Today’s er… Monday link-of-the-day is for those of you who want further illumination on the shallowness of pop culture:
(My favourite is Dog Welder.)
Today’s er… Monday link-of-the-day is for those of you who want further illumination on the shallowness of pop culture:
(My favourite is Dog Welder.)
Actually, I went to bed early; four days of snowboarding had caught up with me. Deb and Dennis went over to Stacey and Randy’s place for the traditional get together.
Happy New Years everyone.
… hanging out in Ironforge. 🙂
(First use of “Force of Nature”)
Dennis is doing snowboarding TA training this week. He was at the top of the hill for his third run of the day, putting on his board, when the binding came apart in his hand. Yikes! Good thing he wasn’t riding at the time.
Then he walks back down the hill with his instructor, and half way down the hill he sees his cousin (Tim) sitting in the snow, holding his hand and crying. It turns out he’s broken his wrist. Double yikes! He’s at CHEO getting it set as I write this.
Let’s hope the rest of the season is less eventful.
Update: Apparently it was a double break. The poor guy :-(. (I’m going to have to apologize to Stacey. Based on Dennis’ description, I downplayed the seriousness of it when I talked to her.)
I unfortunately couldn’t convince her to go for a MacBook Pro, so I ended up getting her a Dell: 2GHz Core2Duo, 2Gig RAM, 160Gig drive, ATI X1400 grapics (256Meg), 6 hour battery. It really is a pretty nice machine. My task for the day is to move over everything she cares about from her old one. So far, I’ve moved her favourites, her email and address book, and her iTunes library. Now it gets more subtle…
I already had a library of movies that I had ripped — yes, from my own DVDs — to watch on my LifeDrive, so I just dropped them all into VisualHub and told it to convert them for use on the iPod; 12 hours and 20 Gig later, I’m all set. The screen is small, but it’s perfectly acceptable for my use.
… as usual — games for both the PC and 360, a wireless 360 controller, a new snow skate, a marshmallow gun,… — but the gift he liked the best was a $2 rubber tube that you blow into to make farting noise. sigh.
We had Christmas day dinner (mid-day meal) at my parents place.
Excellent use of turkey. We got a chance to see Sonny and Edna for the first time in quite a while. They’re both looking well, although Sonny was down with a bit of cold. We spent the rest of the afternoon pigging out [For those that like it, no one does deserts like my family!], opening presents, playing games and chatting. What more could you want?
Not sure if I’m going to be posting tomorrow, so I thought I’d get the link-of-the-day out today. If ever there was a reason to buy a Mac, this is it:
Read this one.
Ken just posted the tracks from Friday’s jam session to his blog. If you’re interested, go have a listen.
Since he doesn’t have comments enabled, and I wanted to comment :-), I figured I’d do so here. Anyone else with something to say can pile on this post’s comment section.
First off, I want to thank Ken for going through the pain of producing individual tracks from it. I particularly like the name choices. Having names on the tracks almost makes it seem like we intended to do them. 😉
My personal favorites are “Oh Ah”, “Float Me” and “Worst Bar”.
I also think the recording quality is surprisingly good. I clearly would have benefitted from having better amplification, although given how long it’s been since I last played (keyboards) with anyone, I think it’s probably a good thing that I wasn’t too loud.
Yup, they’re blown.
In honour of the last day before the holiday, Steve (electric guitar) and Ken (african percussion) decided to get together to do some jamming yesterday. I had my laptop and a usb keyboard at work, which is all I need to make music, so I figured I’d join them.
Unfortunately, all I had to play through were the Logitech Z-4 speakers from off my desk. Now, these are perfectly reasonable computer speakers — better for gaming and techno music than general listening, but not bad. The thing is, when you’re competing with djembes, dunduns, and killer guitar rifs you have to be loud. And despite being plenty loud enough for my office, the Z-4s just couldn’t compete. Somewhere about twenty minutes into the jam session, I realized that every patch I played sounded like it had a wee bit of extra distortion added; after about an hour, this had progressed to that sound that guitarists lovingly call “crunch”. Yup, they’re blown.
Rather than just replacing the speakers with new ones that would also be destroyed the next time I got an opportunity to play live, I decided to look for something with a bit more oomph. My constraints were:
I looked around a bit before I found something that seemed like it had potential, which didn’t cost multiple arms and legs: the Behringer K1800FX.
I picked one up from Ottawa Pianos today. So far it seems pretty promising. As usual, Behringer has loaded it up with features for a very nice price (< $400):
The sound quality is good, but a little “boxy”. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds good, but I guess when you’re used to studio monitors, you get spoiled. It is however, definitely loud.
Hey guys, next time I’ll be ready!
Update: Ah, it’s not feedback cancellation it’s feedback detection. You still have to use the EQ to remove it. Oh well.
As your typical high tech weeny, I basically treat electronic devices as “toys that are cool only till the next big thing happens”. That goes for computers, PDAs, phones and even electronic musical instruments. Heck, I even want to upgrade my cello. 😉
The thing is, to truly master a musical instrument, it takes serious dedication and that kind of focus is hard to maintain in a world where something “better” comes out every few months (whether it’s a software instrument or a new piece of gear).
That’s why I genuinely admire those who work with a single instrument to the point where they have mastered it. One way to make that happen, is to just stop “playing with” everything else; sometimes it leads to the Bach solo cello suites and sometimes it leads to Roger O’Donnell.
For those who don’t know Roger, he was the keyboardist for The Cure from 1987..1990 and from 1995..2005. One of his recent projects is an album recorded entirely on a Moog Voyager synthesizer (+ vocals) called The Truth In Me — bonus video link.
I have so far only heard the demo bits from his website, but I find the pieces starkly beautiful and quite compelling. I’m now hunting the CD. If anyone sees it somewhere, please let me know.
Every year, a number of musicians from around the world get together to create an album of Christmas carols using Garritan Orchestral Libraries music software. These vary from being very good, but still obviously electronic, to nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. Take a listen to the Monday link-of-the-day:
Garritan Community Christmas
So… The original link didn’t work any more, but all of that content plus a ton of other stuff is available on the Garritan SoundCloud site.