Owner: gashcrumb.homelinux.org URL:http://gashcrumb.homelinux.org/logahead/index.php Join Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:47:11 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: My personal blog featuring music I've done in the past, stuff I've been working on more recently and random other tidbits of info about me or stuff I care about. Site statistics:Click here
1988 Epiphone Spotlight CMT 2007-08-17 07:13:00 So I meant to post this a couple weeks ago, but it's probably better I held off a bit. In any case, part of the reason I figured I'd post this is because there's so little information on the internet about this guitar, so I thought I'd document what I've been able to find here. I've always wondered about my guitar, I originally picked it up in 1989 or 1990 for $300 used at a now-closed music store in Concord, NH. The music store was in the little plaza on Fort Eddy road across the street from what's now a Market Basket and Lowe's plaza.
Since I got it I never really saw another one like it, and finally I decided to do a little research online, starting with the Epiphone website. Turns out there's little if any information on this guitar anywhere. The Epiphone Spotlight
was apparently made for only a couple years, from 1987 to 1989. Originally there was the "Nouveau by Gibson" line in 1986, but they changed it to "by Epiphone" for aco
singing... ugh. 2007-08-16 06:05:00 It didn't take long to do that second bit of The Love Missiles recordings, so check it out on the right there.
Now that I've gotten most of my old 4-track tapes sucked into the computer and turned into mp3s I've turned my attention to doing some new songwriting. Except I've got a lot of practicing to do. My guitar work is shaping up nicely, at least I feel less rusty than when I usually pick up my guitar every 6 months or so. I've been working on re-doing some songs featured in The AA Sessions, namely "The Vessel" and "The Days Wear On" (too many "The" song titles...). I've laid most of the guitar parts down for both songs, spent countless hours programming the drum parts (thanks to Jamie's substantially complicated drumming) and opted to fake the bass parts using a combination of seq24 and fluidsynth. All in all they're turning out pretty well, I've taken some artistic license and changed up a couple things.
Ah, but the vocal parts..
Quick update... 2007-08-10 02:35:00 I remixed a couple of the newer tracks on my music page, The Bludgeoning had too much high end and it finally bugged me enough to fix it. Regular computer speakers do not make the best monitors, so I've realized I've gotta ease off bumping up those higher frequencies. The other problem was with I'm Glad I'm Not Poo, It cut off pretty abruptly and apparently when you export a session from Ardour it's better to leave an empty measure at the beginning of the song. It's all about learning the tools...
Next project is to mix down The Love Missiles 4-track recordings. I've done this once before but I believe I wasn't a big fan of how they turned out, so I'm gonna do it again. Now that's dedication.
Read more:Quick
Fart Waffle 2007-08-09 15:37:00 Well, aren't you lucky that I've gone and remixed almost all 65 of these tracks to make the ultimate Fart Waffle
anthology "Falafel of Flatulence". Fart Waffle is myself and Jamie with some occasional guest appearances by Iestyn; we basically just goofed around and came up with very random lyrics and put them to very random combinations of riffs, or came up with some funny concept of breaking up the song in some discordant fashion. It's taken me years to get this done, I've even managed to lose some of the original masters, so there's about 10 tracks or so that are a little bunk sounding. Too bad for you...
These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Falafel of Flatulence
001 - Wookie - mp3 or ogg
002 - Heavy Sedation - mp3 or ogg
003 - Hate - mp3 or ogg
004 - Folk Deth - mp3 or ogg
005 - 30 Square Feet - mp3 or ogg
006 - CakeHead - mp3 or ogg
007 - Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise - mp
The Love Missiles 2007-07-25 16:19:00 The Love Missiles were a band consisting of myself, Iestyn and Jamie. We got together in high school with the goal of writing songs to piss off pretty much as many people as we could. I think we managed to just hurt some eardrums, mostly my own.
These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Doom Music
This is all taken from the practice tape that we built up. Basically as we finished songs we'd just plop them onto this tape. There's also some live stuff on here from the high school talent show and the high school battle of the bands.
