Here is approximately 20 minutes of a live blue grass band I recorded at the Ancient Mariner in Ridgfield Connecticut on Saturday March 21st 2009 (Note: file is mp3 stereo 192kbit and weighs in at 44.6 megs)

This recording was a happy accident as Katie and I had just sat down and ordered dinner when unexecptantly this band appeared and started to setup.

I say unexpectantly because the Ancient Mariner is perhaps better known for their awesome burgers and local vibe but not necessarily for a live music scene.

I happened to have had my portable audio disk recorder so I put it on the table and let it capture the band’s warmup and most of first set before we had to call it a night and get back home.

The audio you hear is pretty much what we heard sitting in a back table along the wall towards the corner adjascent to the kitchen.

The voices you hear are mostly Katie and I chatting a bit about birthday plans, our dog, as well as the happy clinking and clanking of dishes and joyful crowd banter mixed in the background.

I did take some liberties to spice up this recording a tad with some compression, EQ, and maximazation in order to bring up the music while keeping spikes from thunderus applause within pleasant listening range but I digress on audio tech.

I should also mention that earlier that day I had attended a Tea Party Rally at Ballard Park and was thinking - how cool is this, one can protest during the day without negative incident in Ridgefield Connecticut and dine out that same night with love of my life - not everybody can do that - e.g., in other parts of the world like Tiananmen Square in China.

Accordingly, Thank You Neighborly Americas - Thank You Ancient Mariner - Thank You Awesome Musicians who add positive grooves and volume to our collective mix - viva et al. - enjoy!

PS - there are nine sections to this recording - titles and times as follows:

1 - Intro - ChuckingIt.com and ChuckScott.com
2 - Warmup Set (starts 17:26 seconds in)
3 - After Moon Light After Mid Night (starts 4:45 minutes in)
4 - Yes I Keep Falling (starts 9:23 minutes in)
5 - Hey Good Looking (starts 12:18 minutes in)
6 - Tribute to Vintage Fleetwood Mac (starts 15:26 minutes in)
7 - Amy What You Gonna Do - Transition (starts 19:19 minutes in)
8 - Amy What You Gonna Do (starts 21:36 minutes in)
9 - Friend of Mine (starts 26:16 minutes in)

Yesterday while walking Kasha through the local nature trail, I saw something I’ve never seen before and it gave me reason to pause and reflect on the cycles of life and death.

We had just reached the end of the trail and turned right onto the roadway as we continued our walk into the neighborhoods circa Poplar Road in Ridgefield.

Kasha was walking briskly as if she was a full guide dog - walking confidently in the lead position on my left and if I had closed my eyes one could have easily imagined her with a harness on her. It was a pleasure to have her gently pull us both along that quiet street with such confidence and briskness.

Normally I have to keep my head down and watch every step when we walk as Kasha can be a bit unpredictable but not this time. Thus with her brimming confidence in the lead, I was a bit freer to look around and tilt my head back a hair looking up into the canopy of forest trees lining both sides of the street.

As I was looking up at the 40-60 foot high pines, I saw what appeared at first as a leaf to be drifting down from forest tree tops and thought it odd that trees would be shedding leaves during this late Spring, May 27th afternoon. As I watched this leaf float down from the canopy towards the street pavement, it spiraled a bit as it circled on its descent so then I thought, “Hmm. Maybe it is not a leaf but one of those helicopter seeds?” And so I enjoyed watching the gentle dance as it ever so softly spiraled and fell closer and closer to us.

But then as it was about six feet from the ground, I could see it clearer and realized it was not a leaf or a seedling but was the wing of a Monarch butterfly. Not even a full wing at that but a wing that appeared to be three-quarters of its original beautiful self - light yellow with soft dollops of brown and black circles arranged in the beauty of God’s fingerprints that characteristically mark the Monarch butterflies with their distinctive marks.

