Wife-Aggro

I’ve really gotten into the whole home music studio thing. After I shut down the wife-aggro podcast last year, I found my self with some extra time and alot of undirected created energy.

So, I visited my local Guitar Center and picked up Cakewalk’s Sonar Home Studio 6 XL, a MIDI keyboard and started learning how to make them, and my guitar, play nicely. There’s a few examples of what I’ve been doing on the site here, if you’re interested, but I’ve still got a LONG way to go before I consider myself anything more then a complete newb.

Before long, my home studio comprised my DAW (Sonar), my Guitar, my keyboard, a Line 6 USB audio interface, and an excellent microphone that my wife picked up for my Christmas gift.

Not a bad little set up, to be honest. The Line 6 modeling software that comes with their interfaces was excellent for finding the tones that I wanted to play around with, and Sonar is absolutely excellent at getting my ideas recorded, arranged and saved.

And then my house was robbed.

Good Bye Guitar and Keyboard.

Unfortunately, as often happens when you’re an adult and have bills, taxes, and whatnot, it wasn’t possible for me to immediately go out and replace what I lost. I know what I want to replace them with. I’m going to upgrade the Ibenez guitar that I was using with a Paul Reed Smith Single-Cut SE And my, “not quite as good as I was hoping for” MIDI keyboard is going to be replaced with an much improved Edirol PCR-500. And while I’m at it, I’m going to replace my USB interface with the new POD Studio UX2 which, incidentally has phantom power so that I can actually use that spiff microphone I was given. So, the studio is getting an upgrade.

Eventually.

It’ll probably be the guitar and the interface, and then the keyboard.

So, if you’re checking out the FOD page for new music, please excuse the fact that it’s missing some guitar at the moment.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to hang out in bed and catch up on some TV that had been accumulating on our DVR.

Two shows stood out enough to mention. The usually excellent Reaper and Kings (which I’m only just now catching up on).

I caught the last 3 episodes of Reaper which reminded me how funny this show is. The standout episode of the three, was “The Sweet Science.” In the episode, Sam must return the soul of a boxer who threw his last fight. I’m not going to spend too much time ruining the plot for those of you who haven’t had a chance to see it, but the I re-watched Sam’s second fight 3 times. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the series, I believe you can catch up on CWTV.com.

Kings is a new show this year. The premise in 1 sentence is that it’s a retelling of the biblical story of King David set in an alternate modern age. This sounds like the type of show that never would have gotten the green light from a major network. Yet, here it is.

The cast of Kings is excellent. Ian McShane (of Deadwood fame) plays an amazingly conflicted King Silas and stands out in the show. However, the rest of the cast does a great job and shouldn’t be dismissed as simply supporting castmembers. Once again, I’m not going to blow any plot points, but if you get a chance to see this show, I highly recommend it.

Lastly, the premier of Southland was this week. Strong start. I hope I’m able so see more of the show and see if it can keep going.

-dr

I’ve added two new pages to the site. WordPress treats pages sort of like individual content that just links off of a blog.

In this case, I’ve created a 21st Century Philosophy page where I hope to archive modern observations about our current culture. Please feel free to contribute.

I’ve also created a page for my pseudo band project, Foriegn Object Damage. That page will archive the trials and products of FOD. Feel free to criticize.

-dr

The Friday Night Shootout, which is currently being spent playing the excellent Left 4 Dead, is growing a bit stale, I fear. It’s not that the game stinks. But I think running the same two map sets over and over is getting old.
Valve has been promising a new “Survival Mode” for a while now. And there have been rumours that they’re planning to open up the two map sets available in campaign mode (but not versus mode) but nothing has shown up so far.

Last Friday there was talk about really needing a new squad based shooter to come along. I think the principle complaint being that there are 5 or 7 of us playing L4D, and the game only supports a squad of 4.

There’s not alot on the horizon, either.

Battlefield 1943 is pending. But it’s hard to find any info on it other then gameplay videos of a map from a previous Battlefield game. Don’t get me wrong, when they added the Iwa Jima map to Battlefield 1942, it was a blast to play. But rehashing the same map for a new game years later is either a brilliant transition move for the player base, or just lazy. As I haven’t been able to play yet, I really don’t know which it could be.

I really don’t know about any other multiplayer squad based shooters coming along anytime soon.

-dr

The Sci-Fi channel is changing it’s name to something that they hope is less geeky.

I’m a huge fan of a couple of the Sci-Fi originals such as Battlestar Galactica and Eureka. ((I suppose those links might be broken shortly??)) Obviously, Science Fiction content isn’t all that they show on the channel. They’re also well known for some of the crappier horror and fantasy programming of the last year.

I personally, don’t care what they call the channel. The shows that I love to watch I watch no matter where they reside on the TV menu. I do sort of think it’s funny that the change that they’re making, supposedly to distance themselves from just a Science Fiction fanbase, is being timed for the first episodes of Warhouse 13. A show about a secret government warehouse where the government stores secrets. Sort of a cross between The Librarian and Indiana Jones.

Just because it takes place in the now, doesn’t make it not science fiction.

What I do think is kind of cool is that NBC Universal, who owns the Sci-Fi channel, apparently purchased the Syfy namespace from a fansite that had been covering some of it’s shows. So at least one of us pasty-faced guys playing video games came out ahead in this deal.

-Troy

I’m having alot of fun with the new tools available to me with the new versions of phpBB and WordPress that I’m using now.

Over on the right there, I’ve added in a video player to post up the videos that I come across that deserve sharing. The current one from the Onion News Network is hilarious. Shortly, I’m going to add in a playlist enabled MP3 player for sharing other types of media. Mostly stuff from the wife-aggro house band, Foriegn Object Damage, but probably some other stuff as well.

I need to create a better way of getting to the forums, but for right now, I’ve put a link up above in the banner section of this page. You can register here to commont on these posts, and you can register there to participate in the forums, but sadly, the two accounts use different databases. So, while you can use the same name here, and there, you have to register twice. It’s worth it, though, I think.

I’m sure I’ll post a long rant about how hard it was to get the wife-aggro.com domain back in my name and back on the internet.

Needless to say, if you’re thinking of registering a website and creating your own little space on the internet, be wary of hosting deals where they’ll help you register your domain.

It took me the better part of 6 weeks to get the soil that is Speakeasy.net out of my shorts and back onto a new start. Old users of the domain will immediatly note that the forums didn’t make the transition. Let’s just look at it as a fresh beginning and put the past behind us, shall we?

-Troy

So, just an update on the old wife-aggro forums.

It’s likely that we’ll be starting out fresh when this site goes live. I don’t seem to have a recent backup of the old phpbb forums. I thought that I had done one about 6 weeks ago, but I was either in error, or I lost the file.

So, once this migration is complete, the forums are going to be completely new. My appologies to those of you who have accounts that were closing in on some new rank, or had maxed out to Seth-Like greatness, but there’s really nothing I can do to resolve it.

The good news is that I’ve been able to upgrade both the blog software and the forum software to the latest releases. Which means better manageablilty for me, and better security for you. Hopefully, we won’t have to deal with so many asshats trying to farm email addresses and advertise their porn here.

So, I finally got fed up with my previous web hosts, Speakeasy.

Mostly it was billing, occasionally it was database problems or support issues.

In the end, it just became an issue where I’d rather just get away from them and start all over. The domain expiring 1 year earlier then I believe I paid for made this as good a time as any.

Although, I think the forums will be muffed.

I guess I’ll see who wants to participate in them now.

-Troy