Oh hey, I still use this journal thing... it's just "life" has happened a bit too much for me, and thus I rarely have time to write long posts. Feel free to check my various other social aggregates.

Traveling was probably the most long and arduous part of the vacation so far. Wake up at 5am PST, and then become finally settled in your hotel room at 7:00PM (that's 5PM PST). I was pretty exhausted and had an empty stomach all day -- so naturally, first thing I do is get a drink.

Not any drink mind you. This is Bourbon Street. First thing up, was a large 151 Pina Colada. zOMG!

The cool thing of course, was that you can roam the streets with your drink with the rest of the semi drunk people. The street was basically one giant bar in that sense.

Strangely, I was unaware but it was super packed last night because it was Tulane University's graduation that day, thus a bunch of those folk were over in the street celebrating.

Anyhow, after finishing that drink, god... I felt way super smashed. I don't think I had gotten that drunk off one drink before. So, I wound up stumbling into The Court of Two Sisters Tavern for a Po' Boy (Basically sort of a mix with a sloppy joe and roast beef on a french roll).

Wow, I could not believe how quickly I went from "smashed" to comprehensibly sober. I was back to my normal state after that.

So what was next after this endeavor? Huge Ass Beers. Apparently beers that were served in bucket like containers. I'm not sure how many ounces this container was, but I bought a rare glass of Guinness in one. Yes, I was that badass.

And of course, I wound up completely smashed again. This is when the exciting stuff happened. When returning back up the street, there was smoke and sirens. The building right next door was on fire!


By this time, I'm like, "Jeebus, how the hell do I get from here to my hotel past there." So I wound up having to cut around side streets, use my handy dandy fabric map and make it up the street to my hotel. By this time I was contemplating whether to get my SLR and go back out, but my newly drunken state said no and I stayed up poking around the net til I passed out.

What. A. Night.

So... I finally got around to buying a bike. I have no clue about bikes so much, but I know I didn't want some cheapo-heavy-as-fuck cheapo Target bike. Not to mention Target and other chain stores don't carry bikes that fit me (my long ass legs won't extend correctly).

Originally I wanted to get a cannondale quick 4 (I heard good things about it when I did sound for Bicycle Magazine's Year Winners). It was a ship-to-order bike. Meaning I could order it and get it. I wouldn't have any clue if it fit me correctly or if I'd like it, so I decided to look at what was there. I sort of fell in love with this one all dark urban bike, the Marin Muirwoods 29er. So, I got it.



It was rather pricey, and a few of my friends flipped out on how much I spent but, I'm planning to eventually bike around for my main transportation. I kind of love how simple the bike is, how light it is, and how it rides.

Currently though, I haven't had the chance to quite ride it. I'm waiting for some basic things I didn't want to buy at the store (way overpriced than what I could get online). Wound up buying a spiffy bike lock with a lock cable to secure the rest of the bike, and a tail light strobe. I have my old bicycle headlamp still that I'm probably going to use, I just need to get a new handlebar mount for it.

I'm also trying to find a store that sells Lazer Urbanize helmets, since they don't look as goofy as a speed racer, and not as special ed as a rock climbing helmet. Sort of like a "lite" version of a BMX helmet.

Anyways, Rachel (pink haired one) bought herself a bike too and we might start doing some light riding around on trails or around Jack London Square at night. I might travel back down to Monterey sometime to ride along the trails there sometime too.

I tried... I tried sooooooo hard tonight to have a good time.

Only to discover, that my FUCKING CAR was broken into at MEAT.

Right in the same area that someone had their car broken into last Monday at Deathguild. There is someone obviously fucking with cars, and I think honestly it's someone who frequents DG/and related events. I have a strong idea of who it is, but no concrete evidence to prove.

Either way, I'll be without my car for a week since I have a giant foot print from someone kicking the door in along with my window being broken.

Overall, I'm majorly pissed, more so since I felt alone in the whole situation and will be missing out in school cause of it. Goodbye $12,000 in tuition. FUCK YOU!

I care about my friends, I really do. I'm beginning to feel that this care is becoming unwarranted. If disinterest in my ability to help/warn a friend is denied by one, perhaps it needs to be revoked from the rest.

I know atleast one person involved in this reads my livejournal, so for the sake of everyone concerned the exact matters nor the people involved will be mentioned, but the overall plot will remain for anonymous comment.

--

I warned a friend (we'll call her friend A) of mine about someone (Person X) from information that I knew of from another friend's (Friend B) experience. Mind you this isn't completely Friend B telling me this info, Friend B was involved and experienced it. The information incriminates Person X about something. In Friend B's experience, Person X was proven/admitted to it.

