Today was a really nice day. I think the temperature reached just shy of 70 degrees F. This is quite extraordinary considering the past month of so, which was filled with rain and unseasonable cold. Global warming, my ass! About a month ago there was a single gorgeous day. I think it reached 80 F, and it was beautifully sunny. I went for a walk in the neighborhood at the end of my street and it was as though every second household was washing its cars. I listened through the entire Wind & Wuthering album (minus the insipid third track, “Your Own Special Way”, which I don’t even have on my iPod) and part of A Trick of the Tail. For some reason these two albums just really fit the mood when I’m traipsing around the sidewalks.
Today I didn’t go for a walk, on account that A) it rained in the mid-afternoon, and B) I was dead tired after not getting much sleep last night. I kind of regret not taking advantage, except that I usually go for my walks in the early evening when the sun is going down. There’s something about that time of day that’s magical.
In any event, summer finally seems to be around the bend. It’s about bloody time, if you ask me. Plants are blooming about two weeks late this year, which is no surprise considering the weather. I saw an oriole a few times in the past week; I think he and his mate might have a nest somewhere in the yard. Robins are building nests as well, and the other day I saw the first mosquito in the house. Ugh!
Lately I’ve been on a Linux binge. Every so often I get the bug to check out a few distros and see how the FOSS community is coming along. Canonical recently released the latest versions of Ubuntu and its derivatives, and I’ve been using the main Ubuntu variant on my main laptop since release. It has come with its share of problems, mainly because of the new Unity desktop shell that most people either love or hate. I’m kind of on the fence about Unity myself; tweaking it so that the Launcher bar remains persistent instead of automatically hiding when windows are maximized or else brought near it has gone a long way toward making Unity more usable. I still feel like the Dash and its various Lenses need a lot of work, though. They’re pretty much useless at this point, save for the ability to search for applications by name, which I’ve been doing regularly.
I also had a nasty issue where the Internet was very slow. What was happening was each time I tried to load a page, it would take forever to communicate with the DNS, then at the end of that (usually an additional 5-10 seconds) the actual load operation would go through, albeit still somewhat slowly. The solution I finally discovered involved playing around with a configuration file, basically reorganizing and simplifying a single line that controlled various host resolving functions. The problem has now completely vanished, and with it my last real reason to use Windows on this computer for a while. I switch back and forth between Linux and Windows every so often, so I doubt this will be permanent. Still, I love exploring new things, and this sort of geeky stuff really strikes my fancy.
Apart from that, there isn’t much to report. I’ve got a whole summer ahead of me. Last year’s project was cleaning up and organizing my loft. This year…who knows? I’ll think of something. Maybe I’ll get back into web design again, as I’ve kind of slacked off that and I’m getting rusty. I also might consider actually doing something with the rest of this site. Like, you know, actually put up some music reviews in the Musical Box section? Every time I try to write one I lose interest and it feels like work. Maybe I can find a way to make it work.
I battle with this project continually. Every year I end up neglecting it, then I begin anew with gusto, only to neglect it again. I’m not even going to bother apologizing for my absence, as the site statistics state that a maximum of one or two people visit here in any given month. So it’s not like I have a huge, adoring fan base.
So here’s a new post. As in the past, I’m going to make an effort to update more often. With Windows Live Writer (now in version 2011) I have no real excuse not to update more often, as I don’t even have to battle with the WordPress layout. I love this program. It’s very simple to set up—all you have to do is tell WLW what platform your blog uses, its URL, and your username and password, and WLW does the rest. It even downloads the theme of your blog, so you get a built-in preview of what your entry will look like, without having to open a new window. The only gripes I have with this program are that sometimes text input/backspacing can be a bit sluggish, and it doesn’t display long dashes (however, I can type — and WordPress correctly formats these as one long dash).
I could attempt to relay everything that has happened since my last post, but that would be an exercise in futility. Suffice to know that I’ve all but ditched English as a major. I’m sick and tired of the bleeding hearts, the indoctrination, and the closet socialism. I have always been interested in English as a language, both for writing and speaking, and in order to avoid taking “interdisciplinary/white American men are evil” classes disguised as major requirements in English I’ve been exploring the field of linguistics, as these classes inexplicably also count. So far I like it a lot. The most refreshing part about it is the lack of ideological indoctrination. I don’t need somebody’s opinion forced on me, especially in such a way that I have to regurgitate it in order to pass. Furthermore, when we leave the realm of objectivity entirely and make literature mean whatever we happen to feel about the world (as the so-called Modern Literary Criticism prescribes), we turn the study of literature into no more than a vehicle for self confirmation bias. Which, evidently, is what proponents of MLC are after.
