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RAC in RFT

My friend André got a cover story writeup in the RiverFront Times. Read it!

From the article:

“The [Shins] liked it enough to release the song, “Sleeping Lessons,” in April 2007 as the B-side of a UK single. It’s actually one of the few tangible artifacts of Anjos’ remixes. (Others include Tokyo Police Club’s “Be Good” — which appeared on the Toronto spazz-pop wunderkinds’ Smith EP — and a few seven-inch singles.) But a lack of physical product doesn’t mean Anjos isn’t making money. He doesn’t earn royalties on his remixes, but he now commands $1,500 to $3,000 per track. Of course, he’ll work at a discount if he can leverage that into access to industry contacts or the guarantee of future work. Like the smaller indie bands he remixes, Anjos understands that at this stage in his career any exposure is potentially valuable.”

By Annie Zaleski

Published: March 12, 2008, River Front Times

Anyway. Go read it!

Demolition

Jessica and I spent the weekend demo-ing our “library” room. Okay, to be honest, she stripped wallpaper and I demoed the walls around the stairs. Our changes are going to look amazing. I took out one wall surrounding our first flight of stairs before the landing. It makes the room look a lot bigger. I’ll be building a half wall this week with 1×6 that’ll be painted and placed on top as a sort of banister. It’s going to look great.

Then we have a row of bead board wainscoting that’ll travel round the rest of the room, with a chair rail at the top and a wide baseboard. All in a rich chocolate brown. It’s going to be incredible. I would have finished the stairs today but didn’t have the lumber I needed. And with a Home Depot/Lowes being half hour away (not to mention gas prices here being $3.18) and our lumberyard being closed Sundays, I got stuck. I could’ve reused some of the old wood from the framing, but it’s super hard. I need some new tools!

I’ll have to get some photos up here, but at the moment I am too comfortable to get up and grab the camera and find a USB cable.

death.

About a year and a half or so ago Apple Inc. commissioned a battery recall which included my aging 12″ PowerBook G4. Like any self-respecting Apple owner, I sent my battery away and received the replacement for free. I had had that battery for about 2 years and, according to Coconut Battery, I had a good 98% of my original capacity left.

See, as a battery ages it loses its charge capacity. 98% is pretty dang good–with the screen at half-brightness I was still getting 3.5 hours or so. That’s good. When it was knew it maxed out at 5 hours with the screen as dim as it would go without being off. Four hours-ish at half-brightness.

So I got the replacement thinking I would basically be getting added time of along battery life. Now, a year and a half later I get nigh 15 minutes at half-brightness. It is horrible. And to purchase a new battery from Apple would be $129. $129 just for it to peter out after not much time.

So I guess it’s time to start planning for a new Mac purchase. Probably after they redesign the MacBook Pro line. But I’m still a little bit pissed off about the short life span of my replacement battery.

Taxes!

I just finished my taxes. Decided to e-file. AND Illinois offers an e-file for state now. Taxes were way easier this year than last. Actually being a resident helps I guess. Once the refunds get in we can get our camera!!!

Wow. Boring post. I’m thinking of putting together a rant on global warming fanaticism. Maybe tomorrow. After we demo, drywall and then paint our library room. It’s nice to have projects again. Pictures to come, I’m sure.

Television

Tonight is LOST. I love LOST. Is that crazy? No way. I am super-excited about it. We generally get together with André, Liz and Katie. It’s a great time, because we all love it.

Once The Office is back on we’ll start up our Office parties again. Top Chef is coming back next week, I think. That’s a great show.

——–

I had a great idea for a WordPress plugin, but I’m crap at php. I would love a plugin that takes the time of post– the_time( ) — and checks it against the last song you scrobbled then inserts a span class that inserts the artist and track name along with a picture of the band/album. So in effect it functions as an automatic way to insert the song you were listening at time of post. Like Xanga, but automatic.

Too bad I don’t know much. Maybe if I ever decide to get into php I’ll do something like that.

Working it out

I’ve been making a few changes here and there the last couple of days. I’m having a CSS issue that I think is due to something in the Sandbox framework I’m using. And it’s bugging me: mainly because I can’t find the problem. Everything seems correct.

I made a couple of changes in the sidebar, which I think is excellent. One of them is when a single post is viewed, the meta data for the post shows up in the first sidebar. That’s cleaned it up a little bit. I’m still working on it. I am, however, really happy with the overall look.

I’m getting tired of having to look at the same ‘ol flickr photos in my picture grid. We’re planning on getting a D80 in a month or so (as soon as we get our tax refund). So that’ll be nice.