001 - Requiem For a Fly - mp3 or ogg
002 - Coherance Of A Skeptic - mp3 or ogg
003 - The Love Missiles Hate Song - mp3 or ogg
004 - Wigged Out On Gibbers - mp3 or ogg
005 - Shall We Record - mp3 or ogg
006 - Stolen - mp3 or ogg
007 - The Love Missiles Meaningful Beauty Song - mp3 or ogg
008 - The Love Missiles Hate Song - mp3 or ogg
009 - Doot Doot - mp3 or ogg
010 - Cheesy
stay tuned... 2007-07-24 16:21:00 The Love Missiles raw uncut rocking out in Jamie's living room is coming... In the meantime I've added "The AAA Sessions" to the music page for your listening enjoyment, as well as another more recent gem.
feeling nostalgiac... 2007-07-19 11:01:00 Just put up the entire first tape of somewhat decent stuff I did back in high school. It's really brought me back, so much so that I dug up pix of the equipment I had back in the day that produced this stuff:
The Yamaha QX-21. Actually, I think I had a QX-7, but it's the same exact thing as above. Amazing what kind of stuff you can do with just two buttons. I have yet to find a sequencer program on the PC that's as easy to use. Too bad I got rid of this one.
The Kawai PH-50 "Pop Keyboard". 32 note polyphony but could only support 4 midi channels. I pushed the thing pretty hard, eventually the program selector buttons wore out and I wired up new ones using big buttons. I don't have this any more though...
The Roland DR-505. Apparently still quite useable these days, I came across a couple sites that mod these things so the drum sounds are all cool and messed up sounding. Too bad I don't have this any more either...
Of course you need a tape
cat pee... 2007-07-16 03:16:00 So yesterday I posted some tunes I recorded here on the new rig, but I held off with any kind of update since I want that to be a sort of permanent page. I spent a good bit of yesterday cleaning up the basement, hauling tons of useless crap and cardboard up into a big pile in the garage. I'm gonna have to rent one of those haul away things I guess. I still have to rip down the old bar and a wall and then unseal some of the windows before we can start painting and sealing up the concrete. Home owner ship is just so much fun...
Kristen's been working on learning the mandolin, so we've tuned up my aunt Barb's old mandolin (and have recently replaced the 4 year old strings). She's been at it for four weeks now, and I think she's making steady progress. Of course, I've been showering her with DVDs and books and metronomes to help her out and keep her interested (or really keep her from getting frustrated). And once in awhile I'll pull out the
my music 2007-07-15 09:03:00 So I've finally been playing guitar again and doing some recording. It's been a long time, but I'm slowly getting back into it. Here's some of the stuff I've done in the past as well as some more recent recordings. As I get stuff off of tape I'll be adding to this page, or whenever I make something new.
These works are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Recent Stuff
I have yet to put these together in a collection. I created all of these on Linux, using mostly Ardour and Hydrogen. Blurnk was all done using lmms.
Blurnk - mp3 or ogg
I'm Glad I'm Not Poo - mp3 or ogg
The Bludgeoning - mp3 or ogg
The Bungling of Hope - mp3 or ogg
The AAA Sessions
Wow, stuff that was recorded in a studio... Big thanks to Jamie for doing the drums for me. I'm working on re-recording these here and having lots of fun (insert sarcasm tag) emulating what he did for the drum parts...
01 - The Vessel -
a beginning of summer update... 2007-06-14 07:08:00 Man I'm bad at updating this thing. In any case, I took a few days off for my birthday and did a bunch of stuff. For example, I finally got around to painting my office desk:
Kristen also gave me a budget to get my birthday present, so I got one of these. It's super fast compared to my old machine... Nice...
Of course now sometime I've gotta re-paint the room and clean up where I hit the walls with my painting and finishing. Or maybe just put a couple books there to hide it.
We've also been doing a little yard work, namely a multi-weekend (at least that's how it's turned out) project to get a crushed stone path from the back door to the screen house. We've also re-painted our dining room chairs to match up with our color motif a little better and re-upolstered the cushions, mostly because one of the cats barfed on one of the old cushions and the stain wouldn't go away. These newer ones are much nicer.
finally figured out what song this is... 2007-08-17 11:53:00 It's been driving me crazy, I've heard this song at my local hangout at least 3 times and I think once on TV. It's Howard Jones -- "Things Can Only Get Better". They used to play this all the time on the radio when I was in 5th grade or so, it reminds me of plastic army men.
bioshock... 2007-08-22 08:50:00 So yesterday I finally got to pick up "Bioshock". I've been following the development of this game almost religiously for 2 years or so, reading up on any developer interview, checking out any available E3 footage, downloading any available video released on IGN or team xbox, going back and watching said video footage again and again and again...