I want no further part in any of it. It’s a circle jerk as far as I’m concerned, and it made me wish to be dead every minute I spent doing it. Goodbye, and good riddance!
On a happier note, I’ve reassembled my studio. It had been in various pieces due to first a rearrangement of my summer loft, and then the subsequent loss of power up there. I finally dragged it back to its original location, which was my bedroom. I’m currently using a pair of heavily modified Shure SRH440 headphones, as the speakers I was previously using, while pleasant-sounding, weren’t the last word in accuracy. The 440, along with a custom EQ derived from my personal HRTF, produces a virtually flat sine wave sweep from 20Hz to around 12kHz, after which it gradually trails off. Of course this may sound like a rather small frequency range, except that in the real world those frequencies will have trailed off by the time they reach you, anyway, because treble is dissipated by distance from the source. Furthermore, Fletcher-Munson shows us that extreme bass and treble frequencies sound quieter to us in comparison to the ones in the middle at all but the very highest amplitudes human hearing can stand before being damaged. The 440’s presentation, therefore, is accurate.
It’s been a joy to revisit my favorite virtual instruments, like the M-Tron Pro and PMI Boesendorfer 290. I hadn’t played anything in over half a year. My well of inspiration has been a bit dry lately, but maybe something will spur that in the future. I haven’t posted a demo video on YouTube in ages, and I’ve been very bad at getting back to people’s messages. Hopefully I’ll get a little more on the ball about that once I start posting new videos. I also haven’t done the traditional yearly Super Mario Mellotron Remix video yet. I’ll put that up at some point.
Other than that, a bunch of stuff has happened, but it’s probably more important to me than it would be to the random visitor, so I’ll leave it off here. Every year I say I’ll spend more time here, and every time I renege on that promise. Maybe this time will be different. We’ll see. If you’re out there listening, let me know.
I believe I titled a post very similarly once before, but I just don’t have it in me to come up with anything original today. I’m sort of doing this under cover, as it were, because, you guessed it, I’m in class once again. Sociology. Ugh. It’s a social science requirement, as though the six psychology classes I’ve already taken wouldn’t count as social science. To be perfectly frank, I have absolutely no patience with this subject. It’s preachy, watered-down social psychology, bereft of any teeth but stocked with all the touchy-feely fluff you ever wanted to see. It’s Mallow made a discipline (SMRPG reference). And it’s a hot-bed for political correctness indoctrination, mainly because no real scientist or psychologist (also a scientist, of course) would debase him- or herself to teach such dreck, leaving that task to the dregs who couldn’t cut it in a real profession. It’s fuzzy, nebulous, and an utter and complete waste of my time.
This is doubly so because I’m an English major.
Speaking of which, I have a great many English courses this semester. I think the total comes out to five this time around. Further, I’m in a battle with the English department to get back to me about formally declaring that major, which is a requirement for me to take the fifth of my English courses this semester, English 3100. It’s only available to declared English majors, and it’s a required course. It’s also another complete waste of my time, being an introductory course to a subject in which I have taken numerous 5000-level courses (the highest offered to undergrads). Anyway, I need the permission of the department to enroll in the course, and I’ve been trying for two weeks to get a response. I’ve finally decided to enlist the help of one of my favorite English professors ever, and also one of the most difficult. I had him last semester, and I’m taking his swan song course this semester. I asked him if he could somehow goose the department into honoring my request in a timely manner, and he told me to send him an e-mail so he could forward on my request with his backing.
We’ll see what happens.
I’m still in this class. It seems as though time has slowed to a crawl. My freakin’ God is this class boring. Oddly enough, I’m starting to feel tired, even though I was asleep by midnight yesterday and awoke around 8:45 AM today. I suppose this can be chalked up to the soporific vibes I’m getting at this point. This class goes until 2:50 PM, and yet it feels like we’re going at a snail’s pace. We’re being drilled with a lot of questions to which nobody knows the answers. We’re stepping over our boundaries, too: according to the How Not To Be A Dickwad Prof manual, “The first meeting of any course should consist of a simple role call, a brief explanation of the syllabus, and maybe a few lightweight ice breaker activities/discussions…It should last for a maximum of half an hour, and as a professor you should acknowledge that your students are most certainly not prepared for an engaging discussion on the first day.”
Right. That just went out the window.
