Memoirs of a DJ

I got this list from a friend of mine - he and his crew regularly put out this newsletter related to their DJ exploits and upcoming events. This list is right on the money, and I can say that as a DJ, I have literally heard every one of the comments below except #6 (what kind of clubs is my friend playing in???), and I agree with all the responses:

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Rules of The Game
To all my deejays out there that spin in the clubs this is for you. I got this from J Rawls who got it from DJ Center who found it on a blog(shout out to DJ Supreme)...Can I get a "check 1-2" from all the deejays that are feeling this??
To all my patrons/party goers please read, pay attention and enjoy your party experience!!

Attention party people. Before requesting songs, making comments or asking questions of the DJ, please read this:

1. "Will you play something good. Something WE CAN DANCE TO" ?!
As a dj I have to play to an entire club of people not just YOU or ONE person. So what YOU may HATE may be someone else's favorite joint.
Not only that but EVERYTHING I play can be danced to in one way or another.

2. "Would you play something with a BEAT" ?!
Are you serious? I know of NO songs I play in night clubs that do not have some sort of a beat.

3. "I don't know who sings it or the name of it"
Well that's not much to go by. So please don't sing it for me. I put up with high dangerous decibal levels all night long. Please do me a huge favor and keep the rendetion of your favoite song toyourself.

4. "EVERYBODY wants to hear it"!
Oh ok, you went through the entire club and took a poll and have been appointed the spokesperson to tell me this?!


5. "EVERYBODY will dance if you play it"!
I'm not going to so, I guess that blows a hole in your theory.

6. "I can get laid if you play it"
Why settle for one night? Buy the cd and get some for a month!

7. "I want to hear it NEXT"
The ONLY person who can get away with that statement is the one that signs my paycheck.

8. "I don't know what I want, what do you have"?
It's way easier for you to go have a few drinks and figure out something you
would like then for me to recite the 10,000 songs I come with.

9. "Hey man, what's up? NOBODY can dance to this"!
It's not really advisable to say when the dancefloor is jam packed (But a lot of you do anyway). However, even if there is only one person on the floor it contradicts your statement.

Here are some assorted things NOT to say:
If you request a song and I say "I just played that". Don't say "Well I just got here". That does not make an ounce of difference. Don't ask me "Is this the only kind of music you play"? When you go to eat Chinese food do you ask for mexican? Rock clubs play rock. New Wave clubs play new wave. Disco clubs play disco! 80's night plays 80's etc. etc. Plus I like to mix it up and play to the diverse crowds that attend my events. I'm not there strictly for YOU only.

When requesting a song please be SPECIFIC. Don't say"I want to hear something, ANYTHING but this"! You can't complain if you can't be specific.
However, if you are specific and I tell you I don'thave it - don't say "What"?! What do you mean youdon't have it? What kind of DJ are you? Why don'tyou work fast food ? You obviously don't know whatyour doing".
At that point I might KILL you!

Special Notes:
Club DJs are expected to play EVERYTHING forEVERYBODY. It is impossible to satisfy all of thepeople all of the time, yet i'm expected to do just that. If a radio station plays a song over and overand over and tells you that it's good the majority ofpeople believe it. However 95% of the time I wasdropping that song in the clubs months before it hitthe airwaves and radio has discovered it. So give theDJ a break! Next time you wish to request a songTHINK before you speak.

And last but not least and above all.......... If Ihave one hand on the mixer, one hand on a turntableand my headphone to my ear........ DO NOT BUG ME.
I'm working....................

My friend is taking a trip...

Well, it's been a sad couple of weeks in the household. Ever since my xbox died. Lets take a moment of silence....

As u can see, i've prepared the coffin... I mean the return box that will be shipped back to microsoft. Now we must wait and see just how long this whole repair process takes. Safe travels, my friend!