As I watched it take its final swirls before landing, I looked back up into the trees and tried to study the scene for evidence of that which preyed upon the butterfly. I saw none. No hawks, no owls, no birds of any kind were visible but off to the left was a vigorous choir of happy bird chirps. Thus it occurred to me that the death of this butterfly, while sad to the butterfly families, was also a food source for some bird now satisfied with its meal and tweeting away in all the glory God infused in the sounds of their bird songs.

Kasha and I kept walking, then turned around and headed back home. We passed the lone butterfly wing on the return but she did not notice nor give it a sniff. I on the other hand was a bit saddened and reminded that life is a delicate gift. I said a little prayer of thanks for all the beauty in life and the opportunity to be a part of it. Then I pondered my own mortality as we walked back home.

Last month I did something I almost never do - enter a writing contest.

Adele Annesi, a local editor who presented a workshop last Fall that I attended, hosted a blog writing contest in April with her friend Jamie Cat Callan, author of "French Women Don’t Sleep Alone" and "The Writers Toolbox."

The contest was seemingly simple in that Adele and Jamie provided the opening line, "We were drinking champagne and losing our shirts." and contestants were to add 500 words to this line and tell a short story.

So one morning while staring into my coffee cup, I decided it would be a good challenge to push my creativity into the fictional unknown and see what I could come up with.

I hit pen to paper, well actually wireless keyboard and mouse to wordprocessor, and voila - came up with the following entry that actually won!

This was a surprise for me on a couple levels - a) most of my writing for past couple years as been business centric - writing for business web sites, multimedia scripts, and other left brain commercial activities that serve clients and pay bills; b) fictional writing is also something I’m not well versed in as documentary style writing is more my default when writing for myself; c) winning gave me an emotional boost to reconsider my talents and has inspired me to commit to more writing exercises that are just for fun and help me to expand my story telling capabilities.

Okay, I’ve rambled so here is my winning entry as submitted.

Champagne and Strawberries

We were drinking champagne and losing our shirts. Well, technically we were loosening our shirts button by button, but it was obvious to all around us that ultimately the shirts were on their way to becoming untethered to our bodies as we sat pool side in Puerto Vallarta drinking Veuve Clicquot champagne flavored with fresh strawberries.

Once upon a time, Veuve Clicquot was a premium champagne but then they sold out to a big conglomerate. Thus that once famous orange bottle, previously known as the best buy for carefully cultivated bubbly, is now known in the beverage trade as "agent orange" given how said conglomerate buys any-old grapes from any-old vineyard. Regardless, our bubblies were mildly chilled and a delight to sip on that hot afternoon.

Sharon actually liked the idea of losing her shirt as she was sporting a bright orange bikini under her gorgeously simple, white flowing shirt - one with a full column of ten handmade wooden buttons in the front. I had only three buttons on my lime green polo shirt. Obviously my torso could not compete with her perfectly sculpted curves endowed by mother nature and years of working out. But yes, one could say I too liked the idea of shirt losing provided it was mutual.

It was Sharon’s idea to start a game of spin the empty Perrier water bottle while waiting for lunch. The premise started simply enough in that with each successful spin the opposing partner would loosen a button and when all buttons were open, off came the shirt. And yet each button held a mystical power that once loosened, started to reveal the increasing desires of flesh. Powerful desires that began to bubble to the surface akin to the bubbles in our fluted glasses - slowly, gently, freely, twinkling on their rise to the surface.

Luck was on my side that afternoon as Sharon had lost eight of her ten buttons while I still had two of mine. This luck might have had something to do with my right knee propped under the table in such a way that I was able to tilt the table a hair, thereby influencing the bottle spins ever so gently. So even though Sharon had started with a button head start, there we sat even with two buttons each to go when lunch arrived.

We ate our food, laughed with the oceans breezes, toasted our new record deal, then ordered another bottle of agent orange to go. We paid our bill, grabbed the new bottle and headed back to our private bungalow. Once there, we kept our focus for the next 20 minutes and penned our new song, then we lost our shirts and gave into desire.