Columbus just got brought up for some reason. That reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by one of my favorite professors (the one mentioned earlier): “Intelligent people make interesting mistakes.” That pretty much sums up Columbus in a nutshell, if you think about it. This professor also said, “The fork was pretty damn powerful.” I assure you that, in context, he was making perfect sense.
I’m not really sure why I began this post. I’m not really interested or engaged in it, which pretty much describes my attitude toward my current environment. Here’s to hoping twenty-five minutes from now comes soon.
Dirty Jobs this week visited a marble factory. Yeah, that kind of marble—the little round things you used to lose by the dozens (and maybe even put in your mouth). Apparently there are marbles that sell for hundreds of dollars. Who knew?
Today I explored the creative possibilities of Windows Live Movie Maker, a pretty decent video editor not included in the default Windows 7 install because of the EU. I had had a few audio “commercials” kicking around from an English project I did last year, so I decided they would make a good excuse for me to try out WLMM. It was pretty easy to use, and the results are decent enough. It outputs HD to YouTube by default using a built-in direct-to-YouTube uploader, so that was pretty cool.
Anyway, here’s what I made:
These are nothing special. I just did some really basic image processing using the GIMP, which I’m finding more and more does everything for which I ever used Photoshop. If only they could get rid of that infernal toolbar palette—didn’t they learn anything from the hideousness that was Office 2004 for Mac (not from experience, but from many, many user testimonials do I know this was a nuisance)?
I’ve been spending more and more time in Windows 7; I thought I wouldn’t use it too much considering that Ubuntu works so well on this laptop. On the other hand, I’ve been spending more and more time here. I have to admit, Microsoft really hit it out of the park with this release. I’m no Microsoft basher myself, and though I prefered Ubuntu to Windows XP, that’s merely because the comparison was between an ancient OS and a very up-to-date one. I actually like Windows 7 and Ubuntu about equally; each has its strong points.
I think I’ll be saying in Windows 7 for a while at least. Maybe I’ll make some more videos of the other two remaining audio commercials. And remember, if you lose your marbles, be sure to take some Pepto-MAX.
I do this all the time: I leave papers until the last minute. Today was cutting it quite fine even for this habit, though: The paper was due at 5:00 PM, and I began it around 12:00 PM. I also took about half an hour off for lunch, though I only did that because I was reasonably sure I would finish the paper in time. I did. I got it in at around 4:50 PM.
To clarify where I’m coming from, of course I didn’t actually do the entire paper today. Most of the actual preparation for a paper (for me, at least) happens before a single word is written…er…typed. So I ended up reading Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener for the first time at about one o’clock this morning and thought for a while about the problem. I was still thinking about it before my alarm went off at noon today. I finally came up with what I was going to say relatively late, at around 12:30 PM. And, spending the rest of the time writing (excluding the half an hour in the cafeteria), I bloviated all about Bartleby.
I am so SICK of Bartleby! I suppose I felt sorry for him when I first read the story, but after paging through the thing looking for evidence, it lost a lot of its luster. Plus, it’s Melville, so it’s not like the thing couldn’t have been about a quarter its length without the actual plot suffering any—remember, it was Herman Melville who wrote Moby-Dick. After that, anything’s possible. I mean, there are some people who never finished that book before they died, and they started when they were infants!
Other than that, I haven’t accomplished anything of real import this week. I just wanted to have a go at Bartleby. Though if he were here, he would most likely say, “I would prefer that you didn’t.”
It’s been over three years—from June 11th, 2006 to November 27th, 2006—that my trusty Toshiba Satellite has served me, but the 27th—yesterday by this time of the morning—was the day I officially retired it. I am typing this entry on the Satellite’s replacement: an HP dv6-1355dx.
Having had the machine now for less than a day, any preliminary impressions would have to be considered premature. That having been said, my initial impression is that this is a fine machine. It makes up for every single shortcoming of my previous laptop, save one: being of the 15.6″ screen class, this machine is still large and heavy (it’s wider than but slightly lighter than the Satellite). But that’s okay because I plan on picking up an Asus Eee netbook for all my portability needs. The latter will be my “pitch in the bookbag and take with me to class” computer; the HP will be my “actually get some work done” machine.
It’s very odd that I ended up with this machine, given that until today I was unaware of its existence. Because of the weight and size issue mentioned above, I had been looking at 14″ and lower computers. I had selected one Toshiba Satellite from the bunch—the M505-S4945, which was a recently-discontinued model (displaced when Microsoft released Windows 7) that Best Buy was trying to get rid of. There was nothing wrong with it, and a preliminary audition at the local BB was favorable.
