The purpose of this exercise was to make sure that my minimalist approach was going to work for simple guitar/bass/drums. I haven’t plugged in the midi controller yet, or the USB mixer I have. It doesn’t sound good, these were probably the third or fourth take on each instrument (except the bass – I’m a perfectionist there even when I’m just screwing around, and even now I want to go back and re-record the thing over a few more times).

The riff:

This is part of a song I’m working on. I came up with the harmonized guitar bit on the spot, and I like it enough I’m going to keep it.

The stats:

Everything was recorded into what I was shocked and ashamed to see was Garage Band 3. I guess I need to grab a copy of iLife 09 for this iMac. Oh yeah, this was recorded on an iMac. I used some Shure SRH440 headphones to monitor and mix down, as much as you can say I actually did either of those things.

The drums are EZ Drummer Drumkit From Hell, some sort of double bass with a custom-picked spock on the beat, then a chinese/crash combo leading into the fill that covers the bit where I go over 6/8.

The guitar is my ESP LTD FX-260 through a POD Studio UX2, one go with a fuzzy distorted with a nice bit of gateing panned a bit to the right, and one with a bit crunchier tone also gated equal bits to the left.

The bass is my plain-as-shit Fender P-Bass going right into the POD Studio UX2, a nice Eden head with the high-mids punched through a bit, a tiny bit of distortion and then a fun little reverb module to space it out a bit and blur the lines between my shitty out-of-practice playing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire#Folk_beliefs

I’ve been thinking a bit off and on about ratings I’ve seen in places like the iTunes app store. These are customer ratings – user ratings – and I’ve noticed a trend. When an application is free, the ratings on that application are typically lower than a similar application that costs money. The conclusion that I currently draw from this is that if someone has to pay for something, they are more inclined to favor it because the act of paying for it gives the object an inherent worth. I don’t know if this worth is related at all to the amount that a person pays for the given object, and if that amount alters the perceived worth, but it seems clear that any out of pocket expense immediately increases the worthiness and non-monetary value of the object.

Free objects on the other hand are not imparted with extra worth at the point of purchase because they didn’t cost anything. They are throwaway commodities, which is odd then that someone would go to the trouble of rating it lower than a non-throwaway object. It almost implies an increased willingness to rate (and rate lower) an object that you didn’t have to pay for than a willingness to rate an object that cost money.

I recently downloaded a 6 track EP from Trent Reznor’s new music project. It’s good, but it was free, and I have only listened to it once. Another album I just purchased from Amazon.com’s MP3 store for $5 (gotta love that $5 album deal) I’ve listened to several times already. It’s similar in style to the Trent Reznor album, and I couldn’t say which one was actually better, but I am using the cost object more than the free object. Why is that? I had the option to pay $2 or some other small sum and get higher quality ‘lossless’ copies of the same Trent Reznor album, and I chose not to. Would I have been more inclined to listen to it repeatedly if I had shelled out the money for it? Were my listening habits this scattered when I went through my ‘piracy’ phase a decade ago? I guess I need to think on this more.

Diptic for iPhone and iPad

My company just released our first iPhone and iPad app. It’s available at the iTunes App Store now. You can see more information at http://www.dipticapp.com. It’s compatible with iOS 4 so everyone upgrading and getting their new iPhone 4s this week should grab a copy.

I wish I could say I was involved with the production of the app, but project scheduling conflicts kept me out of it. It turned out great.

I’ve always been fascinated by the bow tie and wanted to learn to tie one. It’s intimidating but this is the result of a few tries last night and a successful run this morning. Found a few good tutorials online and I think I have it down.

Bring on the mint juleps!

I spent some time a while back building a simple tool that would scrape all of the livedocs from Adobe for ColdFusion 9 and then format it all to be used as a Dictionary.app module. I was inspired by a similar project for Rails, and a Gem that Ryan Davis put together for the standard Ruby docs called rdoc_osx_dictionary.

I’ve been using this dictionary now on two different macs, and I distributed it among the ColdFusion developers here at Peak Systems. I’ve gotten approval from the boss to distribute it outside of work so I’m adding it to this site. It’s free to download and use, and it maintains the Creative Commons license that Adobe placed on it. It’s very much beta and I know it’s missing some stuff (mostly due to the horrible organization that Adobe is using, some tags/functions are parts of some groups, but list themselves as being parts of others, and some groups are not mentioned in the main docs, so a handful of tags/functions aren’t in this version of the dictionary – at some point I’ll come through and clean it up).

Here are some screenshots of the dictionary in action:

Installation:

1. Download the ColdFusion 9.dictionary (ZIP File)
2. Decompress it into either /Library/Dictionaries or ~/Library/Dictionaries
3. Open Dictionary.app and go into Preferences…
4. Place a checkmark in the row for ColdFusion 9 – That’s it!