So it was released yesterday, and pretty much around noon I decided that I'd forgo using the treadmill for 30 minutes so I could make the drive over to Derry and pick up the game from the closest GameStop store. I suffered through an insufferably boring afternoon of work (I had decided to work from home yesterday) counting the minutes until 5:00. At 5:00 on the dot, I closed down my e-mail, IM, IRC, Outlook Web Access page and my Windows XP VM that I have only to run our CRM client and ran out the door.
Of course, it's traffic-y around 5:00, actually 5 to 6 is about the only time there's traffic up by me. So it took m
so close, and yet... 2007-09-22 18:14:00 I've been working away at re-recording a couple songs from The AAA Sessions and I think I'm pretty close, but I've suddenly become quite the perfectionist. Why just today, I spent about 4 hours or so doing a mixdown, only to scrap it after realizing the song still needed a couple small keyboard bits here and there.
Which is a drawback to computer based recording. There's so many knobs, sliders and buttons and so many different ways you can tweak parts of a song that it's very easy to get lost in a sea of constant refinement where you never quite get anything done. On the other hand one thing I do like is that even should I decide a song is done, I can always go back in and re-do a part, add some EQ there, perhaps throw in a bit of chorus elsewhere...
Work-wise it's been a busy month... Which does cut into music stuff time. Still, I've gotten some time in playing along with Kristen as she continues developing her mandolin skills. At the moment
a mini tour... 2007-09-08 04:13:00 I've been mostly practicing vocals these days so I haven't really worked on any new stuff. But in the meantime I've made some small updates to the photo section.
I'm a big nerd and actually spend a lot of time looking at other peoples desk/computer setups. So here's mine along with photos of the office since I've moved up from the basement.
We also painted our living room blue awhile ago, but recently we've moved our old couch up from the basement, so now Kristen and I each have our own couch to lay around on.
We've also finally gotten our bedroom in a presentable state for the most part, with a new furniture set from Jordan's. This room is the most tame in our house, since it's so normal it almost doesn't fit in. The walls took a lot of work to get them smooth
the desktop 2007-09-28 04:19:00 Iestyn tagged me to show off my desktop. I've been all utilitarian these days so I don't have that interesting a desktop, so you get two screenshots:
new stuff (well sort of...) 2007-10-10 01:56:00 I've finally gotten my latest projects to a point where I"m happy with everything. So the idea was that I wanted to learn how to use the various Linux audio tools without any pressure of trying to come up with new material or anything silly like that. So I opted to re-record a couple songs from "The AAA Sessions". It was quite educational, I certainly learned what not to do, for example stereo guitar tracks=bad.
For the most part Ardour worked flawlessly though I did run into one problem while working on "The Vessel", namely Ardour decided that the song was 27 minutes long and I had to keep moving the end tag whenever I exported the project to a .wav file. They're on the music page but I'll put 'em here too:
The Vessel - mp3 or ogg (Lyrics by D. Bosworth)
The Days Wear On - mp3 or ogg Read more:stuff
the great tv swap 2007-10-22 05:17:00 Earlier this month our TV (a Toshiba 27") started acting up, I basically hit the volume up button on the remote and the TV changed to channel 33 and then refused to accept any more commands from the remote. This of course happened while I'm gaming, thus had to be sorted immediately. First I tried shutting off the power. The TV came back on, but the display was now 2 inches away from each side of the screen. The remote still wouldn't work. I tried unplugging it for a little bit. Now the remote started working sort of, the volume wouldn't work and you could switch inputs on the TV, but it would turn off after switching. The big problem for me though is that this is a 27 inch TV, with the display now 2 inches smaller on each side I now basically have a 23” TV, that sucks!
So I decided it was finally time to bring this monster Sony something-or-other TV up from the basement. We got this thing from the people that we bought the house from, it's pretty old but
new Linux distro, make it so! 2007-10-26 07:10:00 Well, I managed to hose my Ubuntu Studio installation on the Dell. I wanted to try an upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy as it was released last week. As I've customized this machine a lot over the last few months I figured the upgrade wouldn't go smoothly. Sure enough it didn't.
After getting about 75 to 80 percent through installing all of the packages one of the package install scripts must have unloaded a bunch of modules, then the install script for am-utils hung trying to shut down amd, since there was no network. Then Ubuntu's upgrade installer thingie just kind of bailed on my.