Things had finally came to a head with my previous Satellite, when its battery simply refused to hold any charge whatsoever; in addition, the power cable is finicky, and I’m on my second one of those. The end result is a machine that continuously and at seemingly random intervals simply died. It was when this became unbearable that I conceded it was time for a new machine.
On Thanksgiving, when I was ready to order the M505 online (it was not available in stores), my father (who had been looking at the BB site) suggested a particular model he had seen, the Asus U50A. I explained that far from a behemoth, I wanted a smaller computer that I could carry around in my backpack and balance on a desk, yet which was still reasonably powerful. He didn’t seem to understand, probably because I hadn’t properly explained that the desks at Wayne State are about nine inches across—they’re no more than a shaped strip of wood that flips down in front of the seat. He argued that the Asus—admittedly a very nice machine—was a better computer, and that the extra inch in width shouldn’t be a realistic concern. We traded arguments back and forth until he suggested that, as backup (and in lieu of trying to get my old Satellite working again as backup) I get the Asus along with a netbook of my choice, with the intent of doing my work on the Asus and taking the netbook along with me to class.
Initially I rejected this, partially because it ended up being somewhat more expensive than I had planned, and also because it seemed I was straddling both extremes—a too-big machine and a too-small one. I had had a netbook once, but it only lasted three days before it got stolen, so I never developed a feel for whether or not I could get any serious work done on it. Plus, I had auditioned the M505 and had never even considered the Asus until that day.
Later in the day, and after a little research, I started giving the matter some thought. The Asus represents a tremendous value, and a netbook would be far more portable and manageable than even a 14″ class notebook. I decided I’d go with my father to deliver some fish to a customer the next day (Friday), and on the way back we would visit a Best Buy so I could audition the Asus and see if it there was anything about it that made it untenable. If so, my plan was to order the M505 online.
One is forced to ask this question every time he considers buying a bottle of lemon iced tea. I confess that I was once among those who happily consumed the Lipton “iced tea” you get from a gigantic can. Even then, I never made it “properly”—I made a highly-concentrated version with anywhere from three to six times the recommended measure of concentrate. And I also invented an ungodly concoction wherein this tea concentrate and cherry-flavored Faygo sparkling water are mixed to create what tastes like pure heaven: carbonated, liquefied blue SweeTarts.
But I digress. Over the years I have grown to appreciate what good iced tea should taste like. I’ve gotten good results making my own, but when faced with a purchasing choice I usually go for Lipton PureLeaf—it’s probably not the greatest iced tea on earth, but it’s right in that range where it goes up against the other contenders for that title. It makes a good benchmark, in other words.
Advertising is a powerful force. About a month ago a rather cute commercial for Snapple iced tea came over the airwaves. It punned on their slogan, “Made from the Best Stuff on Earth,” by depicting what would happen if they somehow found “better stuff.” I thought that was pretty clever, and so I figured I would give it a shot this evening. In the atrociously cornily named Barnes & Nibble (Wayne State’s campus store), I picked up one Lipton PureLeaf lemon iced tea and one Snapple lemon iced tea, figuring I’d set up a little showdown.
There’s no competition. The Snapple stuff is brown, tea-hinted lemonade. There is virtually no tea flavor at all; it’s as though the tea was added as a means to color the drink. To its credit, it certainly wasn’t a horrible-tasting thing, and its use of real sugar means it goes down smooth and doesn’t leave that awful film in the mouth. But it is a horrible tea. Maybe the other flavors will fare better, but at this point I can’t see that happening; the fruit-to-tea mix is so far out of whack that no matter which variety you choose I imagine all you’ll taste is an overly-sweet, fruity liquid that’s colored like tea.
The PureLeaf, which I opened afterward for a single comparison sip, was as good as always. I highly recommend any flavor of this line of tea—you might even get the unsweetened version and add your own digs, as the tea flavor itself is excellent. Raspberry is a bit sweet, but it’s still pretty good. I’ve never liked peach tea much (sorry, my love), so you’re on your own to decide there. And I’ve always hated sweet tea, so that’s outside my sphere of objectivity as well. But once you start with a good base, usually any product made from that base will be at least tolerable.
