Busy week

We had percussion camp this past week, which meant 5-hour rehearsals every night after work. I also had more music to write, and work was pretty busy this week as well.

So I couldn't be happier that the weekend is here. Lisa and I ran off to the beach, since we haven't gotten out there for a while. Tonight we tried the trick for using the microwave to make rice krispy treats, but we halved the materials and kept the times the same (2 minutes, then 1 minute), and we ended up with stuff that was rock hard after it cooled. At least it was good while it was warm.

It's not my night

I'm hoping it's a coincidence that I just updated to 10.3.8, but...

• I've been burning audio CDs tonight that won't show up on my machine
• I tried updating my Airport base station, which then stopped responding at all. I then spent the next couple of hours getting it up and running again (I'm just not any good at networking)
• And after all the Airport mess, my machine still doesn't reconnect after sleep (which was a problem from beforer). Looks like I'll need to call AppleCare...

Drum Corps on the web

I went through a bunch of my links this weekend, and I did a search on Wikipedia for 'drum corps', which uncovered the DrumCorpsWiki.

I thought about making an IMDB-style page for drum corps info back when I was in college - for groups, songs they've played, members, staff, etc... but I don't really have the time or expertise to get anything like it going. At least all the information can get added to this site, although the linking might be more tedious. On the bright side, I don't have to do much of the work :)

Web access to .mac files

Since I'm always forgetting how to find them, I'll post it here (and maybe others will find it useful as well).

I know this works for the 'Pictures' directory, but I haven't had much luck with others...

You can get access to the original files on your .mac account by specifying the path that it is found in your iDisk. For example, to get to my profile photo which is located at iDisk/Pictures/DCS02656s.jpg, I use the url:


http://homepage.mac.com/cflake/.Pictures/DSC02656s.jpg


which is:

• my mac.com address with trailing slash
• a period (important!)
• and the remaining path to the item

I found this years ago back when I posted photo albums, and I've used it quite a few times since.

These days I mostly post to my flickr account, since I really only take photos from my camera anymore (and not even many of those). Speaking of, anyone else have flickr accounts that I don't know about? I need a good excuse to play around with the flickr graph...

New (purchased) music

I grabbed a few of albums last week from Rasputin - 'Rooty' and 'Remedy' by Basement Jaxx, and 'Rewind' by Hexstatic. They're all really good - I heard the Jaxx stuff from shared playlists at work, and someone in my group showed everybody the videos from Hexstatic, which are just amazing. The cd comes with another disk of QuickTime videos that go along with their songs - and some of their newer albums have DVDs with content. I highly recommend them - you can find the albums from both the iTunes and Amazon links off to the right (but of course the iTMS doesn't have the Hexstatic videos).

New winter percussion music

We're getting to the point in the season where things are coming together - so I've posted copies of the music (mostly for for the kids, but you can check them out too).

The music this year includes:

• "Country Band March" by Charles Ives - mallet arrangement by Joe, the director, drums by me.
• The profoundly named "Drum Solo", by John and Peter, two of our drum instructors
• "Ivan Sings" by Aram Khachaturian (not yet posted)
• And a reprise of "Country Band March" - actually just the second half of the song

Check them out - let me know what you think! We still have lots of work to do - the Ives song is particularly difficult, and will probably take a long time to get right.

t-mobile voicemail upgrade

I got a message from t-mobile today - they are redoing their system and getting rid of the text messages to tell you that you have a voicemail.

I don't know where I would have filed a complaint about this, but I'm glad people did. It was annoying to have to delete a text message every time I had a voicemail message.

I can finally buy t-shirts!

Panic's new t-shirt store is up - panic.com/goods
And a post from Steve (stevenf)

Soooo coool!