Happy 3rd Rezday to me and Kat

It's October 12 today, a gloomy and overcast Monday in Southern California, and I am sitting in The Bean Counter, which is also known as "that little coffee house across the street from me". While I do enjoy being over here, I am actually not here by choice on this occasion. The power company is doing maintenance work in my neighborhood, and they started a scheduled outage at about 9am today. The power should be out until about 4pm, so in order to do something other than stare at a blank (and dimly lit) wall, I ventured out of my shell and am here having some coffee and a croissant. Hey, things could be way worse.

So the reason for today's post is that today is the third rezday of both Kat and I. For those of you not familiar with Second Life terminology, a "rezday" is similar to a birthday, except it commemorates the day you first signed up in SL. It was October 12, 2006 when Kat and I simultaneously registered in Second Life, and so it remains a day to celebrate for us. Much like our real-life birthdays (which we also share on the same day, coincidentally), we tend not to make a very big deal out of it. However, today I happen to also have a pretty cool gig lined up: it's a solid hour of all-original music at Z's Music Club. So, we'll combine both things, and tonight at 7:00pm, I'll perform my own songs and celebrate three years of fun and good friends in SL.

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In other news, as I mentioned in my last post, we did indeed wrap up the album on Saturday, and today the final mix files will be on their way to my mastering engineer, Bill Plummer. Mastering is an audio science unto itself, and Bill is very good at what he does. In fact, not that I make this fact the be-all-end-all aspect of judging someone's talent, Bill's engineering skills have been recognized with a Grammy nomination (for BeBe Winans' album "Live and Up Close", in the "Best Contemporary Soul Gospel Album" category in 2003).

If you need some more resume-like items for Bill, he's been entrusted to mix artists including The Cure, Maroon 5, Carlos Santana, Diana Krall, Audioslave, Toni Braxton, Anita Baker, Beyoncé, Whitney Houston, Herbie Hancock, George Duke and many others. Trust me that I get a giant "I'm not worthy!" feel to know I'm having a guy of his caliber working with these little old Zak Claxton tracks.

As I mentioned, the final mixes will be shipped to Bill today. I'm not sure of the method of transfer, which is either via physical delivery or via upload of many large files. I really don't care; my focus is on the end result, and I am really looking forward to hearing the whole thing after Bill works his magic.