But enough about tea. Lately I’ve been busy, sick, and also busy. School is going well enough; I scored a 490/500 on my second paper for the “Hardest English Professor at Wayne” (evidently, see his score), to go with the 470/500 I got on the first one. I have something like a 96% in the class. I can see how those who aren’t familiar with argumentative writing (or writing in general)—basically those who learned the wrong way from high school—would have a bugger of a time with this guy. Me? I had Alwardt. He was my high school AP Literature teacher. I learned more from this guy than from any other teacher I had ever had, and each and every day I’m grateful for it.
Aside from that, I’ve been busy with miscellaneous projects here and there. Recently I’ve been attacking the company website again. This time I finally think I’ve got a good design. It certainly looks better than any of the crap I had put up in the past. It’s in a secret directory so the general public cannot discover it the way you just did now by clicking on the link. Go on, I dare you. I know it should have occurred to me, but I learned relatively late in my web-designing lifetime that many websites use pre-rendered images in their designs. The current incarnation of the site therefore has a pre-rendered header and footer, generated on each page by a separate JavaScript (so I can easily change them site-wide). If you’re using a Gecko- (Firefox or similar) or WebKit- (Safari, Chrome) based browser, you’ll see this site in its full glory, with rounded corners on the tabs and drop shadows on the tabs, headings, and behind the pictures. If you’re (gasp) still using Internet Explorer, do yourself (and me) a favor: switch. When Microsoft finally learns it needs to play nice with web standards (sometime around Internet Explorer 3,702.5 or so), maybe I can let it slide. Until then, bring on Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera…anything but Trident-based IE.
In other news…well, there isn’t anything. Anything I can freely say, at any rate. An insane ninja-stalker might find this site and then there’ll be hell to pay. I’ve been busy, busy, busy. I deactivated my Facebook last week, as it had become a time sink. Plus, it’s like Pink Floyd said, if you build a wall, the other people can’t reach you. Or should that be ρ!ηκ ƒζσγδ, lest Roger Waters find me and decide to sue me for typing “P!nk F!0yd.” Din’t do nothin’, Rog. No þλο1∫ ʞµιδ here.
But enough. I started this entry full of purpose. I end it with no purpose whatsoever.
By this I don’t mean to imply that I made this theme. No, this is the first theme I ever had for my WordPress blog. This was the first blog I set up, over a year ago, and this theme—Egecia—was my first choice. Unfortunately, there was an odd issue that was never solved wherein clicking on an individual entry would break the theme. I had made a custom banner and everything, and it was quite disappointing not being able to continue using this theme.
While putzing around in my Admin section I came across this old theme and decided to search for it in WordPress’s repository. It’s not there anymore. Alas, its creator seems to have abandoned it. However, a Google search turned up a thread where a solution to the breakage problem was offered. I applied it and it worked. So now I get to have my original theme back, complete with the modifications I made to it (the custom banner and background).
It’s amazing how silly little things like this make me so happy. I have this thing with nostalgia, and I fondly remember setting up this blog the summer before last. Getting to fix an old problem and finally display my custom banner and its original theme is just the bee’s knees, as far as I’m concerned. It takes me back to that time, a year-and-a-half ago, when I first began this blogging journey. In many ways I haven’t really left the starting gate; I come here far too infrequently, and I never really did much with the other blogs. I might at some point attempt to realize the dream I had at the beginning, but at this point it feels like too much work.
WordPress had an update waiting for me when I arrived. It seems like, for the first time ever, text input isn’t agonizingly laggy. The WordPress Admin console has been notoriously bad for this in the past, so it’s quite a welcome change if indeed I’m not simply lucky. I’m glad that updates are automatic now; manual updating was a pain, and I usually avoided it for point releases.
I still never did find what I was looking for in the Admin console—the control section for a plugin I recently installed. I’ll find it eventually.
Today I made a new avatar for my Ubuntu Forums account. I figured I’d mash up a bunch of stuff that’s been of interest to me lately, so I ended up with this:
Mario and Sonic are friends now. They’re been featured together now in two separate Olympics-themed games, as well as the Super Smash Bros. series. I wonder if Tails knows about this. He can get pretty jealous when it comes to Sonic. What this blog theme doesn’t show well is that the avatar has rounded corners. That was a bit of a hassle to accomplish. I had to make a rectangular selection with rounded corners, invert the selection, then apply alpha transparency to the four “corners” left behind. The copy is hand-written, as it were. There’s a calligraphic brush tool, which I used with the touch pad on my laptop to draw the letters. I did everything in the GIMP, which is a deceptively powerful image manipulation program. You can get it for Windows, too. It’s like the light version of Photoshop, and it’s free (of course).
