Today I have been working hard on the WCGAPS website.  I decided to scrap the old site and do a completely new site.  I plan to reuse most of the copy but redoing the entire structure of the site to hopefully be much easier for everyone to use.  I am also enabling comments all over the site so we can start getting everyones feedback on what we do and what we think.   So if there is anything that you want to see on our site let me know and I will do my best to get that going.   Thanks all have fun!

Things have been really busy lately at WCGAPS and also in my personal life so I have been seriously slacking in my blogging duties.  I am trying to get back into this so bear with me a tad.

So WCGAPS has been really busy working on a ton of things.  We are trying to bring some new events to people.  Trying to streamline some of our processes. We are also working on possibly getting a second investigation team started so that we can cover more of these investigation requests we keep getting.  We have so many investigation requests that we have to turn people away lately and that is not what we want to be doing.  We have added a few new members lately, this week will be their first meeting so that is exciting.  We are booked up for the next few months doing some investigations in AZ, CA, and NM.  All of this is cool and exciting.

So let me know if you want me to answer any questions that you may have.  You can email me at Shaun (at) wcgaps.com if you have any question for me and I will be happy to answer those.

More info to come soon.  Have fun for now.

Today I am at Phoenix word camp.  This was all started by my good friend and our website developer Chuck Reynolds.  It is a way for me to learn more about how to make our website work for us and more importantly how I can learn to blog better.  My hope is to learn a ton here and then finish working up the new plan for our website.

Thanks.

Well things have been going well for the Ghost Group.  We have had a few interviews and photo shoots recently and have a few more interviews and one more photo shoot this week.  It is certainly interesting to get used to that attention.  It is good for the group but with so much going on in my life right now, I do wish i could push some of it off for a few months.

After all the interviews and what not this week, we have a ghost hunt event at the Gilbert Historical Museum and that will be fun.  I am going to miss my sons second time trick or treating and that has me sad but it should be a good night in Gilbert.  I may try and convince my wife and son to come with me that night but we will see.

Well I am off to bed after a very long weekend.

Shaun

Hello.  So one thing you all may not know about me is that I have always been a sound guy.  My online gaming nickname is usually Hifiguy if that tells you anything.  A long time ago, I used to be heavily involved in doing live sound for theater and other live events.  After doing that for a while I got into HiFi audio sales and installations doing huge theater systems for people.  So needless to say I have always had a thing for audio equipment.

Since i started in this group I have always pushed us to have better and better audio equipment. A while back I did a lot of reserch and determined that the zoom h2 was the best devices for us to use from a bang for the buck standpoint as well as just audio quality.  Lately I have been wanting to step up our audio gear.  With the addition of one of our newer members Tom, we have been using his soundboard to place microphones around during investigations and that has really been a wonderful new advantage for us in audio.  With this sort of system we can quickly and easily listen to audio around the entire building or investigation area all at the same time to rule out different questionable audio clips.  This has really made things so much easier.  The downsides are that this device stores audio on its internal hard drive and it can only record 4 channels at a time.

Even before Tom came on board I have been looking hard for better audio equipment that we can use in this manner and for the longest time i have not been able to find anything that really fits what we need with a good price point.  I had found quite a few devices but most of them were severe overkill and very expensive.  Recently I found a new device that I think we are going to buy as soon as we can raise some money to do so.  The device is the zoom audio R16 seen here on Amazon.  It will allow us to record 8 channels at one time and can link two R16’s together so that we can record 16 channels at the same time.  This is what I am wanting to do so that we can have 2 mics at each camera from our dvr system.  The only issue I see is that we want to try and go to a 16 channel DVR system and when we do that I will want even more audio recording devices but That should be ok, It will just take forever to set up lol.

If anyone has any other suggestion for audio devices that you think I should look at, please let me know.  The requirements for me are to record 16 channels at minimum, in a digital way so that we can review the audio inside of the computers in adobe audition or adobe sound booth (for us mac people).  I don’t care about eq’s at all since i want all audio coming in as natural as possible.  I would want the ability to adjust the volume and gain of the mic just to be sure I am capturing as much audio as possible.  I look forward to your comments.

Shaun

So lately we have been trying to define some long term goals for the group as a whole and we have really been flushing out our thoughts and guidelines for ourselves.  We have always done our best to try and be as scientific as possible about every investigation, trying to always remain of a neutral opinion and only going by experiences that we have some sort of evidence based documentation of.  But, for me this has not been enough.  So after a long lunch chat with my father, who is a biologist and a true man of science, it occurred to me that what we have been doing all along is trying to use the standard scientific method to work towards coming up with some hypothesis concerning paranormal phenomenon.  We just haven’t really acknowledged exactly what process we were doing, where we were going,  and how we expected to get there. So now I am working on integrating the standard Scientific Method into everything that we do.  The other thing we are trying to do is start interfacing with experts in different fields of science so that we can more effectively do this baseline research on paranormal activity so that we can determine what or first hypothesis should be.

This is an exciting time for us and we are really busy lately.  I hope to have a good article written about how the scientfic Method can be applied to Paranormal Activity and Ghost Hunting soon.

Shaun

Hello all,

Well since I am trying to make Andy blog twice a week, I figure its only fair that I also blog here.  So this will be my thoughts and discussion on the world of paranormal investigating.  Hopefully you will all find me somewhat intresting.  Please comment on anything and everything.  I would love to hear from everyone.

Thanks,

Shaun