Islands in the DataStream

I just installed the Wordpress 2 iPhone app on my phone and I’m posting this from my phone right now. For some reason, I still haven’t been able to bring myself to update this blog often enough. I don’t seem to have any trouble coming up with content for my twitter stream and I am constantly feeling the urge to rant longer than 140 characters but I always seem to come with some excuse. Maybe being able to post from my phone will finally push me to post more frequently? Only time will tell.

Guam tweeters now have the ability to post status updates to their Twitter feed from their plain jane mobile phones via text message.  Twitter.com offers their U.S. and U.K. based users support for sms integration with their twitter feeds.  Unfortunately for everyone else in the world, the numbers provided don’t work from these parts.

Jason Salas and I had several discussions about how the Guam web community has been so slow to embrace twitter.  We both agreed that part of twitter’s appeal in the US mainland is the mobile access convenience.  Something that is not possible here in Guam unless you are graced with a smartphone, a la Blackberry, iPhone or Android.  We decided that we wanted to see if that was a doable service and if it was something that we might be able to offer.

We have now been working on this new project, now called TwitterNeni for a little over a month now.  I’ve been so engrossed in the development side of the project that I haven’t once taken a minute to write about this whole experience.  The service is up and running and the official public beta was released on Monday, April 27, 2009.   The launch has gone surprisingly well without so much as a hiccup along the way.  I’ve got so much to talk about regarding my experience developing the application and the supporting infrastructure.  But I’ll save that for a later post and I’ll just keep this post about the service itself.

If you’re curious about what Twitter is, check it out.  It’s a “microblogging” platform.  Participant members think of it just as bloggers do, but the brevity of the medium allows for much faster, more efficient means of communication and interaction.  It’s really one of those things in which the experience cannot  be explained but must be experienced to truly be understood.  As you can see by the scarcity of my own blog posts, I am not one to take alot of time updating my blog.  But I am constantly on Twitter, giving my 140 characters worth.

With the new service, Jason and I have created, now us Guam tweeters can do it while on the go, too.

Whew.  It’s about 2am and I just got home about a half hour ago from my good friend Jason’s house.  Most every Friday evening, I swing by there after my Friday evening Bible study and Jas and I talk shop, life and everything else in between.  Jas came up with the crazy idea that our conversations are worthy of podcast distribution.  Well, who am I to argue with Guam’s uber-web guru?

This actually isn’t really a new idea.  Many years ago, Jas was quite the podcast generator.  We even got together once and did an episode together as we took a brand new BMW 325i for a test drive around Guam.

So we’ve decided to try this out again and we’re gonna try our best to put something out every week.  We’re both pretty busy and things always come up, but we’ll try our best get a show out as consistently as possible.  Tonight’s premiere episode featured a wide range of subjects, and that really is a good sampling of the kind of conversations Jas and I usually have when we get together.  From tech and web trends to music to sports, our sessions quite often go off on tangents and we can ramble on about all sorts of subjects.  Tonight, we surprisingly went on for about 55 minutes before we decided to call it a take and save some juice for next week.

Well if you’re interested, click on the link below to download this week’s episode.  You can also subscribe to the podcast feed, but for now it’s feeding off of Jas’ site.  I’ll get around to setting up a feed off of my server, so you can use that if you prefer.

Download this podcast (MP3) Subscribe to Jas’ Podcast (RSS Feed)

This past couple months, I was tasked by my church to identify the needs of our outdated auditorium PA system and bring us into this century in audio/video technology . . . without breaking the bank. Well, I’m not a professional sound stage engineer by any means. So what have I got going for myself? I’ve got experience as a car audio enthusiast, having done my own share of custom installs. I guess you can say that I am technically inclined. And finally and most importantly, I’ve got Google at my fingertips.

With those tools in hands, I set forth on a quest to design and install the most fitting sound and video system that our church needed. I’ve gotten some really uplifting comments from congregation members on what we’ve been able to do so far, but it’s by far still a work in progress.  If I was a neurotic planner like other people, I would have had the presence of mind to take some photos to use in this for visual reinforcement, but that wouldn’t have been very characteristic of me.  Instead, true to my form, I’ll try and get some shots of the finished setup posted later to help you get an idea of what I’m talking about.

Here were the needs in a nutshell.

