analogkid.in

“The zephyr in my arid world,
I made you go away.

The dry world you feel,
has dried my zephyr away”

So as planned, I got and set up the new 120 gallon fish tank! The dimensions are 4X2X2 feet, which I was told is not a market standard around here. It was built by Hoo’s Aqualife in 12 mm thick green tinged Modi glass. Surprisingly, it took the folks about 20 minutes glueing the faces together and another session to glue the support beams. Once bound tight, this fucker weighed in at just over a quintal. Two grown men and the thing wouldn’t budge!
An Eheim C600 canister does the filtration. Inspite of the ill-famed “bad directions”, we came out in style with the setup [there isn't anything there really, except for the attaching the valves part].
Plain vanilla substrate, zero frills, a couple rocks. Couldn’t wait a couple days, moved the guys from the old tank into this one. After some glitches with the Jewels in the same tank, the guys are finally settled in and doing good for now. Pictures coming soon.

Lyrics to the first part of my favorite song titled “Queen Illusive”:

“”"

The ice in her glass has melted,
She hasnt had a reason to smile
so she starts to gaze out the window
For a clearer sky, and in reply, its been raining

The walls in my room are comforting
I havent had a reason to frown
so I start to look,
For a duller afternoon, but very soon, she arrives

“”"

AKR is back online and killing from Poona this time … God bless the Internet! And while I have the prog/indian death machine going, I think Im gonna provide some balls to it as well … stay tuned …

I moved to Poona ["Pune" for the raj-irreverant] about a month ago. It’s a new job and a new place and I am still settling in, but I’ve managed to start catching the “pulse of the place”. This place is relatively smaller compared to Bangalore, in that you can get to a certain relevant place in about an hour fifteen. Getting used to the new job and the code-base thereof and “it’s not that bad”.

The music scene ain’t that bad either. Unlike Bangalore, all the venues seem to be concentrated around Koregoan Park ["Kay-Pee" as most folks call it]. “ABC Farms” in Kay-Pee has live music venues such as “Sheesha” and “High Spirits”. Although I’ve been to Sheesha a couple of times, it has been High Spirits [or "High" for these peeps] where I’ve managed to witness some live action. From what I gather, the whole “singer/songwriter” affair is quite prominent in this town, as against my much preffered RnR jamming. But there is supposedly a large space for that too, and I am eager to get involved in that area.

And while the live music seems to concentrated, the food obviously doesn’t. Me being (literally) borderline Kannadiga, there are a lot of interesting eateries that cater to the food genres from my “area”. I have been trying to find and consume these places, which are more about “eating” than “savoring” [i dont make that distinction myself, be advised], and they’ve been great by far. There are a few eateries on my list for the local cuisine, which I must work on … well soon enough.

A very important area that I want to explore is the whole “Puneri attitude”, which encompasses everything between “miserly/sarcastic” to severly patriotic. I’ve been probing, but I suppose I haven’t nailed the right subjects … or … this place has changed … but then I very much doubt that …

I have a mad enthusiasm for the life and times of the much revered Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, but I suppose I should make a separate webpage for that.

People, the much awaited album from Rush is due June 12, 2012 … pre-orders on Amazon …

Get the “Headlong Flight” vibe on the official site … NOW!

Analog Kid Radio will remain shut till the end of March ’12, since I will be traveling a little.

Update: AKR is back up … happy listening!

It is Mike’s birthday!! My radio will play music from Symphony X and MJR’s solo work through tonite (today for you peeps in the west) …

God bless you Mike!! More records, more progressive, more happiness!!

I put off the AK Radio idea and the required work for long enough. The dev work [which was all of getting Shoutcast going locally around the house and then some] was completed about a month ago and I was totally stoked about making the server public. But for the life of me, I just couldn’t get the port forwarding shit together [in spite of in-depth help from Sean and my more experienced buddies ... thats how much I suck!!]. See I had a ADSL modem-router and a separate wireless router at home, each of which had their own IPs. I couldn’t quite figure out how I could make my ADSL router move incoming HTTP requests via the router over to my Sony Vaio mini [hereafter referred to "the fucking radio-server"]. So after I pulled out the remainder of my hair out before another networking-guru dude, he said “Man just get rid of your modem-router and your wireless router and get a new combo instead!”. This way I thought Id have the same IP for both of them and port-forwarding would then be a little less complicated. And that is just what I did. This afternoon, I received the spanking new Netgear N150 from Flipkart. A couple of hours later, I was on the air … err wire. Not yet entirely stress tested, but the thing works

Now that I have the technical stuff taken care of, I must move to radio station programming, artist approvals and schedules. At this point, I hope to stream fuckloads of prog and metal music with special focus on Indian bands. Links, program details and schedules coming very soon!

On a more personal note, I do think it is early and it might seem insignificant, but all of this is really for the love of my life … she knows who she is and corny as it might sound … I know who she is … thats as much as I can say on Valentine’s day

Throughout my guitar playing journey, I’ve hit plateaus. Be it one single run of a solo, a riff, a timely squeal, a rest or sometimes an entire solo. Note that I ain’t talking about inertia here. Today I will recount some of these horrible yet delightful plateaus.

1. “The Squeal” AKA “forced harmonic” AKA “The Pinch Harmonic”:
Back in the Antibiotic days, where we had to partially rely on the ignorance of the crowd ala Eddie Van Halen with “Eruption”, I was wrestling with the “Squeak” on songs like “Come Together” [more like Shiva's rendition of the song, specifically, the "G" note in the main riff if you're playing in "E"] and Agni’s “Wind Dance With Fire” [all over both solos]. I loved the way Sumit had the violent vibrato accentuated by the harmonic going on this track. Besides, there was enough talk around about how a guitar player *must* know how to play pinch harmonics [Rahul: "Sanjeev is a great guitarist man. He can "squeak" at will man ... at will!!"]. So I set out in hot pursuit of this “horrible” technique, often applying right hand positions which ranged between “technically, this should work” to “god, if you’re there …”. Rahul had mentioned how the afore-mentioned great guitarist used his index finger to pinch on the string to achieve harmonic heaven, and so after having abandoned all previous theories of science and faith, I finally managed to play a pinch harmonic. Hell, I could go on all day with the “Squeal”. Putting the technique in context was another odyssey, of course. Luckily for me, this as enough for me to get across the singular Antibiotic show … and as I saw it at that point, the reliance was getting thinner. Was I a “great” guitarist? ah pish-tosh!!

2. “Wind Dance With Fire” … that solo!
Pre-Antibiotic when I had “nailed” the entire gamut of guitar world [read "riffs (solos ... not important!) from all super-hit Deep Purple songs"], I heard Agni’s “Wind Dance With Fire”. “My life changed, I felt the bash!”. And like several hundreds of sub-continental fuzzy peaches, I felt the need to play that solo. Plateau. I always believed I had a fine ear, and therefore I started building the blocks to this solo … or at least to my “horrible” rendition of it. That one fantastic dawn after a certain amount of code spaghetti and the company of my binary brothers, I just woke up and played a “horrible” rendition “attha-to-itthi”, which I have managed to retain to this day. I remember, right after I “nailed” this solo, I rode out on my Hero Honda Splendor to the far extents of town and lit me the pocket-friendly “Navy Cut”, giggling under-breath, on naive(?) pedestal, more stoked about how the guys would react than any sense of achievement. When I formed with AntiBiotic, I share(d) the feel of this solo with the other wildman from AntiBiotic, Amar … and we descended on a certain “dynamic”. That “horrible” rendition hasn’t changed, the dynamic hasn’t changed, but I still love the original solo. Potential plateau! I’ll take two of those!!