Shivering Spaces

I’ve got a knitted blanket around me, my feet are cold and the heater running round-the-clock has me dehydrated. I’m ready for breakfast @ the Plaza. So tomorrow is the first Bucs superbowl.. How in the world would I know this? Over the last year, Dan has slowly got me interested in sports — enough to follow Lakers games and know the names of a handful of NFL players and coaches. I don’t even know who I am anymore.

Word on the street is the 307 house of fun and excitement is building a LAN of four PCs, two are being put together over the next few weeks as parts arrive. The new-ish AMD XP 2100 CPU will power the “production unit” in my room while my old PC will be prepped for use as the dedicated “recording unit” in the rock room. No more recording on 4-track, transferring to PC then dragging all types of amps and instruments into my cramped room for overdubs.

Last night I read Dive Into Accessibility, an online book about building more accessible webpages. Most of the techniques I’d already picked up over the last year or two, but a few caught my eye, like this table trick to have content, rather than navigation, be first in the markup (for text and alternative browsers) in simple left-nav table layouts. A great idea if you must use tables for layout..

After an hour of hiding background PNGs and negative margins from IE/win, the pastel theme finally looks decent in that browser. Opera and Moz/Netscape6+ users get the real deal.

Signal dropped off as the clouds rolled in

A packed Common Grounds and I saw Holopaw, Iron and Wine and the Fruit Bats last night. Holopaw is on tour with a ridiculous amount of equipment, and it’s great to see them at home..sort of (most of them aren’t in G’ville anymore). I’m happy how the CD came out with great sound, songs and John’s awesome artwork. The Fruit Bats were a nice surprise, very 70’s California country-pop (but from Chicago) with tight 2-part harmonies. A nice evening of music all-around, as always spoiled by standing for hours in a tight crowd and coming home smelling like smoke at 2:30.

If you’re an amateur recordist or just curious how audio is transferred to vinyl, here’s a nice introduction to vinyl mastering.