1. Install a digital projector for displaying computer, powerpoint, and DVD output.
2. Relocate the mixer/sound/recording equipment from the weird stage left location to the back of the church house so whoever is on sound duty can better manage the sound.
3. Figure out how to fix the bad sounding praise and worship band. (Seriously, it’s a sound staging issue. The band is actually really good.)
4. Upgrade the recording equipment so we could offer sermon recordings in CD format. (Right now, we only offer cassette format.)

It’s been quite a learning experience for me. The existing PA equipment, although several years old, are reasonably good equipment that are professional grade. The core of the system is a Mackie 1402-VLZ Pro mixer that in my opinion sends a very clean signal to the loudspeakers.  The loudspeakers being a pair of JBL Eon15 self-powered speakers.  They’re the first generation of this model and are starting to show signs of age, but still provide good quality sound reinforcement.

In order of priority, my first obstacle was to figure out how to wire the equipment that would be relocated to the back of the church.  Through God’s grace, I was able to network with Doug Gregson through Jeff at Faith Presbyterian Church in Mangilao.  I believe Doug works with Trans World Radio and he helped Faith Presbyterian Church set up the A/V system in their church.  He was able to direct me to a great site for digital wiring and equipment.  I purchased a VGA extender that allowed me to run a computer source VGA signal over Cat5 cable.   For the video signal from the DVD player, I ran a simple RG11 cable with adapters on each end to RCA plugs.  Wiring the digital projector . . . check!!  The projector itself, an EIKI LC-XB42, was ceiling mounted by a universal mount purchased by Pastor Andrew at www.kingdom.com.

The next task was to get the mic and instrument signals from the stage to the mixer and the mixer output back to the on-stage loudspeakers.  To do this, I purchased a ProCo audio snake from http://www.sweetwater.com.  The guys at Sweetwater are really helpful and their prices are some of the lowest you can find.  The audio snake made the install really easy, clean and professional.  Unfortunately, I might have made the mistake of ordering too small of a snake.  I should have allowed for system growth, but the snake has enough channels to handle the 14 channel mixer, so I figured that if we out grow the mixer, then we could just upgrade the cabling as well.  To be frank, with the size if the church, adding anymore sound sources might be overkill.

Now that everything was installed, I had to get all the equipment connected to the mixer so I could have complete control of the sound stage.  Here’s where I learned the hard lesson of audio signal impedance.  This is where the guys at American Music here in Guam come in.  I wish I had gotten the name of the young guy behind the counter that introduced me to the Radial ProDI Passive Direct box.  His explanation of the importance of matching audio signal impedance between instruments and equipment led me to understand what I was faced with when I couldn’t seem to get the guitar, bass and keyboard to jack in to the mixer just right.

With his help, I finally understood that the XLR mic inputs on our mixer expects a very low impedance “mic” signal such as that which comes out of a microphone.  The signal that comes out of a guitar’s jack or a computer’s headphone jack is a high impedance “line out” signal.  Just rigging an adapter in line won’t do the trick for you there.  The DI boxes were expensive, but they are of good quality and really provide the best signal to the mixer at just the right impedance that the mixer wants.

With that knowledge, I was also able to understand that some of the channels of the mixer do allow for a high impedance (or High-Z) signal.  So those channels ended up being where I plugged in the Electronic Keyboard, PC, DVD, and Tape Deck.  Once I had those equipment all connected, I had everything wired up to the mixer and theoretically, full control of the sound stage for the church.

Now, with a properly wired mixer at my disposal, I now set forth in tackling my next obstacle – make everyone sound better.  This step is where I’m at right now and is really a work in progress.  First off, I’m not a sound manager by profession in the least, so I am learning all about acoustics and sound physics as I go along.  Second, I am not a musician either, so I am also learning what each musician/singer’s needs are as I go along as well.

