The blog is back…

Clustering is a natural characteristic of true randomness. The randomness of life’s events clustered on our household this fall, so I’ve had to let all of this sit idle for some time. I’m gradually reviving it…

My new CD is now available!

The tracks for my new CD have all been mastered since May, but I was second-guessing the whole project. (Wow… with a sentence like that, you can see why I’m not in marketing.) Anyway… I realized that it was really just one bad track that was tainting my opinion of the whole thing. So I just removed it! Now, 4 weak minutes shorter, I think it’s a much stronger piece of work.

But don’t take my (not terribly compelling) word for it, listen for yourself! I don’t have the website for the new CD done yet, but the CD itself is for sale in the Room 34 Online Store, with audio samples and everything!

The new CD is called Inflationary Cosmology.

Progress…

I realized what a daunting task it was going to be to use the built-in WordPress functionality to manually copy over all of the articles from my old site database, so I dug under the hood and used the power of SQL to just more-or-less dump everything from one database into the other. So now all (well, most) of the stuff is moved over, and I can begin to disassemble the old site (currently lingering in the link set as “Room 34 Cold Storage”).

If you care to look back at the old stuff (and why wouldn’t you?), you may notice some oddities… that’s mainly due to inconsistencies between my idiosyncratic HTML and the fancy formatting/clean-up WordPress does. I’ll gradually fix that stuff… maybe. (Right after I get around to organizing the basement.)

I’m also tinkering more with the themes. I’ve downloaded several interesting themes that I plan to try out for a while, to get a feel for both their visual appeal as well as the ways they handle certain technical features of WordPress. Once I find one I like, I’ll use it as a basis to build my own, one that incorporates my photography as well. (Will the excitement never end?!)

Oh, I almost forgot to mention… some of the old stuff didn’t have dates, so I hastily and more-than-somewhat arbitrarily assigned them all to January 1, 2004.

What’s all this then?

Yes, it’s yet another unnecessary room34.com overhaul. In part, I wanted to give blogging a try (again… but this time for real [maybe]). I am also trying out some blogging software for potential use at my company. But most of all… well… why not?

So here we go with WordPress. So far I am pretty impressed. It was extremely easy to install, and it doesn’t look like crap, unlike most of what’s out there (especially in the free/open source world). We’ll see how it goes as I start to get under the hood (but maybe not too much — part of the reason I’m doing this is that I just don’t have the free time anymore to build a full engine to run my personal sites on, as much as I like building PHP apps… it’s just that I need to stick to getting paid to do it!).

Right now I’m just using a stock template/theme/whathaveyou that I downloaded. I hate stock designs though, even the good ones. So I’ll be working on my own custom template soon. But I want to make sure this is the right way to go first.

So, there you have it. At the moment, this blog’s presence here means all of the links to my other sites are gone. (Don’t worry… the sites are still there. What do you mean you weren’t worried? Why not??? Ehh…) I’ll be sorting all of that out shortly.

Limitations of the System

After nearly a year away from actively making music, I found a window of opportunity and cranked out 4 complete songs in the span of 6 days. (Actually, 6 evenings, because I worked all day 5 of those 6 days.)

The results were heavily… uh… Ataricized… so there was only one appropriate title for the EP: Limitations of the System.

The whole thing’s available for free download at the link above. (But if you like it, I wouldn’t mind you throwing a bone — or like, maybe, you know, five bucks or something — my way.)

And what do you know, it’s even being “released” on a Tuesday. Maybe Room 34 Records is turning into a real label after all…

…nah.