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.

Pownce - new Twitter/Jaiku/Tumblr sort of thing by the Digg folks. I am too lame to have an account but it looks pretty and file-sharing will be a huge feature.

Scott asks where Touring 2.0 is. Eventful’s okay but he’s right: it could be so much better. Things that suck about Eventful:

• It hassles people to sign up for Eventful accounts. People tell me it’s required, but like for Louisville, Kentucky there are 13 demands but I can only see that 3 Eventful users are demanding it.
• Regarding the above — how am I supposed to contact those other ten people if I wind up in the area? Why don’t I see their email addresses? It can’t be a spam thing — they signed up!
• The Eventful interface is cluttered as hell, I never know where the hell I’m supposed to be looking for things. Could use some serious streamlining.

If it didn’t annoy me in those ways I’d think about running my whole gig list off of them. But not if they’re going to be all stingy and into the lock-in.

Peter Kirn has a good article on the Internet Radio Day of Silence, which is today. There’s a huge service-killing hike in the pipe for web radio royalties.

I want to care about this but I don’t listen to web radio, I’m not American, I think big music screwing themselves creates great opportunities for musicians like me, and I don’t think protesting will do much good if they’re determined to do it.

So I guess I’m a web radio dick, I’m sorry.

Holy crap: musical tesla coils. This would be a sweet live show. Here’s the Super Mario Brothers theme on solid state musical tesla coils:

The theme from Weird Science:

Beetlejuice:

And here’s the introduction and explanation:

MediaMonkey Review - found this great write-up on MediaMonkey (my MP3 player of choice) geared towards power-users and people wanting to trick out their MediaMonkey.

I’m hoping someone can point me towards what to buy to solve this problem.

For the longest time I’ve been using a mixing board as gain control and a headphone switch for my monitors. Here’s the rough layout:

I’ve been aware using a mixing board for this small task is stupid (and a waste of desk space) for a while but I didn’t know what to replace it with. The board’s slowly dying now though so I need to figure out what to replace it with. Here’s what I’ve thought so far:

• I could plug the Delta 66 sound card directly into the monitors, but then how do I switch to the headphones? I hate dicking around in software to change volume and settings every time I want to do something.
• I thought a headphone amp like the Behringer HA400 might be what I was looking for but I’d have to feed my sound card output into one of those headphone inputs and that seems sorta gross. Also I don’t need the two extra outputs and would like a mute switch for the monitors.

Aaaand that’s about it. Digging through Behringer’s product list hasn’t helped much. Basically I need two 1/4″ or XLR inputs & outputs, two volume dials and a mute button in a wee little package.

LiveAPI is an open-source third-party Ableton Live API, so Ableton Live is now hackable via Python. Create Digital Music has a write-up – very cool.

Here’s my idea: let your audience control cowbell levels of your set via text message. Make millions off of cowbell volume fights. Retire.