The Z Files

After all, they just got a big chunk of my money. My “2008 Studio Improvement Plan” is in full swing, with the acquisition of Logic Studio and a new iMac (20″, 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM (soon to be maxed out to 4 GB) and 500 GB disk). This thing absolutely flies. I ran a quick speed test by doing bounces of a Logic demo project, and the iMac came in at better than 4.5x faster than my old G4…and that was with Logic only using one core! (Hopefully they’ll improve multi-core awareness in a future point update.) Here it is in all its beauty… (full unboxing series @ flickr)

Next up in the studio overhaul: a FireWire audio interface. Right now the likely option appears to be the Focusrite Saffire.

(One note about the pic: you may notice a photo sitting in front of the KRK speaker. That photo means a lot to me. You see, it’s me and my girl. Yep, that’s right, this ol’ dog finally got it right! I’ve been friends with Kari for nearly three years now and it only recently evolved into something more. It’s been almost two months now and I couldn’t be happier!)

(One more thing: no, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. I really did paint my room bright green. )

I’m usually quite critical of our society’s lawsuit mania, but I’m going to put that to the side for the moment…partially, at least. Yesterday’s mail brought notice of a class-action settlement regarding foreign transaction fees on credit cards. While anyone who had a Visa or MasterCard from one of several banks is eligible for a refund, regardless of whether they had any foreign transactions, I can actually morally justify claiming a refund, as I’ve charged a handful of foreign transactions. The end result is that, most likely, I’ll get $25 for fees that I never really had a problem with and that didn’t come close to the amount of my refund. This I won’t complain about!

Waking up is often the toughest part of my day. I’ve thought long and hard about how to kick myself out of bed in the morning. For a time, I considered bringing a Clocky home. (I still may!) Today, I was thrilled to find Alarm Clock. It’s an OS X alarm clock (really!?) app that tucks away in the menu bar and plays whatever you want from your iTunes library. I’m not entirely optimistic about its chances at getting me up in the morning, but I’ll give it a shot.

I often use my iPod at work to break up the monotony. Imagine my disbelief when I pulled my prized bit of shiny Cupertino gadgetry from my backpack last night and discovered that it wouldn’t start up. I wrote it off to an accidental bump in the backpack that started it playing and ran the batteries out, so I went down to the gallery’s restaurant and borrowed their iPod charger. I plugged the iPod in and it wouldn’t get past an illuminated Apple logo. Putting it to my ear, I heard the hard drive clicking. (That’s usually a bad sign.) At that point, I was thanking my lucky stars that I bought AppleCare for it, as the standard warranty expired several months ago.

This afternoon, I scheduled a Genius Bar appointment for tomorrow. As a last resort before taking it in, I decided to hook it up to the computer again and try to run utilities on it. Interestingly enough, Disk Utility reported the drive to be OK. Sure enough, I unmounted the iPod and gave it a quick test, which it passed with flying colors.

Only at that point did I breathe a sigh of relief and cancel my slot at the Genius Bar.

So I’ve been riding a post-Moestock emotional roller coaster (on one hand, I have newfound confidence and motivation, but on the other, I’m sad that it’s gonna be another year before I see all my buds) but suddenly WHAM!!! it hit a wall when my external hard drive didn’t show up on my desktop. There’s a lot of stuff on there that isn’t normally on my laptop (my audio and video projects, for one) and, to make matters worse, I had dumped pretty much everything non-essential from my laptop when I lent it to my dad to take on his Mexico vacation (had to make room for what turned out to be something like 12 GB of photos…!!). All that I left behind was my Applications folder and my iTunes library.

Faced with a data disaster of the highest order, I fired up trusty ol’ Disk Utility to see if there was anything that could be done. It rattled off a list of something like 6 things wrong with the disk, but totally failed to repair anything. At this point, my stress level hit a point somewhere between “the sky is falling” and “oh noes, it’s the end of the world!!!!” Knowing that I could really not afford to lose all that data and all those photos and projects, I bit the bullet and bought DiskWarrior. Within 5 minutes, I was out $100 but I had a good shot at recovering my disk. I clenched my teeth as I watched DiskWarrior’s progress bars inch forward. Soon enough, a report flashed onto the screen detailing several issues that DW found and repaired. A quick glance at the rebuilt directory showed all my files just as they were. Two clicks and another minute later, and everything was well again.

