If you’re in the area, come see us play live!  There will be appearances in Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Chicago, and perhaps other cities!

I will be accompanied with Tom (Five Step Path) & friends for all of the gigs.

Click the venue name to see the venue’s website. Click the address for a Google Maps location. The list below will continue to be updated as information is received.

Confirmed dates:

I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Original computer:
Sony Vaio VGC-RB30 (2005)

Specs:
Intel Pentium 4 HT (3.0Ghz)
1GB RAM DDR
200GB hard drive (7200RPM SATA)
NVidia 8500 GT
PSU: Stock – Max 308w
Drive: HP DVDRW dvd1140i (IDE)

Served me well until 2008, when I purchased my Macbook Pro.

If you own this computer and are wishing to upgrade it, read on. There’s a couple of things you need to know and ask yourself.

What exactly do you want to upgrade and why? What will you be using it for? The motherboard in that computer is a LGA755 (Socket T). The Dual/Quad Core (last generation) chips are designed to fit on the board but are not compatible with it. Not only has the motherboard not been updated to be compatible, but the board itself is five years old, with support only for 2GB (max) DDR400 (Old) RAM. So if you really want the computer to run the latest Intel chips, you’re going to have to buy brand new components. You can get by upgrading the computer for as little as $300 (Core i3 + 1GB RAM + New Motherboard + New PSU). In this project, i go midway with a Core i5 750 (potentially overclocking in the future), 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a graphics card. Please note, you’re going to have to upgrade the PSU. The stock power supply is 308W max. Modern day motherboards, processors, graphics cards require more than that. Depending on your usage, your needs will vary. For me, a 630W PSU will suit me just fine.

If you buy a motherboard with PATA/IDE, you can re-use the same drives (assuming they still work that is, which both of mine did not). Because the HDD is SATA, you can re-use it. Is 200GB enough for you? It is for me. For the time being, anyway.

Upgrading to:
Processor: Intel Core i5 750 (2.66Ghz) | $200
RAM: Corsair 2GB x 2 DDR3 | $100
PSU: Raidmax 630w | $6

Upgrading to the new Intel Core i3/i5/i7 line requires a new motherboard:
Asus P7H55-M Pro (LGA 1156 / H55 Chipset) MicroATX (DOA)
Gigabyte H55M-USB3 (LGA 1156 / H55 Chipset) MicroATX | $110

+Aftermarket CPU cooler | $30
+Thermal Paste | $10

Total spent on project: $510 (Excluding taxes/shipping)

Read on to see more information and pictures. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve integrated my website with Bandcamp to host all of my music streaming and downloads. Currently, there are only two albums featured on the music section: Artificial Horizon and In Memories. At the moment, i’m working on getting my older catalogue onto the system but is taking longer than previously thought. The upside is that my older music, which was previously released as 128kbps MP3, will now be available in delicious lossless FLAC and AAC formats for the first time.

Also, be sure to watch for possible live performances in Texas and Chicago. My new album will also be released by Winter this year (First full length release since 2007). It’ll be available in regular stereo mix and 5.1 surround mix, if there is interest for it.

On the Mac, that is. And so are some of Valve’s Source games, like the Half-Life 2 series, Portal and Team Fortress 2 (Which I have been waiting for).

TF2 in particular is a special one. The OS X community all got iPod earbuds as a welcome gift into the delightfully gore-tastic festival that is Team Fortress 2. Since I’ve been playing the game on Boot Camp for almost a year now, it’s reassuring to know that when I feel like sniping heads off, I no longer have to boot into Windows.

Actually, I confess. I still boot into Windows to play Tf2. The game is just way too buggy and under-performing (to its Windows counterpart) for me to accurately play. For instance, the first time I ran the game, I couldn’t join any of the custom maps that I mostly play on. The download of the map file itself would just stop. I bypassed this problem by grabbing the custom maps from my Boot Camp partition:

c:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\<username>\team fortress 2\tf\maps\

Right in there you’ll find your custom maps associated with the servers you have joined. Their extensions end with “.bsp”. Just copy those files and place them in Mac OS X in:

/users/<name>/Library/Application support/Steam/SteamApps/<username>/team fortress 2/tf/maps

You’ll be able to join your favorite servers with no problem.

