Over my winter vacation, I ended up buying NI Komplete 7. It's a humongous library of software and sample for making music. It's been on my wishlist for a long time and I finally buckled down and bought it. It took several hours to install and several days of exploration just to get the feel for it.

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Jaymi and I have been re-organizing the garage for the last few months. We put in some shelves (they're uber) and got a lot of things off of the floor. Now it's time to do something about the wire rack that's holding the server and network gear. We decided to get a low-power, small, quiet computer to run the server to replace the aging Pentium 4 and its box full of failing and failed hard drives.

We went to Fry's to see what we could find and ended up finding a little Shuttle box with a dual core Intel Atom CPU, a cheap 1GB of RAM, and a slow 500GB 2.5" hard drive. I spent some time trying to get Mac OS X running on it, but with the USB optical drive I was using, none of the boot loaders would do anything. So I ended up installing Ubuntu Server 10.04 instead. It was more painless than I had expected and I was able to start moving stuff from the old box to the new box pretty quickly. It sort of feels weird to not be using Gentoo any more.

Now it's time to shut the old box down for good. It has been running almost continuously for almost 5 years. At one point, it had over a 3 year uptime. As soon as everything is settled on the box, I'll be wiping the drives and looking for a new home for the old box.

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A friend challenged me to write something that goes with "Silver Linings". This song really didn't start out this way, but this is how it ended up.

Jaymi loves it.

100328 (Silver Linings) by kender

100327 by kender

...I possess one!

Now I need to learn what wonderful new things I can make!

I managed to spend a couple hours in my studio on the final day of my turkey-week vacation and created something I like very much. It started out as just a tapping out of a rhythm on my desk and it grew into something pretty stompy! This is more like the sound I've been going for and I hope to pursue it further.

091129 by kender

I was playing around in my studio yesterday working on my sound. Jaymi was in there with me and I told her that I needed to get some vocals into the song. After a few false starts on my part, Jaymi took over the mic and we recorded some simple vocals.

Arranging a song with vocals is a lot different than arranging an instrument. I'm still not quite sure how to get it right, but I suppose it's something that'll come with practice.

So, here is Jaymi's very first vocal contribution to Transistor Generation!

I sketched out a new song last night while Jaymi was out eating sushi.

bandcamp

I've started doing some experimentation for whatever the sound of my next album might be. In this track, I'm using a completely new drum setup that has a more electronic feel to it. I also played around with a PodXT patch for the guitar bass line that sounds interesting. It makes me want to get a bass.

The inspiration for this track came from the theme from 28 Days Later. It's one of my favorite tracks ever.

kendersoft.org, my old domain, is going bye-bye! I've had this domain for years, and still get plenty of spam to my email addresses on it. The domain registration expires this week and so everything I do from now on will be on the enkode.me domain.

So, if you're still using my kender@kendersoft.org email address, please change your address book to kender@enkode.me, otherwise, i'll never receive your message.