作譜

A week of suck

Vital Signs

Monday: ATM in my office eats my card. I cancel it but now must way for a new one to arrive in the mail.

Tuesday: One of my trashy neighbors decides it would be fun to start screaming into a karaoke machine with the echo on full at 4 a.m. Sleep-deprived, I show up to work and call the apartment office to find out how to get that motherfucker evicted.

Wednesday: An upgrade to a new internal drive goes horribly bad because I have only one SATA port with which to do a data transfer. It would have been easier if I could have set up a master and slave, but SATA doesn’t support that.

Thursday: My TiVo stops responding to the remote control, thereby forcing a reboot. Purchase of a hard drive enclosure still can’t address the data transfer, so I spend the entire night reinstalling Windows and all my applications. I wonder whether it’s a Mercury retrograde. (It’s not.)

Friday: I don’t know yet. The day has just begun. My mind tends to go to very dark places.

L10N 4 B6G

Technophilia Social

That’s not l33t. "L10N" is a common abbreviation for "localization", and I figure I may as well abbreviate "blogging" to "B6G" — you know, just to be a smart ass.

I’m less impressed by the idea of a CEO blogging than by the fact his blog is translated into several languages.

Wow. That’s a great idea.

That would be great for Musicwhore.org. At the very least, Japanese readers should experience my total lack of Japanese comprehension in their own language!

I know my finances suck, but c’mon …

Vital Signs

An ATM in my office ate my card this morning. Literally.

It had its usually welcoming greeting, "Insert card". When I did, I got an angry red screen that told me the machine was out of service. I hit cancel, thinking the ATM would spit my card back out. But it didn’t.

I went to the receptionist, but she couldn’t really help me all that much. I called my bank to cancel the card. I still need to get cash.

Wow. Today is really going to suck.

On podcasting: What about the voice?

Technophilia Aural

It’s nice to see HawaiiUP up (haha!) and running again, especially after having been overshadowed by the phenomenally successful Lost podcast, The Transmission. Even Dreama has jumped on the podcasting bandwagon.

I toyed with podcasting back in March, but I never launched it. I was still unfamiliar with my microphone, and the shows I did produce sounded wildly inconsistent. It also sucks living next to loud trashy neighbors and a bus route.

I’ve since had more practice with my microphone — and just as importantly, setting up my "sound booth" — and I’m thinking about revisiting the podcast. Out of curiosity, I thumbed through some books about podcasting at the bookstore and tried to find how much space the authors dedicate to practical speaking tips. The results were just as bemusing as when I first explored the topic back in March.

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Have fun at ACL? Is that even possible?

Capital of Texas

I’ve seen numerous blog entries and articles about how to survive the ACL Music Festival. Here’s my advice: don’t go.

I worked at the very first festival, and it scarred me for life. My perception of the festival is perhaps colored by the fact that in the three years I’ve gone, I was never there to have fun. I was there to make sure drunken assholes and juvenile delinquints didn’t take five-finger discounts.

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Let them eat cake

Technophilia

Cakewalk has released Sonar 6, the latest version of its recording studio software. I use Sonar for my work on Eponymous 4, and I’m waiting for the reviews to come in before I decide to upgrade.

I upgraded from Sonar 4 to Sonar 5 last year, and I don’t think I really got much out of it, feature-wise. I got more out of upgrading from Studio Edition to Producer Edition.

In fact, Sonar 5 turned out to be pretty buggy. I’m not sure I want to upgrade to Sonar 6 if it’s unstable, even if it’s tricked out with new features. This thread from the Cakewalk forums, however, does mention some things that sound tempting, namely audio quantize.

If I do decide to upgrade, I’ll do what I’ve done the last few times — wait for a sale. Christmas is coming soon.

Does this résumé make me look fat?

Technophilia Professional

Using the criteria lined out by this list of résumé pitfalls, I think my own résumé is a bit dull when describing the professional experience, whereas the miscellaneous stuff sounds more flash.

While I don’t use buzzwords, I do list the relevant technology used at each job, which is why I guess I get a bunch of random calls from third-party recruiters.

I didn’t realize recruiters and hiring managers had that much of a disconnect with their filtering methods. I always wondered why I felt something was always getting lost in translation when some recruiter would pitch me a job description that even I could tell I wasn’t qualified for.

Nuevo Taco X-Press

Capital of Texas

Have you been to the new Taco X-Press? It’s been open for the past two weeks now.

Although the interior is new and comfortable and spacious, the decor is still every bit as funky as the original shack. Just … cleaner.

Of course, "spacious" depends on the time of day. I try to get to Taco X-Press right when it opens, when the line is at its relatively shortest. I couldn’t manage that this past weekend, and the line threatened to snake out the door. Every table inside was practically taken, and the ambient noise from all the customers rang throughout the high ceiling.

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