3 posts tagged “festival”

My daughter and I picked up my mom and went up to the Fresh Paint Festival at the marina on the Everett waterfront Saturday. It was nice, plenty of interesting art - several painters were interesting, some very good glass work, and an old friend of mine named Jon Noe was manning the music stand, spinning old R&B music from the 40s and 50s. My mom enjoyed the music quite a bit, and so did I. It was interesting how many songs I recognized due to remakes, for example the original version of "Train Kept A'Rolling" which was covered by the Yardbirds and Aerosmith. I was in a band in my teens that covered that song somewhat poorly. First audio bit on the left is as we're driving over to pick mom up.

After checking out the Fresh Paint festival and having an early dinner at Lombardi's we set off for Hempfest. Parked up the hill and walked through the sculpture park (giant orange cones!). A relative was rumored to be working a booth there, but we couldn't find him. Listened to a little music, the second audio was recorded from the crowd listening to the music, came through better than I expected.

It was pretty hot, well into the 90s, and mildly crowded. Several food vendors were out of water or anything to drink. We wandered through the festival and got some water, the lines at vendors who had water were long, but we needed it. We climbed down to the water front over the rip-rack and bathed our feet which cooled us off nicely. I was sitting on a rock close to the water when the wake of a large ship came in and had to scramble to avoid getting soaked. Recorded the 3rd audio bit there.

Several bands sounded good, but I couldn't figure out the Hempfest schedule so I'm not sure who we were listening to.  My favorite was a reggae band, the beat was infectious and bouncy and the music was upbeat.

We left shortly after that and watched some of the sunset over the Olympics from the sculpture park, recorded the last message from there.

As we drove north on I-5 the view over Lake Union with the sunset over the Olympics was impressive. I don't think my daughter enjoyed it much, she has asthma so she has to avoid the smoke and it was hot and we were a bit tired, but it was an interesting experience.

Bumbershoot is at the end of the month in Seattle, anybody planning on going?

I'm experimenting with audio blogging, I plan on trying to do some simple stuff from the festival and getting it posted in near real time. Videos and photos will take a little longer.

Since I'm an employee of Cisco and I'm using and mentioning Cisco products, I should be clear: the views, comments and (hopefully) insights found here are purely mine, not Cisco's. No official or corporate views or policies will be expressed here, only my personal opinions.

Bumbershoot is coming and I want to do something creative or productive. Last year I took a notebook and occasionally scribbled some notes while at the Seattle Center (laying on the ground in Memorial Stadium twice) so it didn't work out all that well. I eventually blogged about it later, but many details were gone by then - I always end up seeing so many bands that by the end of it I forget what they sounded like and what I enjoyed for the majority of them.

Cisco has encouraged us to look at web 2.0 and be creative, so here's what I've come up with. It's mostly nearly web 1.0, at least so far, but I envision eventually linking this to other web 2 apps such as the user editable maps, perhaps get a GPS with path recording, if we can adorn the path with links to the audio blogs, pictures and videos on a map of the center it could get interesting.

I'm experimenting with audio blogging by leaving voice mails on my corporate phone and grabbing the .wav file using Outlook in Windows. It took me some fiddling to figure out the server and password, but it works.

VoiceMessageTest

Pretty slick. I'm using IMAP to connect Outlook into Unity Connection, the voice messaging product from Cisco that I work on. The voice message account just looks like another e-mail account in-box, it's sea-alpha-cuc in this example:

UC Inbox

The inbox shows my voice mail messages with the message attached as a .wav file for each message. I left one using my cell phone sitting at home with my lap-top using VPN over wifi/cable modem with Outlook running and the cuc-install-49 folder selected as shown. The message appeared (and Outlook beeped) in a fraction of a second. Under load it may get slower, but I expect load to be low on Labor Day weekend during Bumbershoot so we should be OK.

The VoiceMessage.wav file can be saved by right clicking on it and selecting Save As. In this example the wav file is 103 KB, just short of 13 seconds of 8 KB/sec audio.

UC Inbox Detail

The sound was better than I had expected, if not spectacular. I added it to this blog as VoiceMessageTest above to the right so you can see - or should I say hear - for yourself.

Uploading it into Vox was mildly trivial. I think from now on I'll use small rather than medium sound icons, but otherwise we're pretty much good to go.

Hmm, sheer genius - I need to go somewhere with live music this weekend to do a dry run, I want to see what a 15 second bit of a song sounds like. Also I want to try talking or perhaps screaming over the music and seeing if we end up with anything intelligible. A job related excuse to hit the bars and drink some beer - I mean listen to some music and audio blog. What'll I think up next!