Count me into the ‘religious backups’ crowd, starting about 20 minutes ago.

Unfortunately, it’s all business and very little pleasure. I’m typing this from Albany, where I’m doing secondary testing tomorrow for a NY Corrections position. Assuming I continue to advance, I’ll be making this trip a few more times before I get hired. The good news is that…well, I love my car. The Cali went through its first long-distance drive with ease. I’m projecting that I’ll be pretty close to the 30 mpg EPA estimate, despite the engine being far short of fully broken-in at only 400-something miles going into today. One thing that a lot of people complain about with the Caliber is excessive road noise. I’d have to disagree. At 75 mph, the cabin noise level, while not quiet, is low enough to carry on a quiet conversation. (I tried…yes, I was talking to myself. ) It was definitely no louder than the Saturn and the Tracer.

So…so far, so good.

The genesis of this one came when I was broken down in Wisconsin after Moestock last year. After much thought and not as much haggling, I brought my new Dodge Caliber home on Thursday. I’m still excited, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. It rides beautifully, looks awesome, and sounds absolutely killer with the premium sound system. I’ve rediscovered my love for driving. Suddenly I have the urge to take a road trip. I have a bunch of Toronto trips coming up, along with a Cleveland trip, but those don’t really count. I’d love to do a big trip like I did last summer…the Cali is just that awesome. Anyway, here are a couple pics…much more in the way of pics and maybe even a video will be coming in the next several days.

A few weeks back, I took advantage of a sweet financing deal at Guitar Center to bag a pair of KRK RP5 studio monitors. Not only are they really nice for production work, but they’ve become my de facto computer speakers as well. I’d have a hard time going back to normal computer speakers.

My latest toy arrived on Friday: a DigiTech GSP2101 preamp/effects processor. I had been lusting after the 2101 for quite a while, and finally went for it when a guy on cyberjammin put his up for sale. It’s a nice preamp for recording, as it has a good hardware-based speaker simulator and decent tube distortion, which sounds really good when properly EQ’ed. I bought this unit for two reasons: 1. late-night playing isn’t exactly feasible with the Recto, unlike the 2101; and 2. to thicken up my recordings in conjunction with the Recto. Hopefully, I’ll have some 2101 recordings up soon.

Of course, gear begets gear, and now I find myself looking at FireWire audio interfaces because my rig is starting to outgrow my Tascam US-122. I probably won’t act on that immediately, though.

New toys: Sony MDR-7506 headphones on top of Canon MP600 printer/scanner…

…both of which are things I’ve been wanting for a while: I’m sick of using other printers/scanner in the house; having my own is so much more convenient; and it’s about time I got a good pair of reference headphones.

New projects: I’m going through all my old guitar mags and scanning everything worth keeping: any lessons, features or song transcriptions that draw my interest. When I’m finished, I’ll probably try to sell off the mags and seed the GAS fund a little bit (relates to new ambitions, below). Also, I’ve begun reconfiguring my room with plans to finally do the repainting, etc. that I’ve been wanting to do for months.

New ambitions: it’s time to get serious about this recording stuff. I’m looking into buying a couple beginner-level recording books, and once the room is finished, I’m going to invest in a bunch of upgraded recording gear…a FireWire mixer, a large-diaphragm condensor mic, monitors, (eventually) a 2-channel outboard mic preamp and 2-channel compressor, and maybe even a bass guitar. Long-term GAS, stoked by Nate from cyberjammin: a Soldano Astroverb amp. That would be a mighty fine recording/practice amp, and they can be had used for $700-800. I wouldn’t have imagined that one could have a Soldano for under a grand until Nate scored one and I looked into it a little bit.

This is just to say that the USPS website is officially worthless. Hmph.