Friend A's experience is different however. Person X has denied all claims to the information.

Now, Friend A is pissed at me for telling her what she believes is false information. While Friend B is pissed at me because Person X is accusing her of spreading lies and rumors.

--

So why should I bother caring about people? I've explained this situation to people unrelated to the story and they have said I did the right thing. But now I have two good friends pissed at me.

In the words of Combichrist (adapted), this shit will fuck your HTML up!

TONIGHT

MzSamantha DJs MEATGUILD's MAIN ROOM!

Be there to support a true and dear friend of the community!





zOMg! ANNOYING GIFS! geocities Style YO!


obligatory boobs

I'm going to be heading to New Orleans in May! Apparently, I've used my Southwest Visa card enough to get two free airline tickets, thus making my roundtrip flight nearly free (I dont think air fees and such are covered). Only thing I'll be needing to do is book a hotel for a day since my friend is flying in the day after. Which means I'll have one day in New Orleans all to myself to explore as I please.

I'll definitely be taking lots of pictures and such.

One place that I've been vying to go to for a couple years is New Orleans. Despite my massive crazy schedule, I do have some constants and some luck in the matter to finally be able to go. It won't be until May, and it's not definite, but I'll finally get a chance to see what it's all about. Woot!

At this point, it's a matter of balancing out frequent flyer miles and such.

Okay... So I came up with the most insane idea tonight while chatting with Geoffrey. GOTHIC COOKING SHOW. Yes. First episode being, Black as My Soul Enchiladas. The following episodes possibly involving special guests from bands, record labels, etc. Some ideas I came up with so far:

Crunchpod Crunchy Tacos
Bauhaus Burritos
Abney Park Pulled Pork
Depeche al a Mode
Sushi and the Banshees
Sisters of Mercy Meringue Pie
Dead Canned Dinner
Peter Murphy Cuts You Up Stir Fry

Any more ideas to add to the list?

Oh crap! I have a livejournal? I'm using twitter more. It's easier for me to send a tweet during my off time, then being at a computer to compose some elegant piece of journal wonder.

twitter.com/megabytemike

It fucked up videos.

Click your friends page. Now look at any videos your friends have posted. For me, they are all scrambled with each other's. My friend caffeina's movie shows up in my friend chise's livejournal, and her movie shows up in audreystat's livejournal. Kelly, I have NO CLUE where your movie went.

Yea. Really screwed up bug. How can it be fucking with content like that?

So, despite my name being the Megabyte Mike, I'm quite datacentric. Having upon gigabytes of files. Possibly into the incomparable uncharitable territories. Consider me a digital packrat. Or just too lazy to delete files. Not including my laptop, I have around 1277.6GBs of files (or roughly 1.25TB). This includes two operating system installs, multiple applications, music of my own and others, videos of my own and others, the lovely pictures I upload to flickr, and more.

Obviously, I could hamper down and consolidate huge swaths of this data (which I'll most likely be pursuing eventually to optimize my datasets), but I figured unplanned redundancy might be a good thing (in terms of backups).

While I have to admit, I've been lucky not to been struck with severe data loss yet (there was once a time a long time ago when 1GB were new, and CompUSA didn't know the difference between a printer cable and a SCSI cable) I had started a little homemade RAID system.

RAID systems are useful if setup properly, since your data can be mirrored/spanned across multiple drives to provide a virtualized backup essentially. While I'm not too familiar with the technicalities of such, elaborate equations are probably involved so where, the 1s and 0s become 0s, 1s, and 2s? Basically, if you have three drives RAID'ed together, and one drive goes bad, you can pop in another drive and all your data is still there.

This has been a rather "rocket-scientist," time consuming process involving you to pre-plan how much data you will need, how to setup specific drivers and programs, and etc. It was a pain in the ass when I did this. I had this home built NAS RAID running Debian. It worked, it stored my data well. I just had to send commands it's way when booting up and such.

Only problem was, if I was at a show or off-site I couldn't take that data with me. UNTIL NOW!



That's Drobo, and it has three 500GB drives stuffed into it. That's all I had to do to set it up. Other than plug in the FW800 cable. Didn't have to setup any fancy shmancy software, or anything. Oh yea, and it fit nice and neatly into my desk (which is another story).

I configured it for 8TB. So the computer will say that I have 8TB available, when in reality I only have 1TB available. This means, in the future I can remove a drive, and stick in a new one with a larger capacity and my data will still be there (no more additional copying of data).