Okay, the song title is still a work in progress but you get the idea, "We lost our shirts to set our minds free so our bodies could surf souls intoxicated with agent orange."

Essentially it’s a remix of, "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Bikini."

WOW! The music video below is wildly powerful - a real inspiration and testament to the power of human beings when connecting our hearts and talents to the beats of life!

This video starts off very simple with a lone street musician jamming on his version of, “Stand by Me.”

Then through the magic of multi-track recording on-location, the recording engineer starts to take us on a journey with musicians from around the world who all chime in on said song and jam in a virtual concert.

The spectrum of musicians is awesome and very much akin to the IMAX STOMP Oddyssey film of global performers - and features a similar global gamut including: African tribes, Native American drummers, New Orleans blues musicians, Brazilian guitarists, and many many others - enjoy!

Last week I purchased two 1.5 Terabyte NTFS hard drives from Costco for less than $230 total including tax out the door - unbelievable but that is not the point of this post.

While shopping I also decided to purchase a multi-function printer-scanner that prints direct on CDs/DVDs, but it only came with a six foot USB 2.0 cable and I needed an extra couple of feet to maintain office feng shui.

This lead to a robust search of where to buy an USB extension cable.

Long story short, I was very impressed with Walmart.com’s offering, deeply dissapointed with Staples.com and RadioShack.com - ugh.

Ultimately it was BestBuy.com that got my order but the BIG surprise was that all other stores, including BestBuy, were selling USB extension cables for $25-$45 and all I needed was a couple feet.

Turns out that BestBuy was the only company with cables available in-store whereas all the others only sold via web. BestBuy also has an audio-music section and I’m well versed in all things audio and music cables so when I saw in their music section that they had a Hosa 10 foot USB cable for $9.99, well, suffice it to say grand cable happiness ensued in the Scott household.

Accordingly, the moral of this post is when looking for computer cables, be sure to check out the music sections. As to Hosa, I love their cables and have enjoyed years of success with their S/PDIF, xlr, stereo, mono, 1/4″ guitar and midi cables.

PS - fyi, the cheapest cable in the computer section at BestBuy was model GS-6UEC sku 6801017 at $25 for this six foot USB 2.0 a/a extension cable, but their music section had the Hosa 10 foot highspeed USB 2.0 cable in black (model USB-210AB sku 8895412) for only $9.99.

Working for clients is always fun and typically pays very well but some projects provide a level of satisfaction that exceed the wildest of incomes. In this case, I’m talking about a tribute DVD I cobbled together for relatives as part of a Christmas Holiday present.

In 1992, I borrowed a VHS camera from my girlfriend’s brother and filmed my grandfather. That girl is now my wife and her brother Don is my brother-in-law.

Almost 17 years later, I rediscovered my VHS recording, digitized it, then while the parents were away on vacation, I went through their house and collected all the photos of my grandfather, Charles Schwartz - my mom’s father.

I scanned in old pictures from the 1930s, wedding pictures from 1961, and even found my very first photos in old scrapbooks from 1970.

With pictures and video in hand, I then created a Vegas project and started assembling the story. This was not a video project that was going to have lots of cuts and fancy effects as the goal was really to capture the feel of the man and what it was like to visit my grandfather on a Sunday afternoon.

At the time I filmed Charles at his home at 518 Mile Square Road in Yonkers, New York, he was 84 years old. In the resulting hour long DVD we covered all the big topics - from sex, first dates, jobs, goals, dreams, education, global warming, crime, immigration, discrimination, World War 2, guns, capital punishment, prostitution, gangs, and many chapters about various relatives (e.g., my sister, my parents).

I was frustrated at first with the production quality of the video as the VHS is not what I’m now used to with my triple-chip high-end digital cameras. It was also the first time I really filmed a documentary (without knowing that was what I was doing) and made the mistake of shooting into the setting sun streaming through the window behind my grandfather. Yet on some creative level, this “technique” actually worked (”happy accident”) and there are parts in the tape that are very clear but I digress.

