WorshipGuitarist

Not to get overly political or anything, but I really don’t like our choices for the upcoming election. McCain vs. Obama vs. Hilary? Wow.

I guess I’ll leave it at that. Discuss. 

Check out this screen capture from the new Iron Man trailer.

Apparently, the Iron Man suit was made with a Mac. Go figure.

Last night, my wife and I went with some friends to a church in Houston called Ecclesia. We’ve been there before, but it’s always good to go back. Pastor Chris Seay is such an engaging speaker. He’s obviously a very sharp guy, but he never comes across as condescending, like he’s trying to show off his seminary credentials or something.

Last night he spoke a lot about preparing for Lent. I was raised as a Baptist and I’m pretty ignorant about the whole liturgical calendar thing, so I’ve never really given much thought to Lent. I mean, I’ve always heard about people giving up chocolate or caffeine for a month, but I never really understood (or cared to understand) what it meant.

Normally, Robbie Seay (Chris’ brother) leads worship, but last night Jeremy McCasland led. I’ve met him before, as manager for the Robbie Seay Band, but I didn’t know that he was a musician himself. It was really good - he played guitar and sang several of Robbie’s songs. It was cool to hear them in that context - stripped down to the bare essentials. The songs held up very well.

It was a good night.

I got my new hard drive today. It’s a Hitachi 200 GB 7200 RPM with a 16 MB cache. I installed it in a USB 2.0 enclosure this afternoon and used Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate the contents of the old drive. That little task took almost 2 hours, but once it was done, the rest of the process took about 10 minutes.

Apple made the new MacBooks much easier to deal with in terms of upgrading the RAM and hard drive. You just remove the battery, remove three screws, take off a little L-shaped bracket, and you have access to the upgradeable components. It literally takes minutes to do this stuff.

I was already very pleased with my MB, but now it’s a much more competent little beast. Apple would have charged me over $2300 (including tax) to configure a similarly spec’ed machine, but I was able to get mine together for $1400 ($1100 for the MB + $100 for 4MB RAM + $200 for the HD).

I bought 4 GB of RAM from Other World Computing for ~$100 last week, and my machine has been screaming fast. Installation was very easy. You just take the battery off, remove 3 screws, out with the old, in with the new. It took less than 10 minutes from shutdown to startup.

I ordered a 200 GB 7200rpm hard drive with a 16MB cache (read: big and fast) yesterday, so should be able to pop that in this weekend. That installation will be a little more time consuming, as I’ll have to clone the contents of my current hd to the new one before I put it in. Over a USB 2.0 connection, it’ll probably take a couple of hours. =/

Once that’s done, though, I’ll be ready to do some serious recording. I still need a hardware interface so that I can use a microphone and record my actual amp, rather than rely on emulation software. I’ve got my eye on the Apogee Duet, which is supposed to be unreal. It’s pricey, but it looks like it’s the best portable firewire interface on the market - and it’s designed for the Mac.

In other news, I’ve been working on a design for my upcoming non-wordpress site, which still needs a name. I’ve got a couple of possibilities, but I’m not 100% yet. Stay tuned.

Back in August, I posted a tab from Song of Hope by Robbie Seay Band. Well, there was a pretty huge typo in there. A couple of the notes at the end were off by a fret. The crazy thing is that nobody pointed this out. I mean, that post has been viewed over 800 times - did nobody play through it? If you did, did you just decide that I’m a moron or something?

Anyway, it’s fixed now. I’d like to thank Mike for pointing out my mistake.

I think I may have mentioned before that I hate the WordPress editor. Well, I really hate it today. Seriously, I was ready to punch something this morning. It just did not want to let me fix that tab. I just need to bite the bullet and buy a new domain and Ecto or something.

Later. 

My wife has a small photography business and I have been working on a website for her to display her stuff. We just got Adobe Flash CS3 and I’m trying to learn the ins and outs of it so that I can create a decent photo gallery for her. Some of it is pretty simple, but some of it looks pretty intimidating - like all the ActionScript stuff.

Anyway, does anyone have any experience with this? Any advice, tips, tricks, book recommendations, etc would be greatly appreciated. 

I’m trying to think about some good names for my new site. I want it to be short, memorable, and somewhat guitar-related. Any ideas?

Apparently, I went over 20,000 hits a couple of days ago and never even noticed. How about that? Well, thanks for coming around and seeing what I have to say. I will probably start looking into something else with the blog thing in the near future - probably moving away from the wordpress.com domain. I’ll let you know when that happens.

What is the deal with the WordPress editor? It seems like every time I click “Save and Continue Editing” it gets rid of all my HTML formatting. Then I have to go in and reinsert all the spaces between paragraphs and make sure that everything lines up. It seems like I always forget about one paragraph, so I have to go back and do it again.

My last post took me about 15 minutes longer than it should have because of this. It also didn’t recognize the command for the audio player until the third time I typed it.

I’m just about ready to buy a domain and hosting from somewhere (GoDaddy.com maybe) and just doing my own thing. It can’t be that hard. 

Does anyone else have the same issues?