Arnie Carver

Working in the entertainment industry, I’ve had plenty of run ins with celebrities. I’m often asked “What is such and such like?” The truth is, in most cases, I don’t really know. When I run into someone famous, that usually means I’m working and don’t have much time to talk to anyone. Occasionally I do find myself in smalltalk with the rich and famous.

One of the more memorable times when I had a 2o or 30 minute conversation with Tim McGraw and not realizing who I was talking to. I really didn’t recognize him. He was a really cool, down to earth guy and just introduced himself as Tim. I had no idea he was Tim McGraw of country music fame until someone informed me later that evening.

More often than actual celeb’s, I come across people who say they are “somebody” and are not. They’re just trying to look good by dropping names.  It doesn’t take long to figure out the phonies. A few months ago a guy came into the club I was working, claiming to be the manager of Guns ‘n’ Roses and the band would be in soon. Ok, thats fine but you still have to pay for your drinks mister.

The latter is much more common.

A while back in a blog I wrote about playing Rock Band with my family. The main reason that game was so easy and fun for us is that everyone in my family is a musician. We all play multiple instruments and when we’re together you can be sure of an impromptu jam session. My parents living room looks more like a recording studio than a living space and it suits the whole family just fine. In fact, my mom and dad are always adding to the collection.

Last summer my dad and I went to an estate auction and saw an old Steinway grand piano for sale. We couldn’t resist buying it. My mom has always wanted a real grand piano and we thought it would make a great gift for her. We got it for dirt cheap because it was in really bad shape. The finish was shot, it was missing keys and of course way out of tune.

After we got it back to my house, I started looking for a local shop that could fix it up but to no avail. I looked online and found several places that could do the job. After getting quotes seeing past work from several companies, we decided to go with Lindeblad Piano Restoration.
It took about 3 months or so from the time we sent it off to get it back. When we finally did get it back, the results were absolutely amazing. It was perfectly restored to it’s previous glory. That old junk piano looked and sounded beautiful. I can’t remember the last time my mom was this happy and surprised. She never even knew we bought it because it was kept at my house until her birthday when I showed up with it.

I’m relatively new to blogging and it’s getting addicting. It’s a good way to relax and organize my thoughts. As a kid I was told that I should keep a journal but I never did. Now as an adult, owning my own business, keeping notes is absolutely imperative. At meetings and such, I always kept a legal pad handy. Now I don’t even need that because I can use the notepad on my cell phone. Usually I would get together afterwards with my partners and compare notes and share ideas. This requires us to all be available at the same place at the same time and that’s not always possible. After a recommendation from an Employee who blogs, my partners and I decided to give blogging a try. It has certainly helped us communicate on our own time.

Since then, I began reading other people’s blogs, they’re everywhere. I can find out just about anything that I want to know through blogs. One place I look often is at web-articles.info. This site has over has over 1,300 unique content articles and I can even get them on my phone through RSS feeds.  I find myself reading and communicating with my crew and others very easy through blogs. So why not blog?

Lats night at work, a worse case scenario happened again. I was setting up my equipment and my external hard drive would not power up. This is very bad because all of my music is stored on it.  It’s not the first time this has happened to me, actually it’s like the third time. The first was about 2 years ago, at work, in the middle of a shift. I lost everything, and it took me a week to reload all of my cd’s onto another drive.

I learned my lesson then, that technology sometimes fails. I now always have 3 external drives with my music library on them and carry 2 with me just in case. Seagate hard drives come with a 5 year warranty and they will replace the hardware but the data is lost. It will take several hours to transfer 400 gigabytes of music over to the new drive but it’s better than copying a few thousand cd’s over again.

To any other digital DJ’s out there, ALWAYS back your music up, you never know when a drive will fail.

As a professional DJ, much of my income comes from weddings and formal parties. Most of witch I have to be well dressed for. I’m not really big on tuxedos but I do like to wear a nice suit and tie. I tend to go with more dark and bold colors, that’s just the kind of guy I am. Light blue and white just doesn’t look good on me, plus that’s what so many other guys are wearing and I like to be different. As an entertainer, it helps to stand out from the crowd. The local mens wear stores rarely have anything that I like so I do most of my shopping online.

With the internet, you still have to sift through all the boring same old stuff but it’s easier to find something cool and different. Surfing through the net, I came across a site that has some truly Unique Cufflinks. The site, Tateossian.com has some really great stuff. They have some nice jewelry and accessories, but what really stood out were the silver king skull cufflinks. They are just what i was looking for. This site has some really great and unique designs. Head on over to tateossan.com and check ‘em out.