The Simpson Blog

I decided to make a cake earlier this month in honor of Amanda's birthday. It didn't turn out too badly. It tasted even better than it looked.

My work life is about to take a big swerve. After five years anchoring the afternoon news, they're canceling the afternoon news. Yup, after about 5,000 newscasts, management is making some programming changes, and my show is one that's being retooled. Well, removed. The station's going in a 'talk' direction rather than an 'all-news' direction. (In radio-industry jargon, they're going for TSL vs. Cume due to market-size conditions .) As a result, I'm being reassigned to be the senior daytime reporter. Now, reporting is something I've done before. I did it for years in Toronto, and those who know me keep telling me how great I was at it. But, I'll admit I'm intimidated by the prospect. I've become used to set hours, working indoors, editorial autonomy and the routine of building and delivering the news. It's both an opportunity and a perceived crisis for me -- I think there's a word for it in Japanese. Crisitunity? In

We recently celebrated our first wedding anniversary. Really, it doesn't seem like that long ago that our house was full of friends and family, and we walked down the aisle surrounded by so many wonderful people. It was such an excellent day. We're bad newlyweds in one respect -- we've yet to order the hard-copy prints that came with our photography package. I hope the photographer doesn't hate us! The old wedding web site, scottandamanda.ca, ought to be not working now. Our subscription ran out. Many thanks to Amanda for putting so much info on there. To mark the occasion of our one year of weddingness, we thawed out the top tier of the wedding cake and ate it. Y'know what? It was a lot better than we expected! And although my plan was to go out somewhere for a full turkey-tastic Thanksgiving dinner, we ended up going to Swiss Chalet instead. Oh, my. Lovely. They're pushing their ribs now, offering up a deal with a half-rack of ribs and a free quarte

Y'allo all. Quiet Sunday afternoon 'round the Big Ass Superpad. I've been spending a lot of my spare time lately finishing off the record I've been working on for ... gosh, for the past ten years. The last time I put out a CD, other than the big Magic 8 Ball live compilation , was 2000. So I have ten years' worth of recordings on there. After building the new studio PC, nicknamed ... nicknamed ... what the hell did I call this machine ... Ah yeah, Big Jim. Anyway, my old standby studio software, Adobe Audition 1.5, just wasn't cutting it. It got slower as the computer got faster. So, I switched this summer to Reaper . Reaper is an almost-free, full-featured digital audio workstation software package that is lightyears beyond what Audition was capable of. And it's taken my recording abilities to a whole new level. I've reworked some stuff I had sitting in wait for the new record, and laid down some new tracks that sound like the best stuff I