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Laptop + Open Mic = ????

Every city has an open mic night, so why shouldn’t today’s electronic musicians take advantage of it?

I used to play live music, but I wasn’t exactly the stool-sitting, guitar-strumming type you’d find at an open mic. (I could be wrong, I don’t know what variety you see at an open mic nowadays.) Recently the music I’ve been creating has been on the Mac using GarageBand, Audacity, sound loops, etc… Does that make me any less of a musician? Why shouldn’t I perform for people?

So my idea is this: Show up at an open mic night, plug in the laptop, and start playing my songs. I have no idea what the crowd reaction would be, which is what makes the idea interesting. Sure the “playing” might only consist of clicking a mouse, but still, it’s music, right?

I can see this going in a whole nother direction as well. We all know that sometimes to entertain you must annoy (some would even say torture) the audience. So I suggest this twist, show up, connect the laptop, and just start a drum loop. Let that play for as long as possible (until they throw you off, cut the P.A., etc.) and for good measure, you will need some friends in the audience, who at first are unsure (obviously they should pretend to not know you) but a few minutes into your drum loop solo, they should start to go nuts, screaming “yeah!” and “owww!” and if possible, getting up and dancing.

Anyway, if you guys want to be the crowd, I’ll bring the laptop…

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Citizen Blogging Summit

Somehow I got roped into participating in this Citizen Blogging Summit (or “Citizen Blogger Summit”) which is taking place Friday, June 15th, 2007.

Citizen Blogger Summit

Maybe Newsradio 620 WTMJ will learn a little about blogging, you know, things like permalinks, or even linking to the bloggers you invite, instead of just putting their domain in plain text.

I’m really not sure what to expect. Mike Rohde and I are on the 2:25-3:10 Panel, Beyond Politics, Beyond Milwaukee. I’m guessing we are the ‘tech bloggers’ or maybe the token ‘non-political’ bloggers. Anyway, I’ll just prepare for this the same way I prepare for BarCamp or Web414 presentations, wait until the last minute, attempt to do nothing, then embrace the chaos.

The event is free, and includes lunch (which I will miss since I can’t be there all day) and I’m reasonably sure it will be interesting. I’m also reasonably sure I’ll be the person there who has been blogging for the longest time, unless Dave Winer shows up. :)

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Apple iMac (New!)

If all goes well, I should have a new 20″ Apple iMac in a few days.

Apple iMac

It’s really time for a new Mac. I mean, I probably would have kept on using my G4 for another year or more if it had not died. The last time I bought a new computer was 2001. I even got AppleCare this time, because honestly, I don’t think Apple builds machines as good as they did 6 years ago. (Definitely not as good as they did 10 years ago.) Anyway, I can’t wait to get it and see what it can do. Of course now I need to worry about Universal Binaries and all that Intel related stuff. (A quick check shows that a good number of apps I use daily already have Universal versions.) But honestly, even if the PowerPC apps run slow, they should still be faster than the old G4 was running them. I’ll let you know once I run it through it’s paces.

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Wave Goodbye

I created another song and got it uploaded to Ourmedia using SpinXpress.

It’s called Wave Goodbye.

I hope you enjoy it.

Or not.

(See Also: A Song at Ourmedia)


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R.I.P. PowerMac

My main Mac, the PowerMac G4 (Quicksilver) is dead. :(

I got it in 2001, so it’s just shy of 6 years old. It was used (and abused) daily, and ran as a server, so it was always on. Still, I think 6 years is a short life for a Mac. I’ve got Apple hardware twice that old that still runs fine. Through the years I upgraded the RAM many times, put in new hard drives, added a second video card, added USB cards, upgraded the optical drive… It was a good machine.

rippowermac.png

The details are fuzzy, but Saturday night, Dana was using her account, and thanks to “Fast User Switching” was switching it over to my account when it froze with a kernel panic. I figured it was no big deal, as I get a kernel panic about once or twice a year, so we called it a night, and I rebooted it.

I didn’t realize until Sunday morning at 5:30 AM that the Mac never rebooted properly. I could power it off, and then power it back on, but the monitor would never show anything. Panic? Not yet… I tried many, many reboots. I tried zapping the PRAM, removing some of the RAM, disconnecting the hard drives, starting from a DVD, trying another monitor, trying both video cards, and then I even pulled out the processor upgrade card, and put in the original one. Still no luck. It would chime the startup sound, and I could use the keyboard since the PRAM zap worked, but no dice, just dead.

Now was the time to panic slightly. I checked my backup strategy. I had most of the files I needed for clients. They get backed up to an external drive nightly. There was one project missing, which I stupidly had sitting on the desktop instead of in the ‘clients’ folder, but I was pretty sure that was backed up on my iPod as well. (Yay for multiple backup plans!) So my backups were good, but didn’t have everything, just client essentials.

At this point, I carefully removed the two hard drives from the Mac, and connected them to my iBook with the connector from one of my external USB hard drives. It’s all good. No data loss. To be honest, I would have been devastated if I had lost all my data. That’s the irreplaceable stuff. The computer? Sure I loved it, but it’s just a computer. It’s not my digital life.

So now what? My guess is the logic board is dead, which means the Mac is useless. I’ll run with the iBook as my main machine for now, while I formulate a plan. I have a few, I just need to determine which is best.