Holy shit, we're packed and nobody is even here yet.

There's gonna be a bunch of white space in this article, click read more below.

                                        

                                              

                                                       

                                                                                 

                                                                                        

                                                                                           

                                                                                          

So far there's only one reservation for a bachelorette party. So far it's been a nice week. Last night we stayed open till our normal closing, and it was a very nice, intimate between 4 or so regulars, and a new guy named Sean. The evening ran as clockwork as expected.

Don't know what to expect for tonight other than the group that's coming in. Usually they bring inflateable penis's, or other weird stuff. Bachelorette parties are always fun.

KARAOKE IS HARDCORE!!!
--toq

So far, it's a rotation of 1 (Josef G). He's singing, but there's nothing cued up after him.

Maybe I'll get to go home early tonight!

--toq

I posted this topic in Yelp talk..

"If songs sung in a karaoke bar truly possessed the power to persuade, what song would you sing to your date.. or, uhm, other person of interest?" 

...and got the following feedback.

Can you think of other suggestions? 

Just got a report in from Tal,

There's some 49'ers NFL players down at the 7b right at this moment. Don't know who these two guys are but they're huge.

The regulars know the kind of BS we're up against every night with aliases and "Joe and Bob" type entries. I say "we" figuratively because I sort of see us in this together. They get ticked off folks cheat rotation, and I get flack from regulars and non regulars about the same people goin on stage over and over because they cheated the rules.

Before anyone flips out, I implore you, google karaoke rotation. I know there's a lot of noobs that don't know what it is, so please, look it up.

The weakness with all rotation schemes in the past has been that folks could cheat. It doesn't matter if it's a human with a stack of tickets, or terminals like ours. People can fake name, alias, bob/joe thier names all day long. The human might have a chance if they're personally taking the tickets and entering them, but the terminals don't have any chance at all. As of late, i've grown pretty weary of it at the 7b, wildly striking out at any rulebreakers by deleting thier songs.

Saturday.. I noticed the sign.. offering air-conditioned Obon viewing on the 7B door.. and walked in to berate Toq.. 'bout how Obon was *all about* Buddhist rememberance of the dead in the full heat of summer ... and blah, blah-de-blah.. then I thought of the strawberry shortcake, and chicken teriyaki, and Kirin beer, and corn-on-the-cob, and rootbeer floats being offered for sale at the temple, and the long lines outside at the Sno-cone window of the manju shop around the corner.. and had to concede .. that yeah, mebe a celebration a little about the dead.. and mebe a few other things too.  So yeah.. you might even say the 'Boo provided a little community service.. a little air-conditioned relief in a darkened bar for those dancers who arrived early in full kimono dress .. a place to set themselves before the street dance started later in the evening.

So once again it's Obon time in jtown.  The last few years have been rocky trying to get a stable feed of the event to viewers worldwide as well as businesses along the strip.

Year one I tried to run it from an underpowered laptop on underpowered wifi.

Year two the son of the owner of Shishedo caught me on thier roof.  It was an honest mistake (the owner of the connected building said cool, and I thought the Shishedo roof was a part of it), but despite my plea of "Hey, i'm doing this out of the goodness of my heart for jtown", we had a heated exchange of colorful metaphors.

Year 3...

Matt D said to me the other night "Toq that would be cool if you could live stream it."  My AOL contacts asked me to do the same.  I told Matt of my past problems.  He pointed out he had a rooftop with a semi clear line of sight to 5th street, and could provide upstream bandwidth.  After borrowing a fast laptop from Izzy, I took the booth cam, loaded it up on a tripod, and set everything up on Matts roof.

PD is an acronym for Pure Data, it's a graphical audio processing and programming enviroment. 

Ever since we started doing camera fades on the video, i've been using PD at the 7b. Our video mixing software mxwendler supports a network protocol called OSC (open sound control) which PD supports very well.  So I use PD to read the position of the MIDI crossfader, then send the position over OSC to mxwendler.