See that I have one drive bay open still? Well, that's for a 1TB drive I'll be stuffing into it soon. First, I'm copying all the files off onto the Drobo using a rather efficient method called rsync.


Yes I know how to use Cmd+Shift+3, but I think an actual photo of the screen is more artsy.

Rsync will essentially compared drive A to drive B, and copy the necessary files over. It'll also check to see if it was copied properly as well, and overall, will "sync" the source and destination. Pretty nifty, huh?

Seriously, if you are a media professional, or even just a datawhore like myself. I STRONGLY suggest drobo as an easy "get it done," device. It's portable, it's easy to use, and it just works.

Drobo has not paid me anything to write this, I rarely rarely rarely hype on products, but feel this one is an exception. P.S. If DataRobotics would like to send me free swag *cough cough*

So I thought this hanging speaker idea was going to help me.

I was completely wrong. Definitely was just a small stop gap excuse to try to get back into music making. It's all sorts of fail.

I guess I'll be looking for a big ol' desk and such to start my music's with. Not sure if it'll be from IKEA or elsewhere, but I know definitely its been the overall vibe thats been bugging me.

My head feels like exploding too!!! UGH WHAT"S WRONG?!!?!!?!?!?!!?!

So, what did I do today?

Quite a bit. After some sluggishness.

First, I finally enabled megabytemike.net to go to it's own website. There is nothing interesting there at the moment, just the basic drupal welcome screen. What plans do I have in store for it? Well, I'll probably be migrating my livejournal there. Hopefully... I'll have to look into accomplishing that. Don't worry though, you won't have to get separate logins there to post comments and such. Luckily, I enabled OpenID with it, so you can actually use your livejournal login/passwords to authenticate there for your comments.

What else did I do?

I secured all my assets some more. I got a program called 1Password, to reinforce the login/passwords I have with various websites. I essentially maxed out on the security of passwords that I could. So now I have a bunch of passwords, that... even I don't know, but are stored luckily and recalled when needed. But what had me really sold, was the free iPhone app that I can use for the passwords on the go. So in case I need to use the password elsewhere, I can easily recall it up on my iPhone. Pretty nifty.

In addition, I did finally get the proper monitor placement thing I've been cooking up for awhile. I essentially "floated" or hung some platforms from the ceiling for the speakers to sit on. At the moment I have my tiny lightweight Roland DM-10s (which suck for low end btw), but plan to hopefully get some Samson Rubicon R8a's. Ribbon tweeter, 8-inch woofer. Pretty beefy, but huge.

Either way, I'm still not sure if this will be a permanent solution to my problem. I'm still boggled as to how I should properly setup the area up here for my studio-ness, but at the moment it gets the job done. I figured I should tackle the projects one at a time, and simply get something basic going before I do anymore further investment.

At this point I don't even have all of my gear hooked up. So I think, I should do that FIRST, before I go on about rearranging and what not. Essentially, rearrange to serve the need of getting things connected when the time comes up for it, and not preplanning. The more patient route I suppose.

Sorry if this post seemed a bit chaotic. Caffeine, ya know?

I was reading an article today on top 16 bands to blow up in 2009...

Combichrist made fucking 14 place? What the hell?

Link to article, copied below:

Combichrist

Who: Based off album titles like “Everybody Hates You” and “What the F--- is Wrong With You People?”, it’s a good guess that Combichrist frontman Andy LaPlegua is an angry man. After making minor waves with the more synth-based Icon of Coil earlier in the decade, LaPlegua (originally from Norway) upped the aggro for Combichrist, mixing in some old-school industrial beats, distorted vocals and heavy metal guitars. Recently, the band’s “Frost” EP hit the Billboard Top Ten singles and dance sales charts; their latest full-length, “Today We Are All Demons,” comes out Jan. 20.

What: KMFDM, Ministry, Skinny Puppy…the spirit of those industrial rockers lives on in Combichrist, who strip out the nu-metal excesses (hi, Static-X!) and self-flagellating worldview (hi, Trent Reznor!) that doomed the genre. They do, however, keep the dancefloor beats and finger-pointing anger, while adding some ambient tones and Depeche Mode–style keyboards—most successfully on “Kickstart the Fight,” a duet with S&M rockers the Genitorturers.

Most likely to blow up: Nothing here screams radio hit, but the more synth-flavored “I Want Your Blood” has a demonic vibe that Marilyn Manson should copy, pronto.—KM

Okay, so what say you? Do you really think that Combichrist, after all these years, is going to blow up nationwide? Not just to the whole industrial/ebm/goth/etc/etc/etc scene, but mainstream?