My first attempt to balance everything out, I forced all the players to lower their on-stage amps and keyboard speakers to help balance out the sound coming out to the audience.  Suddenly, the music started to sound really out of synch and all the musicians and singers kept getting lost and off tempo.  The band members started explaining to me that they can’t hear themselves play and are getting lost.  Normally, they would be able to follow each other because they each set the volume of their amp or instrument at the level that was comfortable for them to hear themselves over the other instruments.  As for the singers, they can’t even hear themselves, so with the band getting lost, they just don’t know what to do.  Thus started my lesson in the importance of stage monitoring.  I never realized that this aspect of live sound can get so complicated.  A little research showed that even in some large venues, there’s even a dedicated stage monitor mixing board with a dedicated sound technician managing each performer’s monitor mix.  Of course, this is nowhere near the level that my application is, but it gives you a perspective as to the importance of a good balanced stage monitor mix.

Now I’m faced with trying to get a good balanced signal to all the players and singers on the stage without overwhelming the first two rows of church members with the stage sound bleeding off to mix with the loudspeakers.  This is especially a problem for our church because the pulpit is quite small and the front row is very close to it.  As much time and effort as I have put into this so far, I think this is the biggest challenge.  I need to find the right balance of all the needs because each requirement seems to be contraindicative to every other need.

There are so many questions now without obvious answers.  Do I get stage monitors and set them up?  If I do, where will I put them because the stage is so small?  How loud will the stage now be with stage monitors, guitar amps and the keyboard with its own speakers.  How do I create a separate mix for the stage monitors?  Do I need to get another mixer?

I’ll do a follow up post when I’ve gotten closer to getting that right balance that satisfies all the needs of our church’s sound staging.

I leave you with a final thanks and praise to God for providing for the needs of the church as He has.  He has provided me with this great opportunity to do what I really enjoy doing all while allowing me to serve Him through the gifts He has provided me.  And another plus for me . . . being able to spend time in fellowship with all the praise and worship band members.  I’ve been learning alot of cool stuff from all the praise team and their input into the setup of the sound system has been invaluable.

This is going out to AJ Rafael.  He’s a struggling musician attending school and representing on YouTube.  I discovered him earlier this year through his creative video “Tribute to 4-chord songs”.  He has a good sound to his voice and his piano skills are awesome.  He’s uploaded countless great clips to YouTube and it’s fun watching him progress as a musician.

So anyway, about a month ago, he posted a call for help asking for donations to help him get out to a concert in California.  Wanting to help him out, I was one of many youtubers that sent donations for his cause.  Not surprisingly, he raised enough money very fast.  I think it might have been in less than 24 hours, but I can’t be sure.

As a show of appreciation, he used the donation information for a raffle to give away a few CDs and t-shirts.  He posted the video of him and his roomies doing the drawing.  It was kinda cheezy, but it was a nice gesture that he did a shout out to ALL the donators (sp?).

The best part for me . . . right about 6:00 when his roommate pulls my ticket. The hilarity starts because he has no idea what GU stands for. AJ figures it stands for Guam, but can’t contain himself and walks off camera. Then his roomie Pablo butchers Dededo, the name of the city that I’m from.  But then Pablo saves the day and gets my name perfect!!! Who woulda’ thought? GREAT SAVE, PABLO!!!

So goes my first exposure on YouTube.

Keep up the great work, AJ and keep reaching for the stars.  . . . and remember through it all, do it all for the glory of God.

Thanksgiving afternoon for me was spent playing some friendly games of softball and fellowship with the members of my church and the PIBC Guam students.  Now, I can’t for the life of me remember the last time I put my hands on a softball bat, but I think I can safely say that it was sometime during my formative middle school years.  Those who know me can attest that I really am a one-sport person, that sport being volleyball.  Sure, I ran some track and cross-country in high school, but only because I wanted the letter and pins to go on my letterman’s jacket.  But softball or baseball was never something that interested me.

The same cannot be said about Palauans in general.  Baseball and softball are the most popular sports in Palau, with baseball being the only sport with an organized seasonal league.  The average Palauan has at least played softball at an organized level some time or another in their life.

The same cannot be said about me.  So I come upon our church’s Thanksgiving plans knowing this, but nevertheless, I tried to be a sport and join in the fun.  Hey, this is all for fellowship, fun and to get some good old-fashioned exercise while we’re at it, right?

Well, even so.  I can’t help feeling how emabarrased the rest of my congregation felt for me that afternoon.  I mean, who strikes out playing softball?  Your probably saying I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.  I’m not.  Try striking out twice, a grounder out, and barely eeking out a base run on four at-bats.  And this is in the midst of guys old enough to be my father smashing doubles and triples, making double plays in the field and throwing out runners at home from the outfield.  The last pitch of the day for the guys games, Deacon Gilbert nailed a line drive over third base AND the left fielder almost getting it out of the park, bringing in three runners sealing our teams victory.

