28.4.05

Ambivalence

Finally got (most of) my floor back today (I had a small waterleak in February), hopefully the carpenter will finish it by tomorrow so I can spend the weekend putting stuff back where it belongs. Can´t wait! It´s been a total mess around here for the last couple of months and I´m fed up with it.

On a happier note, I got my first PHP/MySQL based website up and running yesterday, and I feel quite content. It went much smoother than expected, and was pretty much like installing and setting up a CGI-script. Cool.

Tomorrow is the last day at work for one of my coolest co-workers, after 6 years it feels a bit weird (and sad). Not so cool. That´s life, though; nothing stays the same forever.

I think this is as deep as I´ll get this week.

25.4.05

Ouch

I got a much needed full night of quality shut-eye and woke up feeling fully restituted from the weekend brouhaha. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and therefore I arrived at work...

...with a total b*tch of a headache. Go figure. I had to retreat to the lunch-room for half an hour two times today, just to gather the strength to get through the day. Of course, with an in-store humidity of about 20% and a temperature of about 25 degrees Celcius, a headache is bound to happen now and then. It´s so darn dry in there, that I can hear the acoustic guitars scream in pain as their necks slowly and inevitably curl up into banana-shaped pieces of wood.

Feeling better now, but still a little groggy. Don´t know why. But I´m certain that a good two or three hours of Monday night quality TV will set things straight; "Scrubs" at nine, "24" (season 4) at nine thirty and my favourite guilty pleasure, "Smallville" at ten thirty (hey, Buffy has ended, ok?!).

At least my head will hurt for a reason tomorrow.

24.4.05

Getting motivated is tiresome

Back from a two-day retailer/distributor weekend conference, and I feel a bit exhausted. There have been a couple of very nice seminars in motivation technique and sales/customer treatment, and I´ve seen some new products from the distributors. Nothing exiting, really, just the bread-and-butter stuff that makes the wheels go round.

Best thing was probably getting faces to go with all the names I see and voices I hear on the phone every day; there was a moment of equal surprise at the bar last night when I bumped into one of the guys I buy goods from on a regular basis - we were both sure the person on the other end of the line was some 40 year old and not a guy in his (late) twenties! Good to see there aren´t TOO many grumpy old men in my line of business, we need some (relativly) young upstarts as well.

Very, very tired now, gonna hit the sack early tonight, methinks.

22.4.05

A Jazzmutant ate my Mind!

Ok, this is just sooooo cool: The Jazzmutant Lemur, a poly touch-screen based controller unit made by some wacky French guys! Now, this might seem like a silly thing at first glance, but for those of us who indulge in electronic music escapades and aren't keyboard virtousos it could open up a heap of sweet live manipulation possibilities for our software synths and sequencers...

...IF we could afford one. At 2000 Euros (what's that, 2600-700 dollars?) it is pretty much out of my price range, at least for now. Also, it doesn't transmit MIDI, but uses the OpenSound protocol. A "translation layer" will of course solve that problem, but I still get the feeling this is made for the Max/MSP crowd and their close followers. Fine with me, but it does bring up images of über-artsy soundscape/noisescape artists waving their hands around the surface of these things, impressing a crowd of well-dressed, wine-sipping, silently head-nodding twenty-somethings who are simply BEYOND the boring restrictions of rhythm and melody.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

21.4.05

Music of the day

Being a music freak, I tend to pester my surroundings whenever I discover some (more or less) obscure band, mailing links to everyone I know, waxing lyrically about it at work, over coffee, at parties - I´m sure you know the type. Lately, I´ve made two such discoveries: Mandalaband and Evil Nine. I stumbled unto Mandalaband in a funny way; one of their songs was used as the theme song for a Norwegian TV series that just about every kid (well, every kid in their late twenties) know about (click here if you´re Norwegian). I´ve always loved the song, but not been able to figure out just who made it - I always believed it was composed specifically for the series by some Norwegian musician. Well, a couple of weeks ago I finally found the man behind the music, and bought the wonderful "The Eye of Wendor" album - an hour of late 70s prog-rock bliss! Good stuff.



Evil Nine on the other hand, I found on the highly entertaining I-am-bored website (or was it Kontraband?): a wickedly cool breakbeat romp with a nice flash-animation to boot - how could I resist? Their "You can be special too" album is on its way to me as we speak. I found tasters of all tunes on the album over at Beatport, in case anyone wants to check them out.



Reading through this, I realize my musical taste may appear as slightly eclectic. Rest assured, it is.

20.4.05

I want a Nord Modular G2! (Thank you, Sweden)

I really, really do. Speaking to a friend and fellow music gear geek today made me realize just HOW much I desire one of these babies. Now, those of you out there who lead normal lives (bless you) may not know what a Nord Modular G2 is, and I don´t blame you. However, a short briefing may be necessary. The Nord Modular G2 (or just G2, as we affectionados call it) is a Swedish digital modular synthesizer, made exclusively to make synth geeks like yours truly breathe heavily, drool a bit and then enter an almost vegetative state as we ponder the endless possibilities for making strange, burbling noises with this $2500 red-and-black device.


Then, we check our credit-card balance and cry for a while. This process usually lasts for anything from a couple of weeks to a year, depending on our financial situation and will-power. Fittingly, coming from the land of the real Borg, resistance IS futile and we WILL be assimilated. Pun intended.

I´d like to take this moment to thank Sweden for the wonderful things they´ve given us, including (but not limited to): Ikea, meatballs, Clavia, the Chef in Muppet-show, some sweet Amiga demos and music, Astrid Lindgren, cheap meat (it´s a Norwegian thing). Oh, and that Nobel guy was pretty cool, too. Take a bow, Swedes everywhere!

Hello, World!

Ah, yes. So they got to me at last, all the "What, you don't blog? And you call yourself a geek? Tsk tsk." people. Okay, now I'm here to change the World of Blogging, to rip through the foundations of reality, to tell you what the Matrix REALLY is. Or not.

Anyhoo, since it's pretty slow at work today (hey, I found time to set up my blog, didn't I?) I've spent way too much time at I-am-bored, KVR Audio and waiting for the new The Crest site to go live. Oh wait, that's what I do everyday. Oh well.

Now, since I really haven't blogged before, you'll have to live with my more or less meaningless drivel for a while. Hopefully I'll get better at things as time goes by, but don't hold your breath.