Pics 2 - From the CBC

Band and production engineers. Awesome, professional guys.
L to R: Mike Ramond (Bass), Marc Parizeau (CBC), Marc Bélanger (Keyboards),
Armand Vienneau (Drums), Robert Péladeau (CBC), Rob Rose (Guitar)

Another shot of CBC's Marc Parizeau at the console...sweeeeet!

Pics 1 - Live from the CBC!

Armand Striking a pose.

Marc in mid-chord.

The control room during playback. Racks and boards and screens, oh my!
On the left is Marc Parizeau, on the right is Robert Péladeau, CBC Studio Wizards

Mike waiting patiently for the headphones to work.

Some guy who showed up.

Here are some pics from the CBC sessions last Friday. I'll provide the names of the pros from the CBC studio once I get them.

30YRSL8 Recording Diary - Entry # 2

This is a recording musician's dream: I got an email from Marc, 30YRSL8's keyboard player, saying that the CBC has build a new state-of-the-art studio (Studio 14, to be exact) in their shiny new downtown Ottawa facilities -- and that they need a band to come in and do some recording to help work out the kinks and show the CBC management what it can do. Oh, and they can keep the recorded music, and the band gets paid.

So, last Friday the band moved into the studio for the day to record several of our new songs. The songs were recorded live through their Pro Tools based system, with no overdubs. I'm thinking that with very little clean-up we could have at least two candidates for the new CD out of the sessions:

1. Le Spot "G" -- A song that swaps between a playful but heavy section and a rip-roaring, syncopated solo section, where Marc just lets loose on a wild electric piano solo. The song is so named because our Canadian Retail Distributor, APCM would like us to name more songs in French to promote ourselves more accurately as a bilingual entity in Canada... As with some of our best songs, we just played this song one day. There were no pre-written parts, just spontaneous composition at the practice.
   
2. Chaotic Bottom -- So named because it's the preset name for the ultra-noisy guitar sound I use on this song. Mike Raymond, brought this in with visions of an ultra-heavy bass- and drum-driven song. It all started with a simple bass figure and mutated into all of that plus some cool 11/8 time signature work. A wholly masturbatory solo from me and very tasty synth solo in a lush prog-rock setting for Marc.

Pics, and people's names to follow.

Arizona - Good Eats

Whenever I travel to a new city, I like to ask the locals where to eat. Now, this can be a little awkward, because I'm looking for gems, not just restaurants. Calvin Trillin wrote a lot about traveling and eating and he wrote that he never wanted to go to the place you'd take your in-laws for their anniversary (which he referred to as "La Maison de la Casa House"), but the place you went to when you returned home from 3 years overseas with the armed forces. Arizona has a wealth of those great places that the locals really don't want to share with you. On this trip, Maureen and I enjoyed several of them.

1. The Roaring Fork - Robert McGrath's homage to cowboy food with an amazing foodie twist. Imagine campfire food that's designed by the best chefs and with the imagination of a true culinary master. Very unique. Braised beef short ribs with Dr. Pepper barbecue sauce on cheesy grits....sigh. www.roaringfork.com
2. Alice Cooperstown - Yup, THAT Alice Cooper. He's created the perfect sports bar, rock memorabilia, BBQ joint mash-up that somehow just works. Sure, it's a little touristy, but it's a great place to go on game night. Just don't expect to see a hockey game ("You mean ICE hockey?!?"). This is a place that's decorated with Alice's own memorabilia, so you'll get signed guitars by the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Who. Signed photos of Alice with Salvador Dali and Frank Sinatra. Not the signed drum skin for some flash-in-the-pan one-hit wonder you never heard of, like at the Hard Rock Cafe. Oh, and real food, also not like the Hard Rock cafe. www.alicecooperstown.com
3. Crazy Ed's Satisfied Frog - This is in Cave Creek, a great town north of Scottsdale. This is one of those places that you have to temporarily suspend your amateur health inspector's license for the day and just go with the flow. This is a JOINT. This is THE JOINT, in fact. Real southwest BBQ. In an authentic western town. There are so many additions to the original building, it's hard to figure out what the place used to look like. The best appetizer - whole, fried, green chilies. And they brew their own beer - chili beer. It's a crisp lager with a chili pepper in the bottle (slogan: "Limes are for wimps!"). It's refreshing and the heat makes you thirsty for another -- brilliant. http://www.satisfiedfrog.com.

