Whew!

Let me say this right up front: I have no idea how young rock bands manage to go on tour.

We just finished playing two Eyewitness Blues Band gigs in two nights in two cities. And I can barely stand up.

Load in. Set up. Fix. Sound check. Play. Take a break. Play another set. Tear down. Load out. Stagger to bed. Rest (briefly). Repeat. Hard damn work, and not made any easier by the fact that we don't exactly have world-class gear (our second gig was a full-on McGyver scene, with fill-in audio guy/troubleshooter Mike Davich reaching deep into his bag of tricks to clobber stuff together). Of course, it went a little easier the night before when my brother Craig ran the audio--he just takes care of stuff, and there are no surprises.

But both shows came off well. Maybe better than that. We had people smiling and dancing and yelling for more (at least that's what I think they were yelling). We even had a guy propose to his girlfriend during our Saturday night gig at the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company (which we absolutely loved--great good, great little bar, great people). That's them in the photo, right after she said "yes". We serenaded them with Stevie Ray Vaughn's "Pride and Joy". Who says we're not romantic?

Like a Rolling Stone

48 hours from now, I will either:

1. Be so in love with the idea of being in a rock band that I'll quit my day job, or,
2. Be feeling every one of my 51 years of age and ready to quit the band.

See, your Eyewitness Blues Band is about to embark on its most ambitious effort thus far. We're playing two gigs in two nights at two different venues. And while we're accustomed to playing a single set of 30 to 45 minutes, these are pro-length gigs. That means two sets the first night and three sets the second night.

Add in all the loading-in and loading-out, the setting-up, tuning-up and other assorted stress-inducing activities, and I have a feeling we'll know why the reality of being in a professional band is decidedly less glamorous than the image.

This is not new news to Doug and Patrick, both of whom tried to earn a living with music and retreated to the relative sanity of the broadcast news business. That should tell you something: if the broadcast news business looks sane to you, then whatever else you're doing must really be crazy.

I have a feeling that by the end of the second night, I'll be too tired to even trash the hotel room.

Bike Porn

If this photo doesn't get your blood pumping...well, to each his own.

For the uninitiated, it's a Cervelo SLC-SL road bike. Same bike used by Team CSC (which employs one of my favorite riders, Jens Voigt). Really light. Really fast. Really expensive.

I just spent a weekend riding one, courtesy of my friend Don, who collects drool-inducing bikes the way some folks collect fast cars. Don's not a collector, though. He's a rider. Big difference.

For Don, it's not about the thing itself, but about its utility. And this thing does its job. It really does its job.

The Cervelo is amazingly light (you can easily lift the whole bike, even with loaded water bottles, with your index finger), but also very stiff. I had the sensation you get in a powerful car--hit the gas, and it just jumps.

Not that the Cervelo turned me into Jens Voigt, but I definitely felt like a better rider while we tackled the hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the flats along Santa Monica Bay. What I didn't expect is the bike's comfort level--despite its race breeding, it's an easy bike to ride. You're connected to the road, but you don't feel every wrinkle in the pavement.

Of course, this could all be my imagination. When I told my wife about the bike, she (no doubt thinking about the $6,000+ price tag) immediately challenged me: how do you really know it's a better bike? Is it possible that you're swayed by the knowledge that it's a superbike? Would a blind test reveal the same results?

She may be right. But thankfully, you can't blind-taste a bike the way you can coffee or wine. Could I tell the difference between that Cervelo and say, a Scott Addict (another superbike)? Maybe not. But I could sure tell the difference between my trusty old Trek 2100 and that Cervelo.

Even a blind rider could see that.

TiVo Crisis Averted

It's a long story, but I think we own the TiVo machine that Alexander Graham TiVo cranked out on his first day of business. While people now talk about their DVR capacity in terms of hundreds of hours, we sometimes have trouble recording an entire football game on our aging warhorse.

This leads, not surprisingly, to turf wars. It's me vs. my wife vs. our son, each wanting a slice of scarce capacity (she records "CSI", he records all kinds of Discovery Channel stuff, and I get left out).

So I finally broke down and bought an upgrade kit from WeaKnees. These guys will ship you a new, higher-capacity hard drive, already formatted with the TiVo software. All you have to do is wrestle open the TiVo case, pull the old drive, stick in the new one, and put the machine through its startup procedure.

It's every bit as easy as they say. They're not kidding when they say the case is hard to open (it just requires some serious effort, and a well-aimed screwdriver helps). But once you're in, we're talking 10 minutes.

Of course, I added a few minutes so I could clean up the disgusting pile of dust I found inside. Yuk. It makes me wonder if some of the occasional weirdness we got from the TiVo was actually caused by filthy living conditions on that circuit board.

But I digress. After a fast pass with the vacuum cleaner, I sealed things up (closing the case is a reverse wrestling match), and after letting the system phone home to retrieve its TV program guide, we're in Fat City. We now have 90 hours of storage, ready and waiting.

Which just means the arguments over who's hogging the hard drive will be slightly delayed.

The Lazarus Laptop

My wife will tell you I'm a packrat. I prefer to see myself as a kind soul who offers second chances to things that other less-charitable folks would consign to the scrap heap.

Sure, my wife is probably right, but every now and again I score a success.

I have just raised a laptop computer from the dead. This particular machine was a pretty zippy number back in '04 when I bought it for my daughter as a high school graduation gift. A few years of student abuse later, the poor thing was heaved onto my doorstep.

