New toy

I wasn’t looking to buy a new guitar this weekend, or anytime in the near future for that matter, but it happened. Fate. I’d like to believe that it wasn’t me that found the guitar, it was the guitar that found me.

It’s been a long term goal to eventually buy a new electric guitar. I sold my previous one in California before I move back to the east coast and I’ve been meaning to upgrade at some point, but I’ve had a few other toys to keep me occupied for the time being and a few reasons why I shouldn’t be spending my disposable income on things that make me happy.

The Gibson SG Standard has always been my dream guitar, but they don’t make the natural sunburst finish anymore and that’s what I really wanted. It’s certainly not impossible to find, but it’s difficult to find new. My options were to either resort to buying it from some weirdo on eBay (ugh) or to search around in random music stores until I found it. I made a mental note to keep an eye out but I wasn’t in any rush.

But as fate would have it, I randomly wandered into the 30th Street Guitars and there it was. One of maybe four SGs that they had total. I was in shock for a few minutes. As I stood there staring up, with my jaw almost touching the floor, and the store clerk asking me to please stop drooling on amps, I remember vividly hearing Wayne Campbell proclaiming “It will be mine, oh yes, it will be mine.”

Or maybe I had actually said it out loud.

I knew I wanted it, but I still needed some encouragement to dish out a substantial sum of money. In the past I would have just flipped a coin or asked a magic 8 ball, but we have the Internet now and the Internet is never wrong.

So I asked the Internet.

And within a few minutes I got the answer I was looking for. “Outlook good :)”. Good enough for me!

“Not today, my good man. I’m feeling saucy. I think I’m gonna buy it. Do you accept…cash? Cha-ching.”

No Comments / Posted in: life, music

Lala.com + Last.fm scrobbling = pure bliss

I’ve been using lala.com for a few weeks now. It’s a great service. It lets you sync your music library with their servers so you can play your music library from anywhere with an internet connection. No reason to bring my iPod to and from work anymore. But the one caveat I had with the service was that I couldn’t keep track of my music listening trends on Last.fm like I can with iTunes or my iPod.

Until now!

Lala.com is now beta testing scrobbling your listens onto your Last.fm account! All I had to do was click on the “Tell us” link on the top left of the site and ask for the feature to be activated in my account. Within an hour, I got a reply and it was activated in my account. I’ve been scrobbling all day from lala.com. It works great so far!

Oh, and I got the tip from a lala.com reply to me on Twitter. They’ve since deleted the tweet, probably to keep the beta testing limited, or because they don’t want to be associated with me. Either way, it’s fine by me.

Update (7/12/09): It looks like the “Tell us” link no longer exists. Try asking in this form: http://www.lala.com/#contactsupport

Update (10/27/09): As Andrew pointed out in the comments below, the location to enable the feature has moved. “My Lala” > “Settings” > “Beta” link/tab at the top right.

10 Comments / Posted in: music, Tech

Just how hard do I rock out?

This hard…

During a rather energetic rock out session today on my electronic drum set, I managed to snap the metal on my crash cymbal stand. Granted, I’m sure it’s not made of the highest grade aluminum, but still, I impressed myself.

Here’s the other end of the stand sticking out of the cymbal.

Tommy Lee would be impressed…maybe.

4 Comments / Posted in: music, wtf

‘Tis the season?

Sufjan Stevens “Songs For Christmas” has begun to get heavy rotation on my sleeping music playlist.  I think this means that I’m subconsciously longing for Christmas.  I did the same thing last summer too.  I’m assuming the cycle will continue until someone puts out a “Songs For Memorial Day” album.

1 Comment / Posted in: music, pointless