Below is the four minute intro of that DVD as I didn’t want to try and upload a 3 gig MPG2 file to Google Video - as it was, this 4 minute intro was a 450 meg WMV file that took four hours to upload.

Lastly I should mention the DVD Architect part of the project. This allowed me to create a series of menus for the DVD with 62 chapter points. This way, if a relative wants to jump to that section of the footage that pertains to them, they can scroll through the menus and quickly jump to that chapter. This was a lot of work to set up (the chapters) but I think in the end will make it all the more valuable to relatives - especially, down the road.

Funny how the Universe works in that right after I completed this tribute video, I got a couple more client gigs to do similar for their families - what fun!

This is a really funny nine minute video featuring Robin Williams talking about Bush, Obama, Palin, McCain and all your favorite 2008 US presidential references - enjoy!

According to Williams, the reign of error is over and America is now out of rehab ..??..

A Big Thank You to GO for the email forward

“Toss that dog a bone” took on new meaning for my Ridgefield pack this afternoon, literally.

At 4PM on December 15th, my wife Katie and I were walking Kasha, our two year old Labrador Retriever and part-time ambassador for Guiding Eyes for the Blind. The weather was a balmy 56 degrees with light wind, reminiscent of a Spring March afternoon.

We had walked past the fountain and returned back on Main Street, took a left on King Lane, then a right onto High Ridge Avenue towards Saint Mary’s.

All of a sudden we heard a thump near us. Katie said, “What was that?” And my silent-self pondered, “Hmm. Probably kids.”

From out of the blue, well technically out of a vehicle passing on High Ridge, a large yellow-freckled milk bone had been vigorously but joyfully tossed out the front-passenger window, landing some 5 feet next to us.

While Katie questioned, I turned and saw this holiday spirited milk bone lying close to us along the sidewalk and witnessed a pickup truck ever-so slowly driving past us with the passenger-side window down and the driver looking in his rearview mirror to check our reaction. As he drove off, he gave a hearty wave. And, I could have sworn his smile filled the frame of his car’s rear view mirror.

I waved back. I picked up the milk bone, gave it to Katie while Kasha started to drool in anticipation, and stated, “That man just tossed us a bone, literally!”

“Imagine that,” my wife said, “a random act of kindness.”

“Yeah” I replied, “Only in Ridgefield.”

ps - This essay was published in the Ridgefield Press Jan 8th 2009 in the premier edition of Ridgefield Voices - Click here for the Ridgefield Press’s edited and published version (208k pdf file)

The Rosary Videos are perhaps my best videos to date and also perhaps the most creatively challenging project as well ..??..

It started simple enough with the Pastor saying, “Chuck, I’d like to film my church at prayer.”

Knowing that the audio for this project would be the lead (vs the visuals), I hired an expert at on-location audio recording so we had three mics set up - two stereo mics to capture the congregation and one mic for the Pastor (i.e., my Audio Technica 4041) and brought all three audio tracks direct into a laptop computer running Sonar.

The audio had it’s own issues which I’ll get back to, but the video was the really big issue. None of us had either filmed a Rosary, which is long (i.e., four sections each of which is 20 minutes long and repetitive) and almost like a meditative chant.

Initially we thought we would film the people, their hands, and the Rosary beads. Thus produce more of a year-book-like video, but once the Pastor saw ten minutes of the first draft of the edited DVD footage, he was not 100% happy with the outcome.

“I know I said let’s film my congregation, but after seeing this video of these people, we’ve kind of been there done that visually speaking. So, is there any way we could apply the screen-saver approach and show my people at prayer mixed in with the spirit of the Rosary? You, know. Some of those really nice sunset pictures and other gentle ambient pics along with the congregation?”

And there-in started my extended creative journey and back to the edit bay.

The Rosary has four sections - The Joyful, The Sorrowful, The Glorious and The Luminous - each of which has five sub-sections, and many sections that repeat (e.g., the Hail Mary 10x).