I did manage to complete some of the upgrade, but now my desktop was in a pretty bad state. So I decided to do what I usually do, log into X using the fail-safe x-term, start up metacity manually, then run firefox and grab the install CD for the most recent release of Ubuntu Studio. I got that downloaded and burned to DVD (luckily gnomebaker works just fine without the rest of GNOME Read more:Linux
a quickie... 2007-11-13 06:27:00 Just a quick update, I've re-done some tracks from Falafel Of Flatulence, namely the tracks that I don't have the original 4-track cassettes (for whatever reason). If you've downloaded any of them or the zip file containing the whole album you may want to head over to the Fart Waffle page and grab the updates.
in case you're bored... 2007-12-20 12:23:00 You can take this quiz thingie:
I received 63 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds QuizHow much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Guess the Sci-Fi Movie Sounds hereCanon powershot
I guess I did alright...
winding down after the holidays... 2008-01-23 05:44:00 Well, the holidays are thankfully over and things are getting back to normal around here. And we finally got our Wii back, as it had to be sent in to get serviced. Turns out in some of the older models leaving the Wii in standby mode with WiiConnect24 turned on means that the wifi card will eventually cook the graphic chip, which ultimately means you start seeing small graphic problems as you're playing games or even on the main menu screen. Here's an example (though the guy's camera isn't that great).
Still, it was a pretty easy process. I called the number on the bottom of the Wii, gave them the serial number, they then sent me an e-mail with a link where I could print out a label for FedEx. All I had to do was track down a suitable box and go to a drop off loca
well that was fun 2008-04-08 12:37:00 Just upgraded some stuff on the server this afternoon including the kernel, so I rebooted the box and wouldn't you know it didn't want to come back up at all. I went down into the basement to check it out and of course it was sitting there waiting for the power button to be pressed (it's a pretty old machine). So I shut it off, turned it back on and of course it promptly turned right back off again. I spent a few minutes trying a few things to get it working again, including unplugging the external HD (I had an older one that for whatever reason would cause the box to refuse to power up if it was plugged in), unplugging the UPS, fiddling with the keyboard and so on.
But no luck. So I changed my desktop upstairs to have a static IP address, slapped together a quick "my s
web conferencing... 2008-04-21 05:21:00 At work I was asked to look into any potential open source web conferencing tools that we can use as part of our new support system which will maybe get deployed sometime this year. I recall looking into this a little bit a couple years ago and really didn't find anything, so I wasn't to hopeful I'd find anything this time either.
Go figure though the second hit on Google was WebHuddle, it's GPL, runs on JBoss and has Linux, Windows and Mac support. I had it up and running in about 10 minutes or so and have done a little bit of testing, and while it's not as fast as WebEx for desktop sharing it's still decent enough, I think the cross-platform support beats that out anyway, as the capturing is done by a pretty small pure Java applet.
So just in case anyone
new ultrasound pictures! 2008-06-08 01:47:00 We had to go up to Portland, ME to get a level 2 ultrasound since the machine apparently wasn't that good at our normal place. Here's a teaser, click on it to get to the whole album.
And he's definitely a boy! In this pic he's either yawning or giving his primal scream...
streaming audio around the house 2008-06-11 06:21:00 Lately I've been really into listening to music, or at least just having it playing while I work or clean or whatever. Up until recently I've been using the excellent Jinzora streaming media server, which is a PHP-based web app that can either stream files via HTTP or control mpd. I've mostly been using the streaming feature, either I'd stream tunes to my desktop in the offic
ultrasound video 2008-06-14 02:40:00 I hope the poor kid isn't gonna be scarred for life when he finds out later on that there's been vids of him posted on teh intarwebs from before he was born.
Anyway, the level 2 ultrasound folks let you bring up a DVD and they'll burn the whole session to disc for ya.
Here's part 1:
And here's part 2:
There's a fullscreen button in the lower-right corner of Read more:video
some new developments... 2008-06-29 14:21:00 So the biggie is that my company just announced that we're being acquired by Progress Software. The transaction is expected to close sometime in September. For me it could really be good, as Progress has an office in Nashua, NH and Bedford, MA, which would really help out my commute. Lately the drive down to Waltham has been more atrocious than normal for some reason. But anyway, Progres
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