I’ve been equally neglectful of all my websites in the past few weeks because I’ve been plugging away at my NaSoAlMo album. I’m pleased to report I now have only two more minutes worth of music left to finish. Updated files forthcoming.
[UPDATE, 11/19/2006, 11:11 AM] Scratch that — I’m fucking done!
I know what I want for Christmas: Sony Sound Forge 8.
Sound Forge comes bundled with another program named CD Architect 5.2, which I’ve been using in the last few days. That sound you hear is me drooling in the manner as Homer Simpson at the mention of the word "donuts".
CD Architect allows you to prepare a CD master compliant with the Red Book standard, whatever that means. All I know is that it gives me so much more control over how to program a CD track listing than Nero or Roxio.
I’ve been on full tilt with working on my album for NaSoAlMo, and this weekend was the first I was actually blocked. So I spent some time trying out Finale.
Finale is touted as the premier typesetting software for music manuscripts. When I saw an academic version for sale at the closing of Brook Mays a few weeks back, I scooped it up. A full version costs a good $600, and I managed to grab it for $107.
I played around with it today, and I’m glad I didn’t shell out that additional $493. As thorough as Finale can be, the user interface is one of the most difficult I’ve ever encountered.
My company paid out the first half of its yearly profit-sharing, and it was a pretty nice sum. Now that I’m flush with all that cash, I’ve felt the urge to spend, spend, spend.
Should I blow it on monitor speakers like I’ve been threatening to do for more than a year? I’ve been thinking about getting some more comfortable headphones.
How about more studio software? What can Ableton Live do for me that Cakewalk doesn’t? SONAR 6 is out now — maybe I should upgrade?
The partition of my hard drive where I store MP3s is filling up — I should really consider another external hard drive. Or maybe a new internal hard drive and a separate hard disk enclosure?
Expedia is having a sale on flights to Hawaiʻi — maybe a visit is in order?
So many options, and the truth is … the money is already spent. It’s called a credit card balance. (D’oh.)
*Sigh*.
Oh do I feel wistful for the days when address-scraping robots seeking out mailto: links was the extent of a spammer’s threat. Of course, spammers have been hitting guestbooks, blog comments and trackbacks for a while now. But a contact form or a registration page — no advantage there.
I stopped using the mailto protocol more than six years ago, and the only spam I received from a comment form was sent by an actual human. Not anymore.
The bots are customized now. Someone out there actually took the time to reverse engineer my forms for the purpose of sending spam. I’ve been battling a particularly nasty bot in the past week, and I’m confounded by the idea someone had so much time on their hands to pick my site out of the millions out there on the Internets.
What the fuck ever.
I made my left wrist hurt mighty good on Sunday.
I’d been working all weekend on my NaSoAlMo album, and I was really struggling with NaSoPiAlMo No. 2.
It’s a piece that employs a very active left hand, which I haven’t developed very well. I also use the left hand to CTRL-X, CTRL-C and CTRL-V when I’m working in Cakewalk SONAR. An entire weekend of that left my wrist in a very raw state. That’s what years of being a tech professional does to a person.
I’ve so far recorded 20 of the 29 minutes required for my NaSoAlMo album. Tonight, I wrote and recorded "NaSoPiAlMo No. 6", a 5’30" song that quotes Sigur Rós at the end. I think this song has a vocal version in its future.
So far, I like what I’ve done, even if a few tracks bear too much of a resemblance to their source material. I get downright minimalistic on "NaSoPiAlMo No. 2" and "NaSoPiAlMo No. 5". Too much Michael Nyman.
Waterloo Records holds a store-wide sale twice a year. It’s been a while since went to the sale as a customer instead of an employee, so I’d forgotten about a strange phenomenon that occurs when I try to shop at that time, which happened again this past weekend.
So far, with little failure, the following things occur when I go the Waterloo Records store-wide sales:
A few weeks ago, I gave up.
Many years back, I set the settings on Windows to display white text on a black background. My eyes were hurting from staring at white backgrounds for long stretches of time, so I took matters into my own hands.
Well, it was a futile effort.
Interface developers seldom, if ever, take into consideration a user’s custom settings. How do I know? I know from all the times I’ve encountered my default white text blanched out by an interface’s white background. Or an interface’s black text camouflaged with my black background.
Yeah, that’s a comment form down at the bottom of the page there.
Comments have been supported on this site since the beginning, but I hid the interface behind my custom-built account system to prevent spambots from detecting my Movable Type installation.
Well, I upgraded to Movable Type 3.33 and enabled chip’s force preview plug-in. I will brave the spammers now. If you have an account already, you can still log in and pre-populate the fields with your info. I love providing options.
All comments are moderated, by the way.
I keep meaning to write these blog entries, but my blog-writing time (i.e. in the office) is being curtailed by actual, you know, work.
So here’s a note to myself to write:
This entry will self-destruct once all these other entries have been written.