I downloaded this EP last week, and I’ve been listening to it in the car. It’s holding up pretty well – maybe I’m just desperate for something new to listen to. I guess I’m into the sound design and production of it – very nice though my car’s subwoofer. So I give it a cautious recommendation.

How to Destroy Angels

I’m testing out Google’s Friend Connect – you’ll notice it over there in the right hand column. I’m really not sure what it does, or how it rates on the Good vs. Evil scale, but we’ll see. I does seem to increase page load times, though.

Update: Too Slow, and I have no Friends. So I shut it off.

Matti and Sam were chasing a 3′ garter snake around the edge of a swap over at Bradley palmer. The lost track of it, then they noticed this 6′ long black racer. The cell phone picture doesn’t do it justice – it’s girth looked to be around 4″ – they didn’t try and catch this one.

I ran 4.1 mi in 1:01 – all Willowdale single track trails. My goal was to run as slow as possible for an hour, so I’m pretty happy with that. I’m hoping I can do this 3 times a week or so, and do something easier on the off-days.

Here’s the track on Garmin Connect – pretty nice, Check it out on their site via “View Details”, with heart rate and everything.

The Good News: got the cast off, the thumb is doing very well.

The Bad News: got a new cast, and it’s on for three weeks.

I snapped a picture while the cast was off – kind of blurry, but you can see the end of the pin sticking out. It looks like a good-sized finnish nail, and it’s serving as an internal split of sorts to hold the joint straight. That comes out when this cast comes off.

Facebook of the Dead nicely captures my problems with Facebook, and to some degree, some fundimental issues with social networking in general. I’ve been online a while now. I’m not hard to find. If people who knew me don’t get in touch, there’s probably a reason. And a handy web site isn’t going to change that.

Given the state of my left thumb, guitar playing is out for the next few months. I thought I would try to do something with MIDI and soft synthesis. I picked up an M-Audio Axiom 25 MIDI/USB Controller. I had intended to use it with Garage Band, which it does reasonably well, but it came with Abletron Live LE, a de-featured version of Live. Since I want to figure out how to do more loop-based composition and/or performance, it seems to be the way to go.

The learning curve on Live looks pretty steep. Unlike Garage Band, it’s a tool that assumes you’re going to spend some time with it to learn. At first, I had no idea how to even get started. Then I found that it’s got integrated tutorials, and I was off and running. The Axiom works nicely with it, giving physical controls that will make using the gear creatively much more natural. Somehow, having to grab a mouse, find a virtual control, and mess with it’s pixels clears most if not all creative musical ideas from my brain. Having physical transport controls is a huge gain all by itself.

The keys on the Axiom are really nice – in fact, hard to believe given the price of the thing. I almost wish I’d gotten the bigger 49 or 61 key version, but there’s no run on my desk for that, and I’m not a real keyboard player anyways.

The Axiom is also pretty complicated. I’ve not done MIDI years, and the jargon and conceptual model has changed a lot, particularly with integrated digital audio and software synthesis. I’m looking forward to getting back up to speed.