the media and musings of jOE dEVINE

Man, Ok so Facebook (hereafter f8) is a phenom.  Seems like in the last six months I have 200 new friends.  On f8.  Yeah.

Which I have no issue with.

A girl I dated in eighth grade that I treated badly.

Some dude that cheap-shotted me at a park in high school.

The mom of someone I dated,  whom I can’t remember.

It’s an unprecedented outpouring of connection and community.

But…

Seriously.  When is someone gonna tell it like it is?  I mean, so many people are so concerned with what other people think they never tell the truth.

Tell me you haven’t seen this:

• The “OMG you look exactly the same as you did 20 years ago comment.”  Uh, right.  I’ve gained 60 pounds.  And the girls?  When they say this?  Uh huh.
• The “hmmm…we didn’t really even LIKE each other in high school…but let’s be friends now” request?
• Who the heck are you again?

It’s out of control.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like f8.  But, it’s due for a course correction.  When people stop being nice, and start being real, perhaps unlike now where you have 600 friends you’ll be back to having the same 12 friends you had in high school, plus a few from college and your job.  Which isn’t a bad thing.  Is it?

I made an innocuous comment one day to a girl I hadn’t seen in 15 years.  BLAM-O!  I had to delete it.  She took it the wrong way.

Rather than saying “oh, you  misunderstood what I was saying.”  I just packed up my tent and left.  Because 500 of my friends might see it.

Jeez.   I am nothing if not usually uncensored, but f8 makes me censor myself?  Good thing?  Who knows.  But I am not happy about it.  Not at all.

Start being real.

I don’t think she got paid for this, except maybe in clothes, but my wife pointed out that our daughter Parker Anne is in some fashion photos for a clothing line.  Some of the pics are pretty good (some not so much), but hey, it’s a start.  Of course, I also noticed that it appears these were taken in our back yard!  Hahahaha.  Oh well, you gotta start somewhere.

Here’s a link to an item which she models, in case you don’t know who she is:

http://mylovebugblankets.com/item_270/Queen-on-the-Range-Girls-Custom-Boutique-Peasant-Top-and-Ruffle-Pant.htm

And here are links to other pages where she is featured, now that you know who she is:

dresses

separates

So we were driving back from Arlington to Austin the other day.  At the advice of our friends Doug and Jen, we came home the “back way,” through Glen rose, down 281.  We managed to get a table at the Koffe Kup Restaurant in Hico.   Well, I must say it was a pretty good  burger, but the SIZE of the thing.  Note the look on my daughter’s face when she saw it!

Yum Yum.

Ok, you have to see the burger my Dad just ate. OMG.

I recently shifted my entire development environment for my personal / family business websites to the Mac.  In case you can’t tell, I am a Mac convert.

It took a little digging to figure out how to do all the things that I needed to get everything working.  It’s all out there, but I figured I’d write up a short tutorial on how to do it all.   If nothing else, I can refer to it the next time I need to set all this up.

Here are the main steps to get MAMP (Mac OS X LAMP) setup and running on your Mac.  I will elaborate on each in a subsequent post.

1. Download and install the MAMP environment – don’t get cute with it, install it in the Applications folder like it says.
2. Edit your /Applications/MAMP/conf/httpd.conf file to add your virtual hosts, so you can develop multiple sites on your computer.
3. Edit your /etc/hosts file to define your virtual hosts as well.
4. Install any PEAR modules you may need.
5. Change MAMP to use the default ports (I highly recommend this).
6. Install any MySQL client tools you need to do your development work.

That’s it!  My subsequent posts will explain the details behind each step.

A couple more artifacts from last weekend.  Admittedly, we rushed these so the production value could be better, and we had a couple of noisy spots that couldn’t be helped.  But here they are for your listening pleasure.

Right On Time.mp3

Always.mp3

Justin and I recorded this tune of his at my house last weekend.  I added a little mixin’…

Pretty soon he should have his demo tracks ready to go.  More to come…

I Turned Out For You.mp3

Justin Strackany  (shown here) came over last night to see if we could work together (which we do in real life) on recording some demo tracks for his approaching foray into “playing out” again for the first time in years.  The result, “Glen Tipton” is a catchy, Nick Drake-ish tune that I find myself listening to multiple times.  We did it in about two takes (way to go Justin) and there will be more Justin to follow.  If you’re wondering who “K K Venton” is (I certainly was), I believe Justin really meant K K Downing, one of the guitar players for Judas Priest.  But the song doesn’t flow as well with that lyric, so we kept the former.