--sent from mobile phone--

Moofing

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I just learned a new word that describes my lifestyle pretty well - moofing. Mobile out of office. Describes 'where you are/ what you're doing when you're not at your desk or office but yet fully contactable and able to work as normal'. If you arm me with my trusty tablet pc and my pocket pc cell phone (which doubles as a wireless modem), then a moofer is what I become!

Unfortunately my mac mini has yet to prove itself as an ally in my moofistic lifestyle. Being that it is morally opposed to my windows mobile device, and thus refuses to sync nicely with my calendar items, puts yet another barrier between it and my coveted primary workstation area. :)

--sent from mobile phone--

iChat, You Chat, til our connection goes to crap...

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So, I hooked up with some of my Mac buddies - two in Cali, one in Ohio - and got a 4-person video chat going. As you can see from the snapshot, it's got a pretty impressive interface. What was also impressive was the file/photo sharing. I was able to stream a Billy Ocean music video ("Caribbean Queen", of course) and an Al Green mp3 to the other 3 people, pretty seamlessly. Nice.

The only downside is that I was the only one in the bunch without a native Mac-friendly web cam. Mine is more of a Vista-certified Logitech USB camera. I had to install 3 different pieces of software on the Mac to get it to work, and even then, I was the one that kept getting dropped out of the chat, or my mike would stop working.

I guess the question is, do I ding Mac for making me install 3 pieces of 3rd-party software in order to use a name-brand web cam? Or do I ding myself for not following the Mac motto: use our stuff, and only our stuff, til death do us part?

I know that the major instant messenger folks on Windows also have video chat capability (I chat with my wife via MSN Messenger video all the time, cuz I'm too lazy to walk up the stairs to her office). Never tried 4 people on video chat, tho. And, although I'm sure both Win & Mac can do basic video chats, I'm pretty sure the iChat interface is a lot better than the others.

On a side note, this is the first blog post I've composed while on the Mac. it's also the first blog post to give me formatting errors that made me have to look at the HTML to figure out what was going on. I don't know if this is just coincidence, but I HAD to mention it (hehehe...)

Hmmmm, on we go....

Force Quit... Already???

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So, I'm like just a couple weeks into my Mac ownership, and already i'm using the 'task manager' to kill rogue processes? In this case, one of the disc mounting processes was running in the background and keeping me from ejecting [another] disc. Hmmm...seems like i'm using all the same troubleshooting skills I learned in the Windows world. I didn't think I was gonna need those bag of tricks in Steve's world. :)

I also tried to do a screenshot of my error message using the Grab service. Thought I could capture the image and paste it into an email message. Does that sound too much like right? Wouldn't let me do it.

I also realized that I never liked the menu bar for the apps always being context-sensitive and sitting at the very top of my screen. "Attention managment" is important to me - seems inconvenient to have to take my eyes all the way up to the top of the screen to do something with a window I'm using near the bottom of my screen. And that's if the menu updates to the new context fast enough, and is not still showing the menu for the last window I clicked on. (hmm, maybe that's a Mini thing)

To top it all off, I love the message Mac gave me about my problem from their Help files:

"If this happens, WAIT A FEW MOMENTS and try again..."

Who is this message written for? Are there computer users out there in 2008 that actually DON'T wait a few moments prior to being frustrated enough to check the Help files??? And apparently, in this case a 'moment' was like 10 minutes before I started having to search for a process to kill.

So far, I feel right at home in my Mac world - my woes thus far are very familiar..... ;- )

Window resizing

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So, I've been told that it's "all the subtle little things" about Macs that make them so nice. But for me, so far it's the little things that are getting on my nerve. In Win, I can resize a window from any corner/edge. In Mac, only lower right-hand corner. That's gonna bug me eventually. I wonder if somebody has a good reason for this limitation? Interesting...

Journey to the Dark side

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Well, I decided to drink a little of the kool-aid and give Stevie J. and his backstreet boys a try by buying a Mac Mini. I had planned on blogging every step of my journey, however, since I know I don't have the time & patience to write a cohesive and comprehensive chronicle of my experience, plus the fact that folks like Anand have already expressed it so thoroughly, I think I'll just throw random thoughts out here along the way. We'll see how this little experiment goes...