And don’t even get me started on the women.  These girls can play.  Mailene was pitching for her team and she was grabbing line drives and grounders that I would have run away from.  Norma Uehara plays a mean second base.  She executed two double plays and even tagged out one of the guys by nailing him as he was coming into second base.

Overall it was an awesome day and everyone had a great time.  The PIBC students started off slow, but once they got warmed up, they did their school proud.  But I do have to say, the girls of PIBC are way better at softball than the guys.  Come on guys, you gotta step it up.

I wish I had brought a camera.  There were definitely some Kodak moments.  But with all the fun, I’m sure that this won’t be the last time we do this.  So I’ll definitely make sure to bring my camera next time.

Your sitting in your car stopped at an intersection waiting for your light to turn green.  Across from you is one of Guam’s proud men in blue sitting in his cruiser waiting for the same.  You see the light for the other street turn yellow.  As you patiently begin to prepare for your turn to go through the intersection, you watch the adjacent light turn red.  Much to your amazement, you see two cars in the adjacent flow of traffic zip through the intersection as if the red light was a warning for motorists to hurry on through before any other cars get a chance to come barrelling through the intersection.  You look at the police car across the intersection thinking to yourself, “Go get ‘im, Smokey!”  But alas, you slouch back in disappointment as the officer sits there in his cruiser, oblivious to the blatant moving violations that just took place.  Deflated, you say to yourself, “ONLY ON GUAM!!”

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Guam surely can recognize this familiar phrase.  It’s a mantra that  locals use in reference to many of the unusual oddities that are unique to our quaint little island.  On rare occasion, one would use it in a positive sense, like . . . um . . . Wow!! For the life of me, I can’t think of a good positive example right now.  But anyway, coming back to my point, it is usually used in a negative connotation and pokes fun at how here in Guam, you could get away with things that you couldn’t get away with anywhere else, just because people around here accept it as normal practice.

But I digress.  My thoughts for today are actually about the phrase itself – “ONLY ON GUAM”.  I find it humourously coincidental that “only on Guam” would you even say the phrase “only on Guam.”  (I would have used ironic instead of coincidental, but extensive research into the proper usage of the word irony has only left me confused as to whether this would be an acceptable use of the word.)  By anyone else’s standards, we would say “Only IN Guam.” But we Guamanians say “on Guam” in every place that anywhere else, any other english speaking person would say “in Guam”.  But mind you, we only use it when referring to being in Guam, nowhere else.  Try it for yourself.  Would you say, “I live on California?” or “My cousin has been on Hawaii since last year.” Even our nearby cousins don’t say, “I’ll be on Saipan for the next two weeks.”  Isn’t that weird?

I’ve brought this up to many people who live here and I’ve always gotten the same kind of reactions – “I never realized that.”; “You’re right!  Why do we say that?”; “We’re not the only one’s who say it that way.  What about . . . hmm.  I guess your right.”  Even people that have moved to Guam from other places have obtusely adopted this Guam-speak without even realizing it.  Now keep in mind that I am not saying that this is improper english, as essentially, the phrase is correct.  Being that Guam is an island, you literally would be considered on Guam or off Guam.  I just find it odd that “only on Guam” do we make that distinction.

Now I’ve brought this point up to several people, both local home-grown and of foreign origin.  And like I said, many had never put much thought into it and hardly even realized that Guamanians make that odd differentiation.  Which leads me to wonder if my strange fascination with this grammatical anomaly is a healthy thing.  Nevertheless, when I go on to my next question and ask why they think that we say it that way, I usually just a get a dumbfounded look and some incoherent grunt as an answer.

Of the few discernable conversations that I have had about this, I have come up with at least two theories to the origin of saying “ON GUAM”.  The first has to do with the fact that a very common term used here in Guam is that a person can be considered to be off-island when they are outside of Guam.  This term is commonly used when describing a period of time in which a person normally residing in Guam would be away from Guam.  Comparable statements used by non-Guamanians would be out of state, or out of town.  The term off-island seems very logical and actually makes for a convenient term for referring to travel abroad away from Guam.  Now the opposite of that, when a person returns or is not absent from Guam, would logically be called being on-island.  Could this unique terminology used by locals living in Guam have spawned the odd usage of the term on Guam?