But other than that, the game just runs poorly on OS X versus Windows. Lower frame rates and stuttering audio are some of the other problems. Something about the way the mouse is handled bothers me too. The same can be said for Half-Life 2 and Portal. The periodic updates are helping some, but it’s still just not as good. The great news it that Valve is working closely with Apple + NVidia / ATi to bring better driver performance to OS X, so we’ll be waiting for that.

It’s not just with Valve games. Sims 3 is the same deal. Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 runs so poorly even with every graphical setting imaginable at the lowest point. Okay, but RCT3 just may be a horrid port. The point is, for the time being, the same games under identical hardware runs far better on Windows than Mac OS X. Hopefully, that changes.

I’ve been an avid Team Fortress 2 player for quite some time. The game always seems fresh because Valve continues to constantly update (119 updates and counting) the game since it was released on the PC on 2007. With hundreds of maps and servers, i’ve come across HaLs PlayGrounD. A fantastic little community with a good handful of TF2 maps (mostly 2fort style). With thousands of weekly visitors, hundreds whom are regulars, HaLs is one of the most social, diverse, and fun servers i’ve ever been on. With that being said, you’ll find me playing on one of the servers almost daily. On November of 2009,  I was made an admin for HaLs and have been doing what I can to contribute to this fantastic community. Come join us for a round or twenty on HaLs!

You can add me on Steam and join our gaming community via Steam or on the Forums. I go by VO!D and I frequent Desert and Rainy.

That being said, Steam was announced for Mac OS X on March 8, 2010 and promised to bring all Source games, including Team Fortress 2. This is great because now it means I don’t have to constantly boot into my Windows partition to game on. Originally planned for a late April release (and take into account Valve Time), the Steam client was released on May 12th with just a handful of games. What’s missing? Every Source game except for Portal. I was a frustrated and disappointed to see TF2 MIA on the initial release but Valve did gave away Portal for free. Not a time-restricted demo but the full game, which is absolutely fantastic in my book.

With plans to release Mac updates every Wednesday, I now wait until the day where I can finally download that massive 7GB OS X native TF2 game, along with every other Mac Steam user. A shame my download speeds are mediocre (2.5Mbps).

Happy birthday, Artificial Horizon.

Hard to believe it’s been three years.

When you’re really interested in web design and you wanted to get started, Dreamweaver is a really good program to help you understand how web pages are built. But as you advance and you learn HTML, CSS and maybe some PHP, Dreamweaver also starts to become quite useless. You’re better off using a text editor and a web browser.

In fact, i think it would work out quite well. TextWrangler on the left hand side of the screen and Firefox on the right with the HTML document open that you’re working on. Just set the HTML to refresh every five or ten seconds so when you save the document you’re editing, it’ll refresh on the web browser. Presto. If you’re working with PHP web pages, just run everything from a MAMP or XAMPP installation.

Probably the only super useful feature about using Dreamweaver is the ability to easily create Image Maps.

All programs listed above are for Mac OS X, with the exception of XAMPP, which is also available for Windows/Linux.
Text editing programs: TextWranger (Mac) = Notepad++ (Windows)
Local Server Environments: MAMP (Mac) = WAMP (Windows)
XAMPP = Mac + Windows

I’ve been doing a lot of searching around lately for e-commerce software that will do what we need and do it well. That is to say, it needs to handle album downloads pretty damn well. Since our label isn’t exactly very big, ideally it would need to be free or of very little cost. This is my experience and rant with:

WP e-commerce 3.7.5.3 – WordPress Plugin (http://getshopped.org/) – Free / $40 single / $195 business
This is a plugin designed for WordPress to help you sell things on your blog/website. It’s one of the very first i found when searching for an e-commerce solution. We took this plugin into strong consideration because it was very easy to customize (WordPress is essentially the template and there’s thousands of them). The ability to use FTP to upload our .zip albums was a huge plus, since many of our albums run 100MB and over. With the help of an additional plugin (which you have to pay for), you can make single song uploading easy.

Here’s where the good comments end. The plugin is incredibly buggy and chunky. Changing the plugin and tweