Yesterday I updated The Golden Motors Myspace page after a LONG time away from it. Myspace is a weird phenomenon. Complaining about it is sort of dumb; after all, it is free, and it worked for a long time, and there's no such thing as a free lunch, and the only thing we can truly count on is change. So really, if you don't take the Myspace super-fuckover as a primer for both old-fashioned common sense and basic Buddhism, then you're missing an opportunity. (I have been reading Don Quixote on my Kindle for three weeks, so this kind of thinking comes easily to me right now.)
Interfacing with Myspace again was not as bad as it was two years ago, when the whole thing seemed to have been taken over by Lindsey Lohan's publicist and Triple X dancers who wanted to "friend" my indie rock band. Still, it was not real functional. Trying to set up an "event" without a place to input the date was odd. (I think this may be because it's synced with my Reverb Nation site, which they make the default calendar manager without telling anyone.) HTML boxes sometimes open for editing, sometimes not. In neither case could I get them to really work. No matter how many times I tried to delete a random URL coughed up by my Reverb Nation site as an "update status" to my Myspace page, it stayed up there. Stuff like that drives me nuts.
Over two or three years, the site became far more complicated, then less complicated, but not at all zippy. Now it seems to be working okay as an industry-standard portal site to a band's website and as a music player--which quite often does not work. Most people complain that Myspace makes their computer act like it has eaten two large stuff-crust pepperoni and mushroom pizzas from Pizza Hut. (Perhaps it also works as a site that reminds users they need to buy this year's "faster" PC and "faster" internet connection.)
At any rate, if Kleenex and Stouffer's Cheesy Pizza Bread wants to pay Myspace to host ads on a semi-functional page that links to my web site, then Uncle Wiggly will tell you the story of the peppermint waterfall and the umbrella with the licorice handle. And that's all I know.
And did I mention that I have posted a new song off The Golden Motors new album at that Myspace page?
I'm also getting into a new area of mid-tech for English majors: digital conversion of vinyl album sides. If you've ever tried to convert an entire vinyl album to digital, you know that locating track markers is kind of a bitch. I'll be danged if I know which song is which on my Vivian Girls record; I think some of the tracks are actually two songs in my Itunes playlist of the vinyl conversion. Sorting that out takes time. And if you're an adult, and need to replace the exhaust fan in the bathroom and go to Winco for deli meat, you don't have time to do this for 900 records, even if some of them are Husker Du bootlegs. So, as I write this, I am dumping a side of the second Flaming Lips album into Garageband with a touch of compression and reverb, and will send that to Itunes as is. When I listen to it, I'll listen to the whole side--just like I would with a record. No randomizing the playlist on Itunes; no grabbing a song to include in a mix cd. It's more like a cassette. A cassette I can listen to on the Google cloud while riding my bike.
Finally, we went out to The Mac Store yesterday to check out MacBook Pros. Rationalizing the need for a 15" or 17" model and then researching the pros-and-cons was a necessary part of the process. If I were a graphic designer or working music studio engineer, I'd get the 15" or the 17", but since my heaviest useage is recording crap-ass drums with one mic on Garageband, I think I'll go for the 13". It will still be 100 times better than my old G4 tower, which makes weird sounds not unlike the bathroom fan I just replaced.
