precious time for me. Recently my daughter and I have enjoyed working in the garage and garden together, or rather, I work while my daughter plays with the scraps of wood and field tests whatever …
Continue reading Playhouse – Part I
So it’s been a while since my last post, I’ve been busy with work and LOTS of little side projects that I hope to be sharing soon. Something that we’ve been trying to work on with our house and lifestyle is being more green. We are looking into getting a solar system and a few …
Continue reading Compost Bin
And the winners are… MY FAVORITES (but not necessarily the best) 1. Birdman – A unique and refreshing mindf*** of a movie. So entertaining and so fun with possibly too many endings. 2. Calvary – Oh man, this one rips you apart. But it’s so funny. Hard to shake it off. 3. Grand Budapest Hotel/The …
Continue reading 2014 Movie Roundup
My brother and his wife came to our house for Thanksgiving this year. At the end of the night while we were sitting around feeling extremely bloated he asked me if I had any of our old video game consoles. When we were kids we would spend endless nights (because we couldn’t play during the …
Continue reading Retro Console
Sometimes I will just browse ebay for cool old crap stuff. I was trying to come up with something handmade to give to my wife for Christmas this year and this old desktop microphone caught my eye. And you know what’s better than one microphone lamp? Two microphone lamps. Ah ah ah. I have to say …
Continue reading Microphone Lamp – Part Deux
With all of these projects that I’ve been doing I would say that more than half of the fun comes from the ‘blue sky‘ beginnings. Having no limits allows me to sit back and think, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’. That being said, having constraints can also inspire and force one to come up with …
Continue reading Big Daddy Don’t Phone
My wife and I have really been into re-purposing old/broken ‘things.’ A few years ago we took a broken old microphone and turned it into a lamp. And these days it feels like I’m constantly rewiring the insides of old radio for someone. While Iwas looking for old radios on eBay I found this… An old space heater …
Continue reading Colorful Lamp
So as you know, I’ve been taking old radios and turning them into little music players to put around the house or give as gifts. Basically just keeping the shell of the original speaker and replacing the inside with new parts that work. I’ve been pretty happy with the ones that I’ve made so far …
Continue reading Another Day, Another Radio
Our little one has reached the point where she no longer wants to be a baby. I guess a more accurate way to say it would be that now she wants to do everything that we want to do, despite her age, size, and hand/eye coordination. This has become an issue with her eating as obviously a …
Continue reading 2.5 Hour Seats (aka I hate sanding)
So I’m going to dork off for a minute and write a quick little thing about the latest and greatest theatrical sound system out there right now. Dolby Atmos. There are so many different types of ways that you might listen to a movie in a theater, though for the most part you’re probably going to …
Continue reading Immersive Film Sound
My most recent dilemma in home automation was how to stream our record player to our wireless radios. It is located in a different room than our receiver, which is located in a different room than our main speaker. Funny enough our main speaker is an old turntable system from the 60’s that we thought …
Continue reading Fifth Time’s A Charm
I’ve always loved films and going to the movies. It’s hard to beat sitting in a big dark theater and watching something big and loud. The popcorn helps too. Back in 2009 I decided that I wanted to make my own movie. I had saved up a bit of money after working for 3 months …
Continue reading The Lair
I was at a party in NYC at the beginning of my first year at NYU. The party was hosted by a friend of mine who was doing research at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Somehow the topic of recording whales came up (as it does) and I immediately figured out what …
Continue reading Underwater Sound
My love for music is what got me to where I am today. I went to college thinking that I was going to be a high school music teacher but that quickly changed to a basic music degree with an emphasis on vocal performance and a certificate in music technology. Growing up with computers in …
Continue reading My Music
I’ve loved film my whole life and have always been fascinated with filmmaking. I might have been the only kid that I knew who’s favorite ride was the Tram Tour at Universal Studios. Well, favorite ride at Universal Studios at least… And now I’ve been lucky enough to spend almost a decade working on the …
Continue reading Film Sound
Five years ago my grandparents asked me what I wanted for Christmas. At this point in my life I don’t need anything. I already have way too much crap stuff. However, they are two of the sweetest people in the world and insisted on getting me a something. So I decided that the most productive …
Continue reading Homebrew
A few years ago I was given a 5×8 foot California State flag. I had it hanging in my bedroom for a year or two but for the past few years it’s been sitting in the box that it came in. We’ve been looking for interesting ways to fill the walls in our house and …
Continue reading California Flag
I grew up working in the garden whether I wanted to or not. As soon as we bought our house (or maybe even before) I started scheming up ideas for what I wanted to do. I’m not convinced that the people who designed and built our house actually took into account the view, or even …
Continue reading Our Backyard
I’ve been really trying to embrace the whole maker/DIY idea both in my life and in my projects. I think that it’s valuable for learning and it’s less wasteful, or at least can be. In this case I wanted to relearn what I had taught myself over a decade ago; the basics of el wire. …
Continue reading One Eyed Jacks
We needed a lamp. We needed a lamp that wasn’t from Target or Ikea. We needed a lamp for sophisticated adults. So like any ‘hip’ kid we went to the Rose Bowl Antique Flea Market to find one. We figured amongst the thousands of rows of overpriced antiques that we would be able to find …
Continue reading Microphone Lamp
A couple of years ago I was given an old radio from my mom. I wanted it because it looked cool and thought that it would look nice on a shelf. Turned out that it still worked, or more accurately, still turned on. I was able to do some simple wiring and cram in an …
Continue reading Radios
In order to get my master’s degree in music technology at NYU I needed to complete my final project. My whole first year I expected that I would be doing a research paper on either film sound or interactive audio, perhaps even underwater audio recording techniques. However during my penultimate semester I took a class where …
Continue reading The Voccordion
This is my website. This is also the first post of my ‘blog,’ if that’s what you want to call it. I don’t know that it will be updated as often as blog but it very well could be. What I’d really like it to be is place for me to document the things that …
Continue reading What This Is and/or What Is This?