Some of these sections were seemingly easier to visually score than others - e.g., how to show The Sorrowful Mysteries without defaulting to Gothic or traditional heavy imagery? Jesus dying on the Cross is not a pleasant sight or thought yet in this video, my job was to make it at least compelling enough to pull someone through the entire piece yet also be prayer-like, so using fast edit cuts like an MTV show (or other current TV shows like CSI) was out of the question.

Ultimately, the visual answers came from my extensive image library.

So in the case of the Sorrowful Mysteries, I used images from Native American burial sites, real slave cabins from a South Carolina plantation, Hawaiian burial grounds, various New England cemeteries, plus sprinkled in audio effects like rain, thunder, lightening, running water, etc. All of which are combined and interspersed with shots of the congregation, so the video pulls one through the Prayer without being in your face, yet also subtly reinforces the themes each of the Mysteries portrays.

I mentioned that the audio was an issue - this was unforeseen in that the beads hitting the pews created huge audio spikes that had to be edited out and tamed otherwise the crystal clear audio captured would have been unpleasant to listen to.

Last night was a Friday night and a night that was once the all important date night. But now that I’m part’n parcel of a happily married couple, it was a night like many others except for the fact that I was wired as I entered the master bedroom that featured resting wife and snoring dog.

I was wired with ideas and spirit not because of substances, but high on new technologies I was evaluating earlier that day. Technologies like XAMPP, TikiWiki and Moodle - awesome open source tools that the more I learned about and experimented with, the more juiced I got with ideas for mapping to business opportunities.

So I entered the sleeping bedroom not knowing what to do next. I knew I had to power down, but I also knew I probably wouldn’t get to sleep for another two hours or so.

Thus the issue became:

• Do I enter the bedroom with laptop and continue to surf and educate myself about these technologies (yes, I have headphones, wireless keyboards, and illuminated keyboards so as to cut down on audio / video noise thus respect sleeping wife);
• Do I leave laptop in office and flip the TV channels to find something fun to watch and relax (the TV was already on with low volume set to the Food Network);
• Or, do I turn the TV off and pick up one of the many books that I have open and can’t wait to finish reading but need to turn the lights up to read ..??..

While tempted to continue computing with the wireless laptop, I opted to leave it in the office and first try the TV option via halfhearted attempt of channel surfing knowing I could dive into one of the books as fail safe option.

So I flipped and flipped and nothing exciting appeared on TV that I haven’t already seen on some of my favorite channels (e.g., history, travel, and discovery). But then the cosmos inspired me to flip to the PBS channel (channel 13) just in time to see Charlie Rose interview Professor Lawrence Lessig.

WOW! What a TV surprise - two of my favorite people, neither of whom know me but both of whom I respectfully honor.

Below is a video clip of that interview hosted on Google - enjoy!

I should also note that the reason I love this interview and these two people is partly due to their content sensibilities - e.g., Professor Lessig has been (and continues to be) instrumental in shaping the Creative Commons and argued CopyLefts (vs CopyRights) before the Supreme Court; Charlie Rose has been (and continues to be) inspiring with his objective and truthful coverage of multilateral thinkers, do-ers, movers-n-shakers, et al.

But back to the video clip. It is a dialogue between Charlie and Larry about many things including why Congress failed on copyright issues (simple issues), why Congress continues to fail on the big issues (e.g., global warming), and why Congress needs to change (e.g., upgrade to Congress 2.02b) in order to survive by serving the greatest good (a good thing) which is us (i.e., we the people - everyday people who vote, pay taxes, do our best to add to the system, get along, play by the rules, groove with the flow, just get by, hang on, etc.).

The big idea (as I understand it in this video interview) is that Congress needs to move from money focus to idea focus.

In the old days, I believe they called this Statesmanship - vs today’s vulgar political hack who sells out to special interests even though all parties involved are mostly in denial.

So the good news is that what once was old is new again - yippee - e.g., for best examples of Statesmanship see Founding Fathers.

And as they used to say in Brooklyn, “Go You Guys! Just You Go!”