sometimes i wish i had the talent for sleeping that these three do.  it seems as though they can fall asleep anytime, anywhere… and they love to rub it in.

this afternoon i built these pedal boards for imaad from some scrap wood and carpet that i had laying around the house.  it all came together really quickly and easily. it helps to have a table saw hand for quick cuts.  imaad picked up this nice green suitcase at a thrift store on hawthorne today and it was the perfect size to fit all his pedals. we used little rubber bumpers to the back edge of each board, both to elevate the back edge and to keep the boards from sliding on the stage.  little things like this that can save you time on set-up and tear-down can really make a big difference in helping things run smoothly.  

the pedal boards made their debut tonight and passed the stage test with flying colors.  the pedal boards will be appearing at the warfield later this week…. along with some other people.

i finally got my laptop back from apple.  after a lot of odd repairs i am now having to restore the hard drive from a recent back up.  so far i’ve already had one unsuccessful attempt.  it was in the final stages of restoration when the system just froze up and stopped working.  i’m on my second attempt and the progress bar is moving pretty slowly.  fingers crossed… i hope it works this time.  i’m kind of just waiting around to see what happens at this point.

i had a nice music session with matt tonight.  we in the early stages of getting some material together to make another full length album.  we want to try and do a more sight specific recordings and environmental sampling.  who knows what will happen. i’m just glad that we are excited to start something new.

the thing on the upper right is a new (used) little compact midi controller that i just got from a fellow named john in tacoma.  it’s pretty nice little box covered in leds and knobs. it seems like it will be a good companion for the monome in a live setting.  i look forward to using it (if my laptop ever comes back from the dead)

(update: as of this morning everything looks like it is working fine.  even my cluttered desktop is just as i left it. i hope that everything else is still intact)

today was a wonderful day (weather wise) in portland.  my allergies got the best of me though… it pretty much ruined my morning.  

i made my first felt monome cover for a local today.  this one will help transport surya’s monome down to california on tuesday where he will prepare to do some live visuals for the coachella festival. it was pretty satisfying to hand it over in person rather than packaging it up and saying my farewells to it at the post office.

 i wish it were always that easy.

oh, not sure if anyone really cares or not… but i added this little share button to the bottom of the posts that lets you send links to things like delicious, digg, twitter and so on.  i’m not sure if it works or not.  give it a try and tell me how it goes.

last week nicole picked up an electric warming cat bed for smokey.  he had taken to sitting in front of the heater vent and staying there for hours.  it really made us sad.  he’s an older cat now and seems to have a hard time staying warm. the heated cat bed is now his favorite thing in the world.  he loves it and barely ever leaves.  he always looks so cozy, it makes me wish i had a human sized one.