The corpse sat there for quite a while. Eventually, I undertook a forensic investigation and found:

• A dead hard drive
• A missing "y" key
• One broken USB port
• A missing power cable
• No operating system CD

Several eBay shopping trips later, I had replacements for everything except the USB jack (there's still one that works), although there was one false start that left me with two replacement hard drives. No worries; I'll go to eBay again and get one of those portable enclosures for the spare drive.

So now it was time for the mystical incantations. As anyone who's worked on a computer can tell you, a certain level of patience and optimism are required. But this went amazingly well. As I write, I still haven't attached that "y" key to the keyboard, but otherwise, the formerly-dead laptop is now very much alive.

Hallelujah.

The FirePod Rocks

Like Dylan once sang, "the times, they are a-changin' "

That gadget on the left is a FirePod (well, actually, the company that makes it now calls it an FP-10, but I like the sound of FirePod much better). You can plug up to 8 microphones or guitars into it, and then plug it into a laptop computer. Voila! Instant recording rig. We used it the other night to record an Eyewitness Blues Band rehearsal, and while we still have a few kinks to work out, the whole experience was pretty amazing.

This is not a mixer. What it does is let you capture up to 8 channels of audio, which you can mix in real time (or re-mix later) on your computer. Doug got this rig a day before we broke it out of the box and used it. Read the manual? Hah!

Despite our lack of familiarity, the only real hiccup was the fact that several of our bandmates were, uh, a little louder during the actual performance than they had been when we set the levels. Since we had no one to ride levels while we played, this resulted in some distorted tracks. But in general, considering how little effort it took to set up (and considering the acoustics of our cramped rehearsal space), we were all pretty thrilled with what we got.

At the very least, we now have a terrific instant-feedback tool. Play a song, play it back right away and hear what worked and what didn't. When we have time, we can re-mix and try to come up with an improved sound. But for now, take a listen to an un-remixed version of our song "15 Mill".

Yes, we will be keeping our day jobs.

X's and O's

Will it change the world? I don't know, but it's a damned interesting gadget.

I'm talking about the XO laptop computer, the product of the much-ballyhooed One Laptop Per Child project. Students of recent history will remember this all started with Nicholas Negroponte's dream of a $100 laptop for kids in developing countries. They missed the $100 target by a factor of 2 (you actually have to spend $400 to get one, but that includes the donation of one machine to a kid somewhere for every machine you receive).

I got mine a couple of days ago. Even in an age of stripped-down "quick start" manuals, the XO's documentation is remarkably sparse. There's not even a diagram to explain the function of the buttons.

Took me a few minutes to figure out how to open it (you have to flip those little "ears", which are actually the WiFi antennas, to unlock the thing). I also had to run to my "real" computer a few times to go online so I could figure out the somewhat inscrutable user interface (it's based on Linux and is unlike any Mac or PC you've ever seen).

First impressions?

• Man, is it slow (would another $25 buy a faster processor?)
• It's a more-than-adequate web-surfing and e-mail-checking machine
• The industrial design is innovative and it's well-built
• It will not replace a traditional laptop--but if you had one, you'd probably use it
• The display is way better than you'd expect
• The "mesh network" feature could change the world

That last item is worth amplifying. The XO doesn't just do WiFi (mine found both of my home WiFi networks easily and logged in quickly). It also finds all other XO's in the area and can set up an instant network between those machines.

For me, of course, that's just talk. There are no other XO's within range, so when I go to the screen that would show a little dot representing neighboring XO's, I get nothing. But if there were others, doors would open. We could share data (even working together within a document in real time), we could use a quirky little application that lets two XO's calculate the distance between themselves, or we could benefit from the mesh network's ability to share the strongest WiFi Internet signal among other mesh members.

A meshed world could be a very interesting place. It's one thing to network over great distances via the Internet. Imagine doing so over shorter distances, simply by turning on your computer. Endless possibilities.

Of course, this is all subject to the phenomenon known as "network effects". The more things you have on a network, the more valuable it becomes (one cell phone is interesting, but a million of them creates something way more valuable). My little XO is a handy gadget in its own right, but a house or workplace full of them would be much cooler.

I'll probably tuck mine in my messenger bag often. I'm sure it'll start a lot of conversations in coffee shops. With any luck, I'll find some other XO'ers with whom to mesh.

Play That Funky Music

I learn more every day about how much more I need to learn about the guitar. 6 strings, 24 frets, endless frustration.

At a recent rehearsal, the band decided to try a little James Brown-style fling. Funk guitar is deceptively tricky stuff. It's all about finding that elusive rhythmic groove. But hey, I'm a rhythm guitar player, right?

If only it was that simple. I'm watching Patrick's hands flying around the guitar neck as he lays down some funk that the Godfather of Soul's guitar man "Catfish" Collins would have dug. And I'm feeling mighty funk-less.

So the next day I'm poking through The Guitar Handbook, a very cool book I'd been given as a Christmas gift by KCBS colleague (and real musician) Kim Wonderley. Somewhere in a section about chord theory, there's a mention of how funk music relies on 9th chords and 11th chords. I will spare you the heavy-duty musical details, but fix your gaze on this lovely chord diagram:

That, my friend, is a beautiful thing. It's a nice, funky-sounding chord...formed with one finger! It turns out the whole funk guitar sound can be created just by sliding up or down a fret from the starting point.

I love the 11th chord. No excuses now. It's time to lay down the boogie and play that funky music 'till I die.