Tonight we ate at Roy's. Hawaiian fusion. Great fish. This is NOT a joint. There are a few throughout Texas, Nevada and Arizona. A very nice place for a romantic dinner for two. A bottle of bubbly, a very nice piece of fish, and their famous chocolate souffle for dessert, makes for a very different kind of happy mouth. http://www.roysrestaurant.com/

Not really a restaurant review, but places that folks in the know should know about... Yum.

Demo '06 - Impressions

I'm in beautiful Phoenix Arizona at Demo '06, which is the perfect conference for a tech trends/industry watcher/tech investor types to look at up-and-coming tech companies who have a nail-biting 6 to 8 minutes to sell the audience on their value proposition and give a high-impact demo -- it's kind of like "speed-dating" for VCs. Of course, there's a pavilion where the presenters can set up a booth and be more interactive with interested parties.

While the technologies span every market, from ice-cream vending machines (admittedly out-of-the-box, but cool!) to enterprise security offerings, there are some unifying themes that seem to be prevalent at this year's conference:

Trend: convergence of business and consumer tech. Users are spoiled by elegant and functional applications in their personal life and are left wanting by overly complex and cumbersome enterprise tech. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Trend: corporate computing is too complex. Moving to the point of diminishing return. One more feature in enterprise software among thousands? A better search algorithm to bring back 50 more needles among thousands in the haystack?

Trend: people trust other people before they trust an algorithm. This is the power behind Google's search approach (ranking search results based on people's use of the results) and is fueling a new trend that uses social networks as the engine for a variety of purposes, like recommending products, sharing streaming photo diaries, validating plans and decisions.

Trend: The most exciting new thing to come out of the Enterprise Software Space is (yawn!) security. Among the plethora of security offerings and better application mousetrap (there's a BRAND NEW CRM company here (snooze!), there are only a smattering of unique offerings. To my fellow enterprise software insiders: we need a shake up! IMO, we are failing to capture the imagination of the market, our customers, our engineers and our shareholders.

Cool companies/products:

1. MooBella: technology after my own stomach...er, heart. They've gone and built a vending machine that serves ice cream, but not any old ice cream - the machine will start with a flavor of your choice and mix in various goodies and other flavors, ultimately producing a bowl of your own custom flavor in seconds. Of course, I tried it. Very, very good ice cream and very, very simple to use. This could turn any business into an ice cream provider in one simple step... http://www.moobella.com/

2. Blurb - this company can "slurp" (their term) a bunch of different content into their desktop app and let you publish a beautiful hardcover book with excellent layout control and very attractive templates. They can smartly import content from files and documents, blogs and other stuff you have laying around. They also will sell books on their web store and publish to an audience of one. http://www.blurb.com/

3. DigiSmart - how often does this happen: You want to show people on your cell phone or PDA screen and it's awkward and difficult to ensure that you can operate it and people can see it? DigiSmart is from an Aussie company that has a small add-on that projects the image from the device onto a surface that all can see. No fuss, no muss, and no fancy footwork. http://www.digislide.com.au/consumer/digismart.htm

4. Grass Roots Software - FreePath. This is a meta-content assembly product for people who give presentations. This lets people embellish their PowerPoint presentations with richer media and more dynamic content. As a presenter, I like this idea, because I think PowerPoint comes up way short as an effective communications tool if users simply use the prescribed PowerPoint formats. For more on this, check out Andrew's blog on Bad PowerPoint at http://power-points.blogspot.com. On the other hand, as an audience member I can envision "death by powerpoint" being new and improved with light, sound and video and imagine being bombarded with bad multimedia along with bad slides. But if used for good instead of evil, I have high hopes. http://www.myfreepath.com/

5. Ugobe Pleo. Ugobe is a company making artificial life forms. The CTO is the inventor of the Furby, but I won't hold that against him. The fuzzy and somewhat creepy Furby was a toy that reacted with its environment and its owners. Instead of being cute and engaging, it was annoying. Thieves crept into our house late one night and stole ours. At least that's what my children were told at the time. Well, Pleo is different. Pleo is a baby dinosaur that's very cute and has enough variety in its actions and reactions to be interesting for a long time. Looks like a winner if it can be mass produced. In contrast to the Furby which sold for less than $50, Pleo is in the $200 dollar range. http://www.ugobe.com.

There are plenty of others, but these stood out for their creative applications of technology. For the next little while I'm going to spend some time thinking about how these consumer tech trends can be well applied to the enterprise space. Stay tuned...