{"id":98,"date":"2008-12-26T05:29:39","date_gmt":"2008-12-26T05:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.gregbueno.com\/wp\/vexvox\/2008\/12\/26\/christmas_swag\/"},"modified":"2008-12-26T05:29:39","modified_gmt":"2008-12-26T05:29:39","slug":"christmas_swag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/2008\/12\/26\/christmas_swag\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas swag"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#039;m at the age where it&#039;s easier for my family just to hand me cash and to let me get what I want for myself. They can&#039;t get me anything simple like a Wii or an iPod Touch. No &#8212; I would ask Santa for exotic stuff like bass traps, monitor speakers, scores by Morton Feldman and Steve Reich or albums by VOLA &amp; THE ORIENTAL MACHINE and KAREN.<\/p>\n<p>I also live 2,000 miles away from the closest immediate family, 4,000 miles from the majority of my family. And the number of friends on which I&#039;m willing to spend money is barely a handful.<\/p>\n<p>All that to say, I don&#039;t do many gift exchanges. I participated in one last night at a dinner party, on which I spent $5.25 trying get there because I got lost on some toll roads. (Go Christmas spirit.) I&#039;ve got a gift exchange coming up with Double-A, which is really just an excuse to eat at Musashino. That&#039;s about it.<\/p>\n<p>So this list of Christmas swag is &#8230; minimal.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A R\u00f8de NT1-A condenser microphone.<\/li>\n<li>Sony Sound Forge 9<\/li>\n<li><em>Mastering Audio<\/em> by Bob Katz<\/li>\n<li><em>In the Aeroplane Over the Sea<\/em> by Neutral Milk Hotel<\/li>\n<li><em>Feed the Animals<\/em> by Girl Talk<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The <em>Mastering Audio<\/em> book was purchased with funds provided in part by my mom, who has this running gag for Christmas. It&#039;s great. She&#039;ll buy this tacky Christmas toy and find nooks and crannies into which she&#039;ll stuff cash. And she&#039;s been pretty clever about the places she&#039;ll put it. Some years required tweezers.<\/p>\n<p>I tell people I bought the R\u00f8de microphone with my company bonus, but in reality, I put that thing on Guitar Center credit. I usually get some form of cash for Christmas, and my plan is to use it to pay part of it down. It&#039;s a more intersting and simpler story just to say I bought it with the bonus. Is it really Christmas gift if I still have to pay for part of it? I&#039;ll consider it one since I&#039;ve been meaning to buy another microphone for a long time now.<\/p>\n<p>What I did buy with the bonus was Sony Sound Forge 9. I&#039;ve been wanting to upgrade since I started working on some Eponymous 4 tracks with Japanese titles. The MP3 render supported only ISO-8859-1 tagging, and I needed UTF-8. Sound Forge 9 supports UTF-8.<\/p>\n<p>The Neutral Milk Hotel and Girl Talk albums were purchased while I was Christmas shopping for my nephew and niece over at Waterloo Records. Maybe I should just consider those my usual CD purchases in a month.<\/p>\n<p>The dinner party gift exchange limited purchases to $5, so I came away with:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A journal<\/li>\n<li>A USB flash drive<\/li>\n<li>A budget 2-CD set of classical music used in movies<\/li>\n<li>Soap<\/li>\n<li>A Swiss Army knife<\/li>\n<li>A bag of dried tropical fruit<\/li>\n<li>An electronic organizer<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I actually like all of those gifts. I streamlined &#8212; I bought two packs of Moleskin journals that come three in a pack and split them up among everyone. Yeah, not very personalized.<\/p>\n<p>I&#039;ll amend this list if anything else arrives.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#039;m at the age where it&#039;s easier for my family just to hand me cash and to let me get what I want for myself. They can&#039;t get me anything simple like a Wii or an iPod Touch. No &#8212; I would ask Santa for exotic stuff like bass traps, monitor speakers, scores by Morton [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkgj-1A","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}