I’ve created a Starfinger facebook page. Become a fan today, and earn virtual starfinger points which are redeemable for diddly squat at your favorite ethnic restaurants.

I’m becoming more and more an advocate of buying local things and rejecting corporate-best-interest-driven garbage. Obviously, modern life imposes limits on what is practical in terms of “saying no to the man”, but when I read things like this:

http://stopnestlewaters.org/

I realize there are things that can be done. Let’s stop buying Nestle products! Hey, it’s a start.

Hi there.. it’s been a while.

I thought I’d make mention of a few of my recent musical purchases, and confirm to you that I am alive and kicking.

For my birthday, I got a a kaossilator, which is a terribly fun touchpad-based preset synth. The sound quality is great, and you can build up some neat loops with it. It’s great for jamming, if not for sound design. It’s easy enough to play with your eyes closed, and it’s been in my bag or on my person constantly since acquiring it. I have a couple stupid demo tracks around here somewhere, which I can make available if anyone is interested.

The kaossilator got me into a very hands-on mood lately, so I’ve been hooking it up to things like my old SP-202 and my ER-1. I realized what I really wanted was a cheap small-format mixer to hook these things up more flexibly.

Over the weekend, I got this Xenyx 502 by Behringer. Normally I wouldn’t touch Behringer with a 10 foot pole, but thanks to a surprising promo gift card from Guitar Center I got this one (and a few much-needed cables) for $35.

It was definitely a spur-of-the-moment purchase, but this thing is surprisingly awesome. It’s meeting my routing needs perfectly, and the xenyx preamp + “british EQ” makes a pretty sweet bass preamp. Who knew!

Anyway, expect to hear these things in a recording one of these days.

I grabbed the new Beck CD yesterday. It’s good. Danger Mouse [the producer] is OK in my book… though he has not always been: In the beginning, I was both underwhelmed by “the Grey Album” and annoyed by his usurpation of a favorite cartoon character’s name. Thus-configured, I chose to ignore his musical contributions and silently resent his existence. Well, it turns out that Gnarls Barkley is pretty damn good. In fact, “the Odd Couple” is my favorite album of the year, thus far [critical note: I think I have heard 2 new albums this year, total].

Anyway, I would love to add this CD to my cd database, but I seem to have deleted the database and all of my maintenance tools, during a linux-related debacle [for the nerds: debian unstable to openSUSE 11]. A half-hearted attempt at recreating the database from that most recently generated report [linked mere sentences ago] is currently underway.

I have to leave now. The kids need drinks.

The End.