The second theory doesn’t have much to support it.  But I remember a particual song from my youth.  I don’t even remember who it was made popular by. . . maybe Jimmy Dee, or maybe I remember a Jesse Bias remake.  But what I do remember is there is a lyric somewhere in the song that goes something like “On the island of Guam . . . where the coconuts grow . . .”  That’s all I can remember about the song so if anyone recognizes it, please give me a hint.  It’s a well known local song sung by a well known local artist.  I’m just really bad about remembering song titles and artists. (My friend Jas can attest to that.)  But again, I digress.  Could it be that this song had such an influence on local slang and conversation that the phrase “On the island of Guam” became the “proper” way to refer to being here in Guam?  I know, it’s a weak theory, but it seems like a cool backstory, so I thought I’d at least bring it up.

Well, whatever the origin of the phrase; and despite my concession that it is NOT improper grammer, I have committed myself to make it my own personal crusade to campaign to the people of Guam to rise up from the cobbled ruins of the past.  We are not inhabitants living on top of some tiny little landform which we cannot even refer to as a place that we live “in”.  Okay, maybe Guam is a tiny little rock in a vast expanse of ocean.  But let’s not remind ourselves everytime we make reference to the place we call home.  Say it with me, “ONLY IN GUAM!! ONLY IN GUAM!! ONLY IN GUAM!!”

I just finished reading a really great post by my good friend Jason.  My friend has been a forerunner in the web landscape of our little island of Guam for the past . . . I don’t know eight years or so.  He’s also established himself as one of Guam’s foremost prognosticators (for lack of a better word) in the adoption and success of various technologies, consumer electronic goodies and pretty much everything nerdy, er, tech related in Guam.

Talk about spot on.  He’s really got his finger on the pulse of Guam’s tech industry, or lack of therein.  People in Guam have always known that our island has been slow to adopt anything modern.  It comes with the territory (no pun intended).  We’re a small rock in the middle of the largest ocean on this Earth with a population of some 100,000 or so.  What else can you expect, right?

But hey, we’re a territory of the world’s largest superpower!!  We’ve got, not one, but TWO U.S. military bases here.  That makes us a strategic military resource to our mother country.  We’ve also got this HUGE multi-billion dollar tourism industry that is a significant market segment of the outbound tourist traffic from Japan – the country with the world’s largest number of tourist based outbound travel.  And why wouldn’t we.  Our island’s a beautiful island paradise and is US soil, so when you’re here, you can feel confident that you are in a safe place.

Therein lies Guam’s identity conundrum.  Jason did a great job of giving Guam’s tech report card.  Now here’s my shot at playing parent-teacher conference and explaining why Guam’s such a disappoint to so many.  Especially many of whom choose to call Guam their home.

You see, no matter what we think of Guam, because of geographic logistics, we will always be just like the little rural town of Sleepy, Iowa (sorry that’s a fictituos stereotypical town, not real) that doesn’t have a metropolis within 1,000 miles of it.  Run by an overweight Sheriff and his cousin the Judge; with a Mayor who keeps getting elected because his wife makes the best apple pie.

We see it portrayed all the time on TV, but we won’t admit that we aren’t that much different.  Everyone in Guam knows everyone else and when you do meet someone for the first time, you’re guaranteed to run into them again sometime in the future.  The same people or their people and their friends run the government.  The big businesses in Guam are all owned by an elite few.  Whenever a big company, i.e. K Mart, Home Depot, come in, everyone gets excited but there’s always those complaining that they’re killing the local business owners.  In fact, how many times has someone tried to use the “Support local businesses” marketing tactic on you?

Despite our true grass roots and small island heritage, everyone watches MTV and Friends and tries to make Guam the big city metropolis that it isn’t.  Okay, we’re lucky.  We’ve got tourism.  So that supports having a Sandcastle (for those wondering, it’s a Vegas style production house), and some nice cappuccino shops and a couple fancy discotheques.  And us local folk get to take advantage of those nice amenities.  Even with a  local discount because we can’t really afford to pay what it really costs to keep them running.