I'd like to point out that on Day 1, I put a CD in the drive. Standard task, right? The Mac didn't see the disc. Wouldn't let me eject it. Had to restart before it would work. Did I buy a Mac or is this a mini-Windows98 box? Hmmm, not what i expected......

On the road

Headed to cincinnati. Ridin in the car bumpin a krs-one mix cd. The ride down I-71 is so exciting ... Not.

First YouTube Video

Health insurance

Watched Oprah show when they talked about health insurance and mike moore's movie Sicko. Very interesting. Made me realize that all of us who have yet to be a victim of the health care industry are basically just lucky, REGARDLESS of how good our insurance plans are or how much money we make.

One thing I think they didn't talk enuff about, tho, is the COST of health services. Do those pills and operations REALLY cost that much? If so, do they actually have to cost that much? Why can't government control prices thru out the manufacturing chain? My leukemia operation's retail price is $200,000 - but is the wholesale price actually $1,000?

-- sent from mobile phone --

What's the big deal??

Am I the only one that doesn't understand why folks is loving Halo 3? Let me preface by saying that yes I am an xbox 360 gamer, and I love Gears of War, among other games. But yet I've never understood the fascination with h3. Looks like a basic first person shooter to me...

-- sent from mobile phone --

More blogging

I'm gonna try to start blogging more. Even tho I am busy, I aint got no excuse when I can easily send messages from my phone like I'm doing now. And writing my thoughts is good for the soul I think. :) ...well, that was a nice little procrastination break I just took. I guess now I gotta get back to work. Mutha...

-- sent from mobile phone --

Return on investment

Well, I'm in Vegas for the week. I put five $ in a slot machine just to pass the time while the wife was having fun with the one-armed bandit... 2 hours later I had turned that 5 into 3 hundred...

Unfortunately I can't post video clips from my phone, so you'll just have to imagine me doing the 2-step down the vegas strip...

-- sent from mobile phone --

A Certain Damsel's Distraction

In my most recent men's bible study group session this past Wednesday, we read & discussed Acts Chapter 16 vers 16 - 34, which is the story about Paul and Silas being thrown in jail for exorcising a demon from one of the villagers. I found one part of this to be very interesting...

To paraphrase the story, Paul and his boys were were walking to a "place of prayer", and ran into this "certain damsel" who was possessed with a demon or "spirit" that allowed her to predict the future. She was being pimped by some of the locals as a way of making money off this 'talent'. Anyway, she started following Paul and his peeps, and the demon thru her was telling everybody, "These are God's servants! They'll tell you how to be saved!" (I guess even demons have to speak the Truth when it comes to God's Word).

The interesting part is that Paul lets this go on "for many days" before he finally turns around and speaks to the demon (not the girl) and says, "In the name of Jesus I command you to come out of her!" And the demon comes out.

What's interesting about that for me is that Paul and his boyz endured the wailings of this demon for several days before doing anything about it. (Even tho the demon was speaking truth, there's a problem when that truth comes of out of a demonic vessel)

I wrestled with that for a while - why would Paul let this possessed woman follow them for days like that? Is this a lesson in patience?

My conclusion: you can't let the Devil keep you off balance by reacting every time he throws a distraction your way. Paul had a mission; a ministry. If he stopped walking every time somebody came up talking some bull, he'd never get to where he was going! So I can't slow down my Christian walk by letting a bad day, or a bad word out of someone's mouth, keep me from 'making it happen'. I've gotta use the Holy Spirit to know whether I need to call somebody out and set them straight, or when I just need to "keep on truckin', baby!"

Industry rule #4080

Is it possible that the PPC 6700 is like the best phone ever??? I found another use today - using the flash on the phones camera to help me see inside my computer case while I changed my hard drive. I feel just like MacGyver!!! :)

-- sent from mobile phone --