chris’ blog

in the last day or so, i’ve managed to snatch really good tickets to both the police and bob dylan.

i got my new amp today. it’s such a punnim. and so loud. i’ve already cranked it a bit today, i should probably give my ears a rest. it’s a vox tube. you may have seen edge or the beatles playing the same thing. so naturally, i’m right at home.

chris and i went on a hunt for an amp. i want to get an vox ac30. basically, just a really loud guitar amp to make all the windows rattle. joel’s moving out soon, so i won’t have his marshall to play on. and seeing as i’ve had an electric of one sort or an other for the past 8 years or so, it’d be nice to finally get a decent amp to plug into. but we only found one place that had the one i wanted..

it’s taken me a month to get working, but i’ve finally got the punnim running. i’ve had to resort to dual-booting fedora 5 (with my current fedora 6 installation), for it to run. i don’t know why it is, but this audio stuff won’t run on the newer release. and i don’t like ubuntu very much. my experience has been that if you compile a lot of things from source, particularly from svn/cvs (which i need to, to get a lot of these audio things working), ubuntu is a dog. an absolute dog. no gcc installed by default. yuck.

fedora may be ugly, but it sure is reliable. and nothing a little bit of tweaking can’t fix.

why is it people that know the most about computers tend to break them the most?

i finally got my mobile recording interface. it’s very nice. and, well, it works nicely somewhat with linux. the drivers are all supported, and i have had it running, but it’s not entirely optimal yet.

i’m running fedora core 5 at the moment, and while 9 months isn’t very long in human years, in open source, it’s an age. and i think this device is having issues with some of the configuration of firewire and audio visual device who-ha. so i’ve had to switch in on and off and run things from console to get it working. which isn’t really where i want to leave it. apparently other people have got it working with the gui tools, so i’m determined to get there.

also, the realtime kernel patches don’t yet work for intel core duo chips. which is a little annoying, seeing as i’ve just forked out for one.. but it will pay off in the long run.

meanwhile.. i’m thinking of making a change to ubuntu. i had a very good experience installing it when i first got my laptop (2-3 months ago), but it was very annoying having to download gcc (lucky i didn’t have to get wireless drivers compiled).. and i couldn’t get Xgl working (i’ve got to have my laptop eye candy). i’ve used exclusively fedora since it came out (3 years ago), but it’s way too big, needs way too much configuration and has too long a release cylce for me.. i read one article recently that said 30% of all desktop linux users use ubuntu, with debian following second at 14%. so i figure that many nerds can’t be wrong..

yesterday i walked up to turramurra music, with a question and walked back with less cash and an item layby-ed. which is how it usually goes. i don’t often buy expensive things. the last time i did was when i bought my new electric guitar (which was slightly different, as it was to replace the other one i gave away).

anyway, this is what i got. it’s an “edirol fa-101″. basically a mobile firewire audio device. it can record up to 10 in and 10 out, with midi and at very high rates. i wanted a device to plug into my laptop. the one i used for the past few years ago, is bound to a desktop, which is getting older and slower (relatively). in fact the only reason i haven’t got rid of the old computer yet is because i can’t record any music with the laptop.

i wasn’t really planning on layby-ing necessarily, but they had a really really good price (nearly $400 less that retail). so i wanted to lock in that price.

now i just have to pay it off..

i think my desktop pc is on the way out. i haven’t tried turning it on for probably the best part of two months. and i did tonight because i wanted to demo some music. so it’s slightly annoying if it’s gone.

it’s still up in the air a bit, but we’ve decided to make a 3rd and final “the boys/christmas” album, which will also be a victory one testbed thingo, seeing as we never got round to doing anything for blackstump/october. and though we’ll probably do the recording on my new laptop, i don’t yet have anything attached to it to record with, so i can’t do anything for another month or two (that’s another $1000 down the track).