Any Road, Any Cost and some Guitar Blues

I have committed to be the band director for the 180 degrees music team inc. for this year, as I have the previous years too and it has been most fulfilling and enjoyable as usual. Nothing beats loving what you're doing and knowing you kick a$$ on it! Hehehe. Forgive the language.

1 week countdown for the event and I hope everyone who visits my blog (if anyone at all!) can come. The musical "Any Road, Any Cost" is youth driven and will feature a live band and a live youth group singing praises and songs for the Almighty being up there.

I will be rendering a number or 2 in the said event. I have been preparing for this one too. I hope to deliver an experience to the audience they would appreciate. This is of course dedicated to my Creator and His love for me, but through this I hope I can extend His love to others as well (at least this is what I would like to think). =)

On preparation, I have prepared my Cort Earth 1200. It's a beautiful acoustic guitar my father gave me. It's korean made (like my Ebox chassis!). Now I have to prepare and buy some guitar in order to amplify it well. I am looking at the Behringer C-2 matched condenser microphones. I hope they will suffice for the amplification of this guitar.

Anyway, this guitar gave me problems. if it weren't for its good looks, I wouldn't spend time fixing it. It's giving annoying, and I mean annoying, fret buzz. Not on open strings, not even on fretted ones. It's giving fret buzz on tapped ones! Whenever I tap on the eleventh fret, it's giving me a buzz below neck, hence giving me 2
notes played simultaneously. Anyway, lowering the nut on the guitar solved, except now I have an open string fret buzz too. I was considering bringing it to a luthier but I want to learn myself so I kinda murdered the guitar instead.

Pictures of the guitar can be found in my flickr site here. Pardon the disorganization. Hehe.

Mumblings

It's been eons since I've posted. It's been eons since there was sugar in the pantry.










Finally, Joost (TV, the way you want it - so they say) has emailed me to download their program and try it out. I've installed, registered, and now watching TV from home. It's a streaming type of thing, but I don't think it's live. I just ope they are not preset videos that you have to watch all over and over again. Quality is better than that of Youtube's though, so I guess its for higher bandwidth connections, not that I do have one.

Try it out. The interface is cool.

IPAQ 2210 / 2215 Pocket PC

Old School Gear I still love

I've had this unit since the life of me. I think it's one of my most expensive, if not the most, investments back in college. Was able to save enough to buy me a decent personal digital assistant. Bought it second hand in bidshot. Buyer arranged a new replacement from HP Philippines. Exchanged it for the new unit. Eventually, new unit gave me some sort of oil inside. I don't know if it was an LCD leak or something. Had the unit replaced by HP. Got a new one again. Ran smooth. Took care of it as much as I could. Eventually, it gave me the dreadful white screen of death. No amount of charging, discharging, banging around, and abuse could bring it back up. Brought the unit back to HP for repairs. Guess what? They took it in and replaced it again!

Reflecting back, HP Philippines does have great customer support. I have to personally thank Mr. Vincent Polido whose name I will not forget for his superb and sincere assistance to me and my pocket pc. I still have the 3rd brand new unit with me, all functional and well. I think he is now disconnected with HP but wherever he is, I hope he is well and prosperous.

I just bought a Tomato. It's a 2GB SD card / USB flash drive. It's a hybrid type. Take off the cap and tadah! It's a flash drive. Copied a lot of mp3's on it and installed Ppod, a discontinued iPod simulator (thanks to apple!) for the pocketpc. It's cool actually. Now I have a 2Gb pseudo iPod. I love it. I'm sure this isn't the end of it.

Of course, I still installed the pocket pc essentials. Dictionaries, games (yes! they are essential), resco programs and all. For musicians who do own a pocket pc, I would recommend the following programs:

• Phontuner - it's a visual tuner for your instrument. There are several instrument presets for guitar, violin, cello, and singing. Available to pocket pc, symbian OS, and Palm. It's the best tuner I've found.
  
• Beats Metronome - Says what it says it does. It's a metronome. I think there are better ones though, but for now, this will do. It's also stuck at 4/4 time signature. So much for Uneven. No, not my band! The time signature!
• Resco Audio Recorder - a decent audio recorder for your pocket pc. Records straight to mp3. nice!

I hope I can expand this unit more. As a good friend of mine put it, "You're not maximizing your pocketpc!".

That got my ass moving.