I’ve been getting interested in the Sonic universe lately. It’s almost like the Mario universe was for me last summer; Sonic is something new, complete with its own spin-off media. He also gets featured heavily in YouTube Poops; the animated Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog has been extensively drawn from for these. Dr. Robotnik’s voice acting is so over the top that it lends itself very well to the hallowed art of the Poop. There’s an entire sub-genre of YTP devoted to the short segments found at the end of these animated episodes. These are called “Sonic Sez” and are part of that obnoxious 90s initiative to try to teach kids lessons through the mouths of their most beloved cartoon and video game characters. These YTPs jumble up the words and make Sonic say dirty or otherwise deleterious things to both the audience and Tails. Poor Tails! Sonic can be so mean to him.
Speaking of YTP, I came across some that feature Billy Mays. I know it’s somewhat irreverent considering that he’s dead and all, but most of them were made before he died and several of them are quite hilarious. Here’s one of my favorites (it also has a sequel):
I laughed so hard I cried! I know at some level it’s immature, but it’s kind of like the Tourette’s Guy video when the bird got in the house—shamefully funny.
Speaking of funny, for my Oral Communications class I had to write my own eulogy. I made to be entirely serious while I dubiously twisted my future into a cruel irony: I opened the passage with a statement to the effect that I must have fallen out of the sky (because of my uniqueness). I made myself die at the age of 97 from a tragic skydiving accident, tying back to the opening statement and making it literal. With great sincerity I read this passage to the class, who loved it. I might post it here as a separate page; it would give me an excuse to get back into web development, which I have neglected ever since the first week of summer vacation.
Just a quick update. My life has been school, home, and YouTube (which I manage to visit in both places).
I really should update this place more often. I say that all the time, and then proceed to not do it. I did make a stab at it early this morning, but I was ill prepared for that entry and caught off guard by having discovered at the last moment I had missed my deadline by one day. I’ll explain shortly.
In any event, since the last (visible) update the summer has flown by, even if I can’t remember a single thing about the past three months. It all sort of runs together, and while I’m sure I’ll look back on this summer and will be able to choose the highlights, at this point it’s sort of a homogeneous wash. But so what if nothing meteoric happened—it’s not like I didn’t have fun with some stuff. I’ve decided to categorize the general developments under separate headings.
Computer
Around the beginning of June I experienced a seemingly arranged series of failures which resulted in my main production desktop becoming unbootable. I was able to extract all my data using the Live CD function of the Ubuntu Linux distro, at which point I decided to use the crisis to my benefit and install a third hard drive I had lying around (I believe I wrote about this once before). A complete system reimage and case swap later, and the old girl is purring along nicely.
I also moved the system from my bedroom to the storage room in which I’m actually spending the summer (the unbearable heat in my bedroom is bad for electronics, after all). I took my keyboard and recording hardware as well, so I’ve basically got my entire studio up there with me. Related to the computer issues, my keyboard is on the fritz. Notes sustain randomly or not at all, without any input from the pedal (which happens even when the pedal itself is disconnected). Additionally, I get random delay effects when using the internal sounds, which are likely read as extra MIDI data by Cubase. Usually turning the ‘board on and off many times in succession will get it working right for a little while, but then it goes back out of whack. I have no idea what happened, though I suspect a power surge. As long as I can get it working long enough for a single recording session, it’s not the end of the world.
Music
I’ve recorded several tracks with my newly-transplanted equipment. In the first instance, I added a second verse to a song I’d actually first come up with last summer. Bizarrely, it still lacks a chorus—I like the melody so much I don’t want to just throw anything into the chorus slot. Whatever I ultimately write needs to do the A-section justice, and it’s a tough act to follow.
Additionally, I also entered into the Microsoft Bing Jingle contest. Basically, contestants had to write and perform (on camera) a short original song about Microsoft’s new search engine—the resultant videos were to then be posted on YouTube and unleashed upon the general public. I was several days late entering the contest, though I still amassed a respectable view total. The number of views inexplicably increased almost four-fold after the contest ended, which tells me the video was featured in at least one article about the competition’s conclusion.
Anyway, here it is:
Anybody who likes the tune (which I must admit I wrote in less than half an hour) can download a high quality MP3 version here. Anybody here on YouTube traffic most likely knows all about all this, as you most likely linked here from the very video above. If that’s the case, I’d like you to know that I do have a small library of legitimate material, though it’s in various stages of incompleteness and it will likely be a while before any of it sees the light of day (or public scrutiny, in other words). If I gain a moderate following, I may feel inclined to post some of it for your general perusal.
