My sophomore year of high school at Maconoquah High School I got to perform in a band. We were called The Flying Gimps, and we performed a whole two times that year. Maconoquah had a talent show every year called Pow Wow. Derrick Smallwood, one of the other members of the band got me a copy of Pow Wow 1993, and I've gone ahead and ripped the video to a WMV file. I've got two files, linked below. The first one is the original footage of The Flying Gimps performing Helmet's Unsung, the audio on this is horrible, but it's the original recording, I'm going to have to say the lack of quality is due to the positioning of the camera in front of the bass player's amp/speakers. http://christoc.com/video/TheFlyingGimps-Unsung-93.wmv 18.4mb The second video is what we should have sounded like! I've dubbed in the song from Helmet over the video. http://christoc.com/video/TheFlyingGimps-UnsungDubb-93.wmv 19mb UPDATE: I've moved them to a server with much better...

At CES this evening it was announced that the Xbox 360 will get a HD-DVD external drive attachment later this year! Good news for 360 Owners. Now if they would just upconvert regular DVDs as...

Well, it's almost 1am and Thanksgiving weekend is almost over. I'll be getting up and heading back to the grind in the morning. Though this coming week will probably fly by for me. Natalie and I are headed to Vegas Friday evening. I bought a flight/hotel package early last week to take her out of town for the weekend. We leave on the 2nd of December, which is the date we've set as our wedding day for 2006, so this trip will be a little celebration of the year anniversary before our wedding. I've never been to Vegas, bar a trip with the family when I was 12 or 13, so I look forward to getting to see all the Casinos, and of course see how much money I can come home with! Here's to hoping it's more than I started with! We've also got tickets to see the Blue Man Group, who I've always wanted to see, and Natalie's never heard of. They're at The Venetian, which happens to be the hotel we're staying at. Other news. The Xbox 360 is going well, solo I've been playing Project Gotham Racing 3, it's got some great online action, and the single player so far has kept me entertained. Head to head I've been playing my future brother-in-law in some NBA Live 06, which is a great game to play when the other guy is in the room. After making a great play you can hit the replay button and rub it in their face. Other than those two games though I haven't touched much of the other software I picked up for the 360. I've also yet to get it working on my network to be able to stream files off my PC. Hopefully I'll get that working, I think it may be related to my PC being on a domain, but we'll see. More news to come soon, lots going on in the Hammond...

So the alarm comes on this morning and I hit snooze the required 3-4 times per morning. It's blaring 105.7 at 7AM, which has the king of all that is bad, Howard Stern, on in the mornings. I absolutely cannot stand the guy, IMO Howard Stern is just a dork who surrounds himself with people lower than himself so they can boost and praise him. This morning I actually listened to the show for a bit though. He had Jonathan Davis from Korn on this morning, talking about Jonathan's childhood and family life. It was kind of interesting, as I've always been a HUGE Korn fan, ever since Kevin Corcoran (sp?) gave me a tape of their first album back in 94. I knew he had a screwed up childhood, but to hear him talk about it was definitely interesting. ...

Well, this is the first post about a great weekend! Friday night Roger and I went to Mississippi Nights to see Papa Roach, Trust Co. and Chronic Future. When we got there we noticed the guys from proach were standing out on the side parking lot talking to fans. So we parked and walked around there to say hello. I said hello to Jerry, the guitar player, and told him we'd met before, at Pop's in Sauget Illinois in 2001, and that I went to school with his brother. He faintly remembered meeting me, or at least acted like he did. After saying hello to Jerry I walked over to Jacoby, the lead singer, and said hello, told him I went to high school with his wife. To which he replied, “She's here, on the bus.” So I went over and waited by the bus until they were done with their signing, which I came to find out later was an invite only signing. I guess Roger and I just looked like we belonged there? :) After the signing Jacoby got Kelly off the bus, she came out and said hello, asked what the hell I was doing in Missouri (I know, it's not the most exciting of states, but it's been home for 9 years now). Roger and I went in and watched the first  two bands, I am not much of being right up in the crowd, so at Mississippi Nights it is nice because we could grab a chair in the back and still be able to see. Later in the evening I noticed Kelly was inside watching Papa Roach play, I went up to her and another girl (kelly is in black, jennifer in the striped shirt) at the bar to say hello. We talked for probably an hour to an hour and a half. We got caught up on all sorts of things. Kelly just had her second son, 6 weeks ago, named Jagger. Her and Jennifer had flown out and met up with the guys in Wichata the night before, they were on tour with them until Monday and then were heading back to California and the kids. Jennifer also went to Vanden High School and was in our class (95). Jennifer married Tobin, the bass player for Papa Roach. Jennifer also has two kids now. All the kids (4) were staying at Kelly's mom's house while they were out on tour with the band. Kelly told me about everything that's been going on, how life still is very regular for her, even though she's married to a rock star! It was a great evening, getting caught up with Kelly and Jennifer, getting to hang out with the band members afterwards. I didn't know this, but Dave, the drummer, is married to a Tyler, as in one of Steven Tyler's daughters, Mia to be exact. Seeing things from the otherside, you realize how real people are, even though they look so far away, they are just regular people to, it's nice to see that. Best of luck to the band, and to Kelly, Jennifer and the kids. I hope to see them all again soon, who knows, maybe they will show up at our 10 year reunion next year at Vanden! Here are some photos taken that...

If you haven't seen Shaun of the Dead yet go see it! It is an excellent movie. Funny as heck, and even a little jump out and scare you here and there. The movie is about two british guys who fight off a town full of Zombies, while the world faces an epidemic onslaught of Zombies. This is definitely a see it in theaters type of movie, or on DVD with 5.1...

I am having the worst time trying to listen to the new Papa Roach CD on my PC here at work. It looks like there may be some sort of copy protection on Getting Away With Murder. I'll post more tonight after I...

Body Count Guitarist Dennis Miles died of Lymphoma on August 17th. I still have my cassette tape of Body Count, with the uncut Cop Killer version on it. I believe I also have their second album on tape as well? I may have to dig through the collection this...

I went to Best Buy last night with Russ and picked up Chronic Future's Lines In My Face So far I am liking what I hear. I've listened to it probably 4-5 times since I got the CD last night. It was actually cheaper to buy it at Best Buy, $9.99, than you could download it from ITunes or Napster, $10.98.....

Chronic Future will be at the Creepy Crawl on the 22nd, I'm gonna head down, drag a friend or two along with me.