Electronic House "Best of 2008"

Just landed back in the Tahoe basin and unpacking the rig from the show I found our latest award. We received an award for our VideoGiants service at this years CEDIA expo. Pretty neato!

http://www.electronichouse.com/slideshow/products/4591/735

CEDIA 2008 Denverado!!!

This year we decided not plant the trailer on the show floor, this allowed us to use it for evening festivities around town. During the day I posted up across the street from the convention center as a base camp for HDGiants team. The crew spread out through the show floor supporting our hardware partners that were demonstating their use of our content and our HD store that is built into their media servers. We recieved very positive feedback from both our hardware partners and many dealers during the show. Much thanks to our partners for their patients in working through last minute tradeshow kinks and for their continued support and promotion of HD entertainment! You guys RULE!!! It was a great show and we are looking forward to planning our trip to Atlanta next year. Thinking about keeping the trailer out of the show floor again and setting up a base camp with other vendors. But we definitely need to add a few lawnchairs, cold beer and a grill into the mix next time though! Big thank you to Violet and crew at Tryst for providing such a great intimate space for our press event! Big thanks also to ADI for helping us promote our HD content and store at the Saturday evening event at Mile High Station, it was a great event for us, the Airstream has never had so many folks loungin on the mumfy mohair couch at one time! As always they threw a rockin'party with great food and awesome music! Towards the end of the show I was able to venture out to catch the tail end of STS9's colorado stop on their fall tour Saturday night at the Gothic theater at their official after party. Bassnectar showed up and played a super thumpin' set to get everyone movin'. David Murphy of STS9 sat in with another group for a fun set of grooves. STS9 played 1 night in Boulder and 2 nights out at Red Rocks Ampitheater. super sweet show and great way to finish off the last of three great years in Denver for CEDIA!

Happy Trails!

KurtB.

Time to get buffed

This summer I was able to do some maintenance on the Airstream while off the road. I tried my hand at polishing the aluminum shell to a mirror like finish. I used two tools, a makita variable speed angle grinder with a polishing pad and a Cyclo dual head random orbit polisher. It was quite the adventure! I started out tackling the project full on and quickly realized that no matter how "in shape" I am feeling this job was gonna kick my butt. After a few hours of very repetitive motion with the machines and polish my shoulders were already feeling the burn! Think Daniel San from Karate Kid but with power tools! I switched it up to hitting the trailer early in the am for a few hours and then in the evening until the sun went down. I went through all the advise I have received over the past few years and got down and dirty to bring the bubble to a fine shine! Overall the trailer looks alot better than it did before, however lot's of valuable knowledge was gained through the process and it will be perfected in the coming polishing sessions! Compunding proved to be the critical step. Once you start removing the swirl marks you can start to see the areas that you didn't go deep enough into with the compounding step. Once you are at this point however, it is very difficult to back track as you will be undoing the many hours you just spent removing swirlmarks, and your arms feel like they are going to fall off, yikes! Not an easy task and altough the trailer is only 23 feet long it begins to look like 123 feet long once you start sectioning it off into 2 foot by 2 foot squares (which is your workable space at any one given point in time)knowing you will need to pass the buffers over these spaces repeatedly no less than 3 times each, ususally more like 5 or 6 times! All this said the trailer looks amazing when it is buffed out and it was a great project but glad to be done and have the rig back on the road! The Cyclo tool is amazing at romoving the swirls and I highly reccomend using ti with the Nuvite polish. I compounded and cyclo'd with F7 and then used the S grade to finish. Good luck to anyone out there looking to polish your trailer and in the end it is soooo worth it.

In this picture I am coming out of the fourth turn and headed towards the finish line on the port side of the trailer, yayyy!

CES video update

Here's some links to video from CES 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFfcdPtbfGM&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHFDSstrLM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA6DJZubvlg&feature=related


The Airstream is taking a break at the office while I get my woodworking and hiking fix here in the Tahoe basin!

Kurt

CES 2008 MusicGiants

CES 2008 was great! The MusicGiants camp in the Grand lobby was buzzing with great energy thanks to all our hardware partners and artists that were part of our booth this year!



We had Qsonix, Azentek, Cutting Edge PC's, Logitech, Olive, Seagate, Request, CRU Data Port, Envive, D-Tools, Fuze, Russound and Toshiba in and around the booth. Everyone was showing off their latest gear and highlighting the MusicGiants HD content and our HD store integration into their products.


It was great to have a collective of CEDIA companies all there to represent! I witnessed several consumers walking past commenting on the gear displayed around our booth and how it was all very high end quality product! Good to see and hear from the general consumers out there and not just those that frequent the CEDIA and EHX gatherings!



There was no shortage of talent in the booth this year from both the hardware partners and the artists that came to help us promote HD Entertainment! We were very exited to have Lily, Shameus, and Leon Patillo(formerly of Santana) return this year again to CES and perform on the MusicGiants/Universal stage. We had some new artists enter into the CES Mix and rock the Grand Lobby(85 decibels, maybe a little over, rockin' it!) Soulfege came from both coasts of the US and put down some great beats to get the crowd dancin'. Not many other booths at CES had attendees busting out sweet dance moves i'll bet!!! Mistah FAB came down from San Fran to rap a few songs and did some serious freestyling with guidance from Lily on topics like ice cream and pictures!

Ben Jelen was out from New York and sang some great songs from his new album ex-sensitive, oh by the way you can buy it here in our store, http://mgn.musicgiants.com/Albums.aspx?ARTIST=26433. I was not around to see Rue Melo for her sets, however everyone was talking about it when I returned to the booth. It sounds like everyone was pretty pumped on her performance.

You can find all the artists that performed in our booth on our events page at http://www.musicgiants.com/. There are free sample downloads form each artist also. Big thanks to Universal for helping pull together the promo gear for the stage!

Roadside to CEDIA

Back in the rig after some time off the road back in Tahoe. I am now in Boulder getting ready to finish the tradeshow trek to Denver and CEDIA. It is good to be back in Colorado! Took a break from the drive today and Annabelle and I hiked up a peak along the trail. Rocky Mountain "Hi", Colorado! Hello you wonderful you! Lovin' it!

KurtB.

Computers on the go go go!!!

Sometimes I find myself checking weather or maybe watching the Simpsons while sitting in traffic on the 405 or other urban parking lots that resemble freeways. It seems like on each trip out across the landscape I am seeing more and more LCD screens illuminating from the tinted glass of many many vehicles. I remember when our Excursion was outfitted with it's screens back in 2000 it was still a pretty rare sight. Now the screens are so big you can yell at the contestant when they buy a vowel when they clearly should be able to solve the puzzle, and this is on the screen two cars ahead! It is hard to imagine where it is all headed but then you go to SEMA or you watch Pimp my ride and get the itch to compucate your ride! I have to admit that it is hard to imagine navigating some of the galaxies that I have been in without the GPS system that I have onboard. I definitely would have higher blood pressure and would have potentially run something over along the way if I had to contend with a map blocking the view while piloting the MusicGiants Vessel. There aren't a whole lot of places where you can take a time out to map out your travel in todays roadway system(this is valid when traffic is moving of course), with speed limits rising and cars getting faster and faster your attention to the road ahead is increasingly important. I heard a report today that they are creating a law to stop School Bus drivers from cellphone use while driving the busses, makes sense! Where do you draw the line though?

The next big thing? What is next you say? Check out the new units from Azentek if you haven't had the chance. Here's a link 4 ya http://www.azentek.com/webpages/atlas.html.
It's gonna get a little nutty inside our cars quickly, watch and learn!

Peace,
Kurt