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 location to get the ball rolling. It took them about 2 or 3 weeks I guess to get it back to me. All of our save games were intact, however we can't edit our existing Miis. Also I had to re-download the Internet channel and the virtual console games I had purchased, but that all was only a slight hassle.

This will mean my 360 can take a break for awhile.

Unfortunately I haven't been doing much music-related stuff, work has been keeping me pretty busy. Kristen and I are on a big health kick though and have been trying to get to the gym as much as possible, as well as change our diet. This show has been the main inspiration. Funny also how many commercials for weight loss pills/plans there are at the beginning of the year, I hadn't noticed that before.

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.

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 me.

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 running), backed up a bunch of other stuff to DVD (love DVD-R) and rebooted. Certainly it can't be that simple, can it?

Well, no it can't be that simple. Upon reaching the initial installation screen it seems that Ubuntu Studio's installer didn't want to detect my USB keyboard. I went and hunted down a USB-to-PS/2 adapter for my keyboard and then found that my machine (it's the XPS 410) actually doesn't have PS/2 ports. Guess that's why there's like 20 USB ports on this thing. That was kind of a deal-breaker for Ubuntu Studio, I kind of looked around for a second or two to see if there was an easy fix, but didn't honestly spend any time on it.

I rather wanted to try out some of the other audio-focused Linux distributions. I finally settled on 64 Studio. It's Debian based, so it's not all that different from Ubuntu, I've really come to like apt and also just like the way Debian distros are set up. Anyway, 64 Studio installed cleanly out of the box. I naturally enabled the testing repositories to get more recent versions of all of the applications. The only snag I ran into there was with one of the packages related to bootsplash, but I was able to quickly find a fix.

So far I really like it. It comes with the real-time kernel set up out of the box, so I was able to get a good low latency set up right away. I also tried their tutorial on how to get VST stuff running but I found it's still far from perfect, I had to increase jackd's buffer sizes up to the point where the latency was unacceptable. But that's okay, I don't really have any VSTs that I've been dying to use anyway, there's plenty of great native DSSI/LADSPA plugins to use.

My initial impression when logging in is that the desktop environment reminds me of CentOS. Probably because it's the same GNOME version. But the nice thing is they actually bothered to make a menu entry for envy24control, something the Ubuntu Studio folks didn't do (maybe it's got an entry in the Gutsy version though). As I have this card it's an essential app.

Damn Iestyn, he's right on about me changing desktops every couple months.

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 still has video-ins and a decent picture. But the problem is it weighs some ungodly amount, we got it down into the basement originally because that was going to be the gaming area, but then the basement flooded and we just haven't gotten around to dealing with that. So this nice big TV's been sitting down there gathering dust. I've tried moving it in the past, it's really heavy and really unwieldy, there's no good way to get ahold of the thing to carry it any real distance. But this time I had a plan. I decided to take some 2×4s and lay them on the stairs and then kind of slide the TV up the 2×4s. Since the basement stairs have this nasty carpet running thing I didn't think the 2×4s would slide around too much.

With a lot of grunting and even more swearing I managed to get the thing halfway up the stairs. However my 2×4 was moving along with the TV, which meant it was now in danger of hitting the wall across from the basement doorway. I had to get Kristen to come over and push the thing back down so I could get the TV the rest of the way up the stairs. Once we got it upstairs, the plan was to then lug the thing's wheeled base up and use that to get the TV over into the living room.

Now that it's in place and the old TV is currently sitting in my "vocal booth" closet I've been happily gaming away. It's kind of big though and really dominates our living room, there's just no ignoring the giant black monolith over by the front door. I'm hoping though to get my TV repaired, then we can set that up in the bedroom...

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

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:

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 we can play two songs together, though I'm waiting for this book to show up so I can learn the guitar melodies, which is also going to be a great help for working on my technique.

I did get more guitar wall hangers though, so now the mandolin and acoustic are hanging up next to the Spotlight. It looks cool...

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

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 me a good half hour or so to get to GameStop. I finally get there, walk through the store to the back wall and... No copies on the shelf... Oh god, what have I become? Rather then ask if any copies were available and face rejection (I already had plenty of this trying to get a Wii) I just left.

As I was leaving I noticed the Wal-Mart sign across the street. I said to myself "What the heck" and pulled into the parking lot. This Wal-Mart in Derry has been around for awhile, it's small, the floor has that old yellow-ish hue, the cash registers are pretty beaten up looking. But I figured it'd be worth a shot to see if they had a copy kicking around.

And sure enough they did. They actually had like 5 or 6 copies. The woman who got my copy out of the case says to me "Gosh, I think this must have came out today". Twice actually. Sadly I said "Yes, it did" in response. Both times.

Thankfully so far the game has lived up to the hype, at least for me. I notice it's gotten a 9 rating on a review site or two, which is good enough for me. What sucks is the other game I've been dying waiting for, "Two Worlds" comes out tomorrow...

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.