Having now seen Indiana Jones 4 I am finally free from looking forward to anything by George Lucas, hooray!

Indy 4 was terrible and at least as bad as The Phantom Menace. I’m not sure how it’s managed a score of 78% on Rotten Tomatoes as I write this, but I have to assume that will be lowered by time and careful reflection.

Here’s my ranty spoiler-filled list of things I can remember disliking:

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Time to take stock of my social networking participation.

Twitter - Still updating on Twitter against all odds. Being able to monitor and update it via IM is really all it’s got going for it. I’ve had to start ignoring certain people though because the noise level got too high.

Pownce - I’m really not sure what to do with Pownce. It’s nice, but the lack of IM makes me lazy about it. I really like the reply-to-posts feature. I’ve started experimenting with uploading songs I’ve been listening to, which is fun but would be way more fun if everyone I knew had access to it.

MySpace - I still log in and add friends who request it and try to reply to messages in there. Spam has reduced from a few months ago so MySpace doesn’t bother me much anymore.

Facebook - Even though I only have around 70 friends on there and don’t whore it out like MySpace it’s rapidly becoming the most annoying social network. Check out what I’m met with when I log on:

Hey Facebook, I’ve got 1 leave me the fuck alone request for you. Oh and a fortune friend request.

As a follow-up to my hard drive terror I guess I’m now in a full-blown Windows apocalypse. I was fairly sure it was the power supply crapping out on me and it was only crashing during the night, so I was waiting till this week to get a new one.

Then yesterday it rebooted in the middle of doing something. Then would only give me an “lsass.exe - System Error Object Name not found” error and reboot when I hit OK. Much research and fiddling hasn’t righted things so I think my Windows is just toast.

Anyway if I’m extra slow to answer your emails that is why.

Woke up this morning to my desktop machine frozen on the Windows boot-up screen. I hit a key and it rebooted. What the. Let it go through, it froze again. Tried safe mode, froze again. And a second time. Uh oh.

Tried some rescue LiveCD rescue stuff, maybe my Windows install was just barfed. My hard drive seemed to be gone. I fearfully checked the state of my backups — was pleasantly surprised to see they were intact. Also Gmail meant my email still worked and Google Browser Sync meant I had all my bookmarks and cookies on my laptop. Sweet.

I started going through the motions of getting a replacement hard drive, rebooted the desktop again for kicks and everything worked fine. “Windows has recovered from a serious error.” I’ll say.

Hard drive on the way out? Power supply dying? Heat? I don’t know but that was a dumb way to kill a couple hours.

And the award for “most annoying music loop used in a Flash product demo” goes to Creative for the Zen Stone Plus! Way to go guys! You’ve driven me insane!

Seriously though, you make audio products. Let’s show some hustle.

Way back I posted my hesitation about using a Firewire audio interface. While I love technology, years of abuse at the hands of SCSI, USB and many other acronyms has made me scared and wary. After dual booting my laptop and stripping XP down to its most efficient, I wrote to M-Audio asking why my Firewire 410 inputs kept hanging whenever I, like, used them. This was the reply:

Hi,

You’ve seen a lot of problem with the newest Dell laptop. The new dual processor have made computer to go faster than ever, but when there is IRQ sharing (or if the IEEE 1394 adapter is on a virtual IRQ), the chipset seems to be less robust with resource sharing.

I would recommend you to try a PCI firewire card (or PCMCIA or ExpressPort Firewire cards) to get rid of any IRQ conflict.

http://shopping.yahoo.com/s:Network%20Adapters:4034-Adapter%20Type=FireWire%20adapter:4035-Interface%20Type=ExpressCard

If I give a hundred dollars to everyone on the planet will all my problems go away?

So bands on MySpace are limited to posting 4 songs. Lame in this age of massive affordable bandwidth but OK. I can’t change my songs around because lots of people have them added to their pages and I’ll break those. But OK. Then there’s this Myspace announcement today:

You know how you can list four songs on your band’s MySpace page? Well, thanks to the fine peeps over at Bodog Entertainment you can now add a 5th song. More music means more ears, more ears mean more plays, and more plays mean way more exposure. Add Bodog Entertainment as a friend and up your band’s song list to five on your MySpace Standalone Player.
Get your 5th song heard.

Wow, that’s ballsy. I mean it’s one thing for everyone else to treat the MySpace friend system as the dumping ground of the internet, but for MySpace itself to just whore it out like that takes some nuts. They must really not care.

Update: Ryan points out that when you Google your new “friend” Bodog you find out he’s really into online gambling. Check their Wikipedia page. I’m still surprised MySpace did this and now even more surprised News Corporation (MySpace’s owners) are cool with potentially being accused of marketing gambling to the kids.

Maybe we can all add Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man as MySpace friends for a sixth and seventh songs on our musician pages! Hooray!

I think everyone should thank me for upgrading my Picasa Web Albums account two days ago to get a little bit more than 250mb storage. Today they gave all default accounts 1gb storage just to make me regret my purchase.

Also what is it with services not offering refunds? World of Warcraft and Picasa have both told me that they’re “unable to provide refunds” lately:

We’re unable to provide refunds, so we encourage you to try the free service before purchasing additional storage.

Well I uh… did that. And then you quadrupled the amount of storage on free accounts a day and a half later.

As I was plodding along working on my album today I wound up reading a lot of posts about the death of the album (1, 2, 3).

I thought the album was dead when I started putting my music on the net years ago. I didn’t even bother releasing an album until a few years later (”people just want to download mp3s!”) but I was totally wrong.

I don’t have much artistic or romantic attachment to albums but I do think there’s a practical aspect to them. Assuming it’s not one good song plus eleven songs of filler, I’d rather have 45 minutes of entertainment from an artist I enjoy than 3 minutes. It’s the difference between watching one episode of a series versus the whole season.

But I don’t see why it has to be exclusively albums or singles, it’s the future now, they can co-exist! I think as budgets shrink, artists become more independent and audiences diversify and fragment, it’s harder to decide or define what a worthy “single” is. That’s what the filtration of the Internet is for, that’s why file-sharing is awesome. The hits will bubble to the top.

Do you want each song to be focus-grouped before you get to hear it? An album’s still a pretty good vehicle for putting out a batch of songs and seeing what spreads.

Setting up all this live show stuff is officially kicking my ass. I am angry and hurt and tired. I’m about ready to put together a live show of me configuring software for an hour and a half and call it “Working-on-a-Performance Art”.

My mind is blown — BLOWN — by how annoying this all is with the tools currently available. I’m jealous of DJs. It’s like nobody designing software wants anyone to change chords mid-song anymore. “You mean you have two SEPARATE chord sequences in a song? That’s unsanity!”

I got some emails from musicians using Live who feel similarly and Peter Kirn from Create Digital Music listened to me cry on the phone. Matt from Flux Minor shared his live Ableton project with me. His approach was to render individual channels (drums, bass, etc) of the entire track instead of recreating it loop-based as I was.

It gives you less flexibility but he assured me they haven’t felt the need to alter arrangements on the fly while performing. So I ran off in that direction as it sounded a lot easier. I was four songs into the rendering and recreating process when I realized Ableton Live can only send program changes to external gear (like my GT-6) at the launch of a new clip. So if you’re not setting it up all crazy like I was before you’re SOL for program changes.

Guess I’ll go kick something.