An Atypical Life

tonight i went overboard and deep fried things. yanno, when the oil is hot, ya gotta use it, right? my beer batter included sleeman’s cream ale, flour, and two kinds of bacon salt.

besides the fairly mundane broccoli and onions, i also deep fried local organic cheese curds. they are now my new favourite vs. mozzarella sticks.

but the real amazing item were the deep fried bounty bars, in the same batter (yes with bacon salt). these things have no right to taste this good. seriously. if you live in the US try finding bounty bars (coconut enrobed in dark chocolate), they’re in many places now. if not you will have to use the inferior mounds bars.

today I was offline the entire day. I taught my friend dys everything i’ve learned about digital performer and my mc mix controller. verdict: good. want to play with it together and make music.

yes this is a bit lame for you to read, but it was very satisfying for me to do. i like helping other people. the end.

done in one take: chick corea’s Eternal Child. Instrument: Yamaha TX816. Effects by Lexicon and MOTU.

can’t publish this one – but i created some awesome reports in a virtual machine for my employer today. really slique. very cool. cognos-based. anything more and i’d have to kill you. ;)

been fighting my mac for weeks now, with constant freezes, hangs, system-wide crashes or video corruption from 1-100 minutes after reboot. seems i followed some bad advice in the past and turned on something i shouldn’t have. so, my thing for today is sharply worded advice:

Do not enable QuartzGL (2D acceleration) on your Mac Pro. To check that QuartzGL is off, open Terminal, paste in this line and press Return:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver QuartzGLEnabled -boolean NO

Reboot to make this take effect. Voila, no more annoying crashes. You’re welcome.

If you’ve had trouble posting on my blog since I opened up comments, you should be able to do so now. I’ve deleted all registered users – so, if you were registered before, now you shouldn’t be forced to log in just to comment.

Still burned out on music. So I made chocolate chip cookies, from this NY Times recipe. I had to make a few substitutions because of what I had on hand:

• Whole wheat flour instead of regular flour (still used the cake flour)
• Dark brown sugar instead of light brown sugar
• President’s Choice chocolate chips instead of the gourmet ones suggested

Delicious!

Randomly, Mr. Neilathotep and I both thought of Barney Miller at the same time. Freaky, but good inspiration.

Here is my rendition. I’ve been spending rather longer on these tracks than 20-40 minutes…too much of a perfectionist, I guess…

I got a bit burned out on forcing myself to do a song a day. So today was a day of organization. I finally cleaned up and posted photos of the erection of my garage. Big thanks to everyone who helped! When I find the photos of the siding and roofing I’ll put those up too.

Full gallery of construction photos here.

The classic, a tribute to Jaco Pastorius.

Download. (mp3, 1:45, 2.2MB)

Instruments: Steinway, Rhodes, Minimoog, brushed drums, double bass arco, fretless bass. Effects by Lexicon.