Oh! Another note. The LifeStream feature. Well… apparently I can’t get the latest version. Because it’s not being hosted on the guy’s site or on wordpress.org – so, I guess I’m stuck until it shows up. Oh well. It half-works. You just have to scroll down a bit. If you want, check it out here.

New Theme

I finally got around to designing a new theme for my blog here. Actually, it’s a test for my new website that I will be working on. I recently registered jggoodman.com and will be hosting my portfolio, blog and other such things there. I’m pretty excited about it. No more WordPressMU (which is a pain in the butt).

This is still a beta release, because I’ve only spent about a day and a half on it. I’m pretty sure that there are some things that either don’t work or are styled incorrectly. If you see any of those, PLEASE leave me a comment telling me what you’ve found.

Snow Puppy

We woke up this morning to eight inches of snow on the ground, cars, trash cans… it’s gorgeous. It snowed most of yesterday and just kept snowing. We had at least a couple of inches when we went to André’s house for LOST last night, and snowed all night long. It was still snowing this morning when I went to shovel the walkway down to our car.

I also had to clear some space for our dwarf puppy. It would have been tough for him to use the facilities (as it were) in 8″ of snow. So I shoveled a small patch for him. When I got him outside, he still wanted to play in the snow though.

two ipods?!?!

I got my first gen iPod Nano back today. The one that was stolen. It’s still got all of my music on it and everything. So that’s nice.

My old external harddrive died when we got back, so I got an discounted upgrade through Western Digital. I lost all of my music when the old one died. So I’m getting what I can back onto my new one. It’s 400GB worth. that means I can use time machine on my work computer properly (since this HDD is almost twice the size of the one I’ve got inside my Mac Pro at work.)

So yay! Sorry there haven’t been many updates, and no visual ones at all on this site. I’m pretty busy with work and that makes me not want to do stuff at home (plus it’s hard to go from CS3 on dual 17″ flatpanels to CS3 on a single 12″ PowerBook). Hopefully soon. I’ve got some good ideas. Just need to get them down in pixels.

back home for Christmas

Jessica and I have been in California for the last week or so. It’s been pretty great. And today is Christmas!

It’s 6:30ish a.m., and no one is awake yet; no one but us, that is. We put our own stocking stuffers in everyone’s stockings this morning — the puppy woke us up to remind us. Now we’re in waiting mode for everyone to get up. Jessica has a problem getting back to sleep on Christmas morning ;) .

We asked Danny a few days ago if he would spend Christmas with us. He got here yesterday afternoon and went to church with us and spent the night. We watched “Battle of the Nutcrackers” last night on Ovation TV. Crazy. Check out Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut, it’s insane.

It’s good to have Danny here. We missed him, and it seems like he may have missed us. Coping with California can be tough for people not from here.

It’s been great in any case. Have a Happy Christmas!

california

we made it. it was a long drive, but we got in Sunday night. it’s been a great vacation so far. Really nice to be with the family and hang out and buy Christmas presents.

Cors is doing well too. After my parents’ dogs were groomed, we all became a happy family. Cors has been playing with Linus a lot. he doesn’t really like Lucy at all.

Anyway. Five days till Christmas!

my ipod was stolen

Last night. My iPod Nano was stolen out of my office, along with its docking station. However, the police caught the kids doing it. So, there is a good chance that it’s at the police station. I hope I get it back before January. Or before we go out to California. the latter probably won’t happen .

I decided back in September…

I decided back in September to join the Greenville Choral Union to sing Handel’s Messiah once more. I haven’t done this since I was apart of GC Choir and the first week I could tell how long it had been since I had sung any serious choral music.

Doc threw in a doozy though. We’re also singing Bach. And it is HARD. So hard that it makes me frustrated. Mainly because I want to do it really well, but there’s no way with the limited amount of practice we have as a group. With amateur singers from the community and GC Choir members that can’t sing (I swear! Doc’s either getting sloppy or they are just really lazy choir members), it makes hearing a bass part in a Bach piece maddening.
I think the biggest problem is once a week rehearsals for an hour and a half. To even pull off something like Messiah and Bach’s Mass… is a great accomplishment for any choir. But to expect a community driven, hodge-podged group to do it justice… oh man. I feel like I have to carry some of the pieces, and in the Bach, I am so unsure in most places that I sometimes just start moving my lips and cut out the sound.
It’s a great experience, but I wish there was a serious community choir. Or that I could just perform with GC Choir. I miss choral singing.