I spent all day yesterday working on a new old web site. I registered thejamesmachine.com. My first web site, years ago, was jamesmosheen.com. I let that die and registered medinaline.net and medinaline.com.
Medina Line has been my personal site for years now, where photos, music, lyrics, short stories (quiction), and a forum is hosted. Back in January of 2007, I rented a practice space and formed Medina Line the band to play my songs. Anyway, medinaline.net became the band site, so I moved my site to a sub-domain, medinaline.net/james. There is lots of fun php, mysql, and javascript functionality there. I have now pointed thejamesmachine.com to the sub-domain and changed up the look of everything quite a bit.
Here is a little something I stumbled on that just made my day. http://xkcd.com/36/ I have since tried to soak up everything I can at that site. Brilliant!
Anyway, enough about not me.
I was working on one of my old guitars yesterday, a semi-hollow body archtop electric Johnson JH-480-N that I bought back in 2002. It's a beautiful (looking) guitar. I have really only used it for acoustic recordings. It has a much thinner, more manageable tone than most acoustic guitars. Anyway, it's made in China and is very cheaply made. There are always problems with it. The input jack had a short in it almost immediately and is constantly coming loose. In plugging the guitar into my Kustom '72 Coupe yesterday to play it for the first time in a couple of years, I found that the bridge pickup has stopped working completely. The pickups have always been weak. A beautiful guitar that has an awkwardly short scale, never works right, and doesn't sound good when it does... it's like someone reached into my soul and designed a guitar just for me.
A note on the Kustom amp, it sounds great, I like the giant pile of features that it has... Except that there is only one set of EQ controls that both channels have to share. There are no settings that are complimentary to both clean and distorted channels. It's frustrating. If I wanted to have to rely on distortion pedals, I wouldn't have bought a two channel amp.
I have been devoting a lot of time to my Pandora radio station. If you don't know about pandora.com, it is a customizable Internet radio station that plays only music you like. If something you don't like something, tell them and they move on. They are trying (somewhat successfully) to map the music genome. What makes different music sound different? What makes you like songs from one band, but not another that sounds similar? This is where trouble comes into paradise... I keep having to tell it that just because I like The Darkness doesn't mean I will like any Poison or Warrant song they play.
Go have a listen if you like moderate rock. It's like a window into my soul... I keep adding new bands that I like, Modest Mouse, The Shins, The Strokes, The Heartless Bastards... They keep playing Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins... In other words, high school. I was a grunge boy for sure. Anyway, I guess it comes down to this: The things that were really appealing to me 15 years ago in music are the same things I look for today.
So, there you have it. My first post in a month. Don't pressure me. I'm teetering on the brink here.