On top of that, because we have tourism and a military presence, we’ve always got big business and sophisticated city folk coming here all the time with their fancy ideas and cool clothes and us island folk get all jealous and want the same thing.  Unfortunately, we aren’t really that well edumacated and we’re really just a bunch of fisherman and farmers.

Now with that as a backdrop, let’s add on the fact that again we’re a small population on a tiny rock in the middle of the Pacific where it costs more to ship an apple here than it does to grow it.  Can we really expect to ever reap in the modern luxuries that our counterparts in New York City and Hollywood do?  Well, its a motivation that’s commendable.  We should stay positive and strive to achieve greatness.  But this is my way of saying – Keep your feet on the ground as you reach for the sky.  (Before anyone cries foul, I AM paraphrasing the great Casey Kasem.)

Well, my blog editor is telling me I’m well on my way to a 1,000 word essay, so I’m gonna cut it here.  Until next time, keep on keepin’ on.

I’ve been away for a long time and I apologize to all you fans out there who’ve been eagerly anticipating my newest post. Ha!  Who am I kidding?  The only one that’s been waiting for my next post is me.

Anyway, as you can see to the immediate right, I’ve finally tried to play around with adding some widgets to my blog page.  Albeit, these are so rudimentary and basic that I’m sure no one is impressed, it’s just a feat that I’ve gotten around to trying this out.  So to Jason at KUAM, thanks for the news widget  And to Facebook, thanks as well.

I’ve also decided that I prefer this theme over the drab earthy one I was using before, even though the old one has the nice island and beach images.  This cool blue color is just more relaxing and more my style.  I hope you all enjoy the new look.

I must say that all the buzz about Google’s release of Chrome, their new browser offering, is definitely well founded.  It’s no wonder that when the company with one of the largest and arguably,most influencial presences on the web announced that they are releasing their version of the desktop browser, everyone stopped to take a look.  What is amazing is that Google has once again proven that someone in their organization apparently knows what they’re doing because it seems that once again, they’ve just simply done it right.

It’s no secret that google is the largest and most popular search engine on the web today.  It would seem, at least at this early stage in the game for their browser, that they are well on their way to have the best browser out there, too.

So now you’re probably thinking, why am I comparing Chrome to Firefox and not the other browsers.  Well, that’s because you have to consider the distribution channels of browsers before you can compare them and their popularity.  Looking at it that way, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is in a different league than the other guys like Firefox, Opera and the like.  In a similar fashion, Safari can’t be compared because it ships with Apple’s OS X.

Which leads me to the question of:  For those browsers designed to appeal to the more demanding surfer, can the reigning champion, Firefox stand up to the new challenger?  This is the market where product performance really counts.  Okay, Firefox has the advantage of coming bundled with many Linux distros, but most people who will use a Linux distro would be inclined to use a preferred browser anyway, whether it come bundled with their favorite OS or need to be downloaded, untarred, compiled, installed, programmed, reverse engineered, or whatever it takes to get the most of their computing/browsing experience.

So let’s take score at this point.  What are Firefox’s strengths?  It’s familiar, of course.  It plays well with industry accepted standards.  It’s very customizable.  I think that’s where Firefox is a big winner.  The Firefox add-ons and themes makes it the most versatile offering out there.  Everything from embedded FTP clients to web page screen grabbers, there are so many tools out there that have been made possible through Firefox’s approach to plug-in development.  And I think that’s a HUGE plus in favor of the reigning champ.

Now what’s the challenger touting?  Chrome is just plain fast.  Again, Google shows their understanding of what users are looking for.  No frills, or bells and whistles, here.  A minimalistic approach to one thing.  Give the user what he needs fast and easy.  The browser doesn’t even have the now famous search bar.  Google just said, “Use the address bar.”  Wasn’t that simple enough?  Firefox 3 does that, yes.  But there’s still that search bar that takes up precious sreen real estate – another big complaint from the demanding web surfer.  But back to how fast Chrome is.  Try it out a few times and you’ll be amazed at how different of an experience it is surfing with Chrome.

So only time will tell now, can Firefox keep the new kid, Chrome under control?  Or will Google once again prove that their business model works better than anyone else’s.  At least when it comes to anything web.