iDallas!

I was lucky enough to be part of a historic event a few weeks back. It was a test of strength, power, stamina, and courage unlike any the world has seen before. I present to you… Team Bruce Lee vs The Superheroes…

Ultimately my team, The Superheroes, was victorious. Here’s our team photos:

(Can you guess which one is me?)

On October 20 I went to an Interpol show in San Francisco, and then on the 26th I went to see The Jesus and Mary Chain. The picture here is of the Interpol show and I stole it from Flickr.

I kinda don’t really like Interpol’s latest album much at all and despite having some strong songs I don’t think I’ve managed to actually listen to the whole album without switching to something else.. there’s just something about it that bugs me… I think maybe the vocals are too loud or the songs are just missing some magic dust the earlier albums had. Eeeeeenyway, the show was still pretty great. I suspected they’d play a lot of songs from Antics and that they did.. in fact I think they may have played nearly the entire album, in addition to selections from earlier albums. I think they also played some from Our Love to Admire, but honestly I don’t really recognize those songs and I only think that because there were songs in their set that I didn’t recognize and were also not raw enough to be earlier material.

The Jesus and Mary Chain had not been part of my musical listening experience up until the show, though I had of course heard of them. They’re apparently ‘new wave’ which is a musical genre I’m still trying to get a grasp on since it just simply didn’t really exist when I was in high school in North Dakota. To me The Jesus and Mary Chain sounded mostly like just good old guitar rock heavy on nice fuzzy chords… pretty much just like a cleaner version of punk rock. I guess that might explain why some friends I have known who were into new wave later got into punk rock!

So, yeah… it was a good week for live music for me!

I’m trying to jump into this crazy web phenomenon of wanting to be ultra-connected to lots of people all the time (even though I kinda wore out that idea back in 1999)… so to that end I’m giving Twitter a try, but to really get much value out of twitter I need to have some people to follow. I’m on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dallas. Follow me and I’ll follow you.

I got my copy of the Logic Studio upgrade yesterday and had about an hour of borrowed time to play with it last night before bed. When it was first announced I was one of the people who was thinking something along the lines of “including Soundtrack is cool, but is this really IT?” The upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1 added several very useful virtual instruments so it felt like a jump to 8.0 should have also included some. I still would have liked to see some of those (maybe 8.1?) but after only an hour I have to say I am happy with the UI changes Apple has made. Logic actually feels like an Apple application for the first time in its history, and that’s a goooood thing!

The new unified window interface is pretty slick. It effectively makes window management almost completely a non-issue. In previous versions of Logic I would always use at least 2 or 3 screensets to give myself different setups… a main ‘overview’ screenset, a midi edit screenset with one arrange window and one linked edit window, and sometimes a mixing screenset with the mixer on the bottom and the arrange on the top. Now you can still do all of that but you can also quickly bring up an edit window (or mixer or whatever) without disrupting your flow and having to resize windows. It sounded like a small upgrade when I read about it, but it’s nicely thought out. Another neat bonus is the screensets menu now shows you a list of what windows each screenset has showing so you know what you’re going to get when you jump to it. I’m sure I’ll find other niceties as I play with it more, but that’s the things I noticed right away.

One small oddity I noticed when trying to open a quite old Logic file (probably made with Logic 6) was that Logic 8 refused to open it and told me I’d have to open it in Logic 7 first. I guess they decided to not bloat Logic 8 with support for converting project files from two versions back, but I’ll have to see later if I agree with that decision or not. The upgrader does leave the previous version of Logic sitting in your Applications folder with the name ‘Logic 7’ so I’m not stuck or anything. I do have to make sure to keep that old Logic 7 sitting there, though.

Overall I think it’s a nice upgrade but it is still mostly look and feel and workflow oriented. It is undoubtedly a more pleasant interface and I think I’ll be more efficient with it, but I don’t know if that will help me make better or more interesting music or not. Only time will tell, I guess!

After I spend some time with Soundtrack Pro, I’ll post some thoughts on that, too.

Updated Info:  Since I first wrote this post a lot has changed in the world of iPhone hacking.  The best place to start now is with either Independence or ZiPhone.  I’ve only used Independence and it did do the job.  You only need to use one of those two tools to put a package installer on your iPhone and you can then install whatever you want directly on the iPhone itself.  You don’t have to mess with any of the stuff I mention below.

Original Post: After a few failed attempts I finally was able to ‘hack’ my iPhone so I can ssh from it onto other servers (from which I can actually do useful things). I ended up using iFuntastic to ‘jailbreak’ the phone. I tried some other methods and none of them worked. That one worked great for me. Once that was opened up I could install sshd on the iPhone (start at step 3 and skip step 5) to allow easy access from my Mac. I then installed MobileTerminal as well as the iPhone openssh binaries to provide me with an ssh command line client. While I was tinkering I also installed the Lights Off iPhone game, which is actually a lot of fun.

This took me longer than it should have and I had to restore my iPhone from a broken state once during the process but now it’s working and it’s pretty nifty. Wahoo!

When I’m on a website and I have to pick my country from a long list of countries of the world it really bugs me when it’s 100% alphabetic and United States is way down the list below Uganda. I KNOW people from the United States must be a lot more prevalent on ANY website than people from Uganda. I’m not saying United States should always be at the top of the list, but I do think the most common choices should appear at the top with the full list below. I apologize to people in Uganda!