Oh, and yeah , we celebrated with four Cuban cigars, three bottles of wine, and one broken Waterford Lisemore large goblet.  Guess who broke it?  I’ll never tell…

Tech specs on the recording:

• Justin’s Yamaha guitar
• Justin’s voice
• Apogee Duet FW audio interface
• Shure KSM32 on guitar
• Rode NTK tube mic on vocals
• Recorded into Logic Pro 8

Glen Tipton.mp3

I was at my college homecoming game this weekend (I was asked to present to the computer science students there, and even though it was only 17 years since I graduated, I decide to attend homecoming with the wife and kid).  Not sure if we won the homecoming game or not, but as we were driving down to Dallas to see some family I did listen to the first half of the UT / OSU game, and got to watch the second half.  Man, both teams played very well.  

But alas, Pokes, the Longhorns won.   You put up a good fight. 

Is it significant that I didn’t know the final score of my alma mater’s homecoming game?  I’ll let you decide – we’re the Fighting ROOS.  Yes, the Ausin College Kangaroos.

Gulp.

This weekend my wife and I met up with ten of our friends in Kansas City to ultimately go see #17 ranked OSU play #3 ranked Missouri.  We were all hopeful for an upset, but knew it would be tough.

This pretty much sums it up:

Despite one of the worst (possible) calls I’ve ever seen – OSU going for it on their own 20 with a 4th and 18 by way of fake punt – missing by two yards, we had a great time made all the merrier (we are from Texas after all) by the fact that Texas beat #1 OU while we were driving to the game – to take over the #1 ranking no less!

The boys:

Kirk, Jeff, Dave, Joe (me), Tim and Matt

The ladies:

Teri, Jenn, Sean, Mel, Brooke, Heather and Elizabeth (my wife)

 There were several great things about the trip, besides all the great football, comraderie, and getting to see old friends:

1. To my knowledge, we kept our adult dignity intact, and no one puked
2. Jen and Tim Miller, our hosts, put on one HELLUVA tailgating party and the BBQ the next day was world class (too bad the Dallas Cowboys lost, but heck, ribs are ribs!)
3. Somehow or another, we ended up with ROCKSTAR parking – the likes of which I’ve only ever seen when travelling with Kirk Reynolds – we accidentally made it into the major donor lot at the Missouri stadium and for some reason were allowed to stay – hence the tiger in all the pictures!

It was a blast seeing everyone and special thanks to Jen and Tim for hosting us in their lovely house in Kansas City!  We gotta do this again sometime soon.

Ok, so the new hard drives arrived.  Two gloriously bubble wrapped 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drives from NewEgg.com.  Now, I have heard some complaints about their shipping, and about these drives – so I upgraded to FedEx shipping and both my drives seem to working flawlessly.  Installing a new hard drive in a MacBook pro is perhaps the easiest drive install I’ve ever done.  Just four screws for the caddy, and the rest was without tools and painless.

I have decided (since I already did a Logic install) that I will leave the “vanilla” logic install, including Jam Packs and all that jazz, on the 320Gb system drive.  After all it’s on the same SATA controller as the other drives anyway.  Henceforth, however, all samples, content, instruments, etc. will go on the Media Library drive – the new Barracuda.

All my project data goes on the other Barracuda.

It’s taking about three hours to copy over my 200gb+ of samples and instruments, but I am sure this is primarily because of the speed of the USB 2.0 external drive I am copying from.

Oh, as an aside, my MacMini is now my “main” computer – dunno what I am going to do with all those PCs I’ve accumulated.  I went ahead and purchased the elgato Turbo.264 and have to say that I LOVE it.  Whereas before if I was encoding a DVD to AppleTV, I could basically do nothing on my mini, now I can read email, even watch another video, while encoding.  And the quality is great.  I highly recommend this product.

More to come when the memory arrives, I load up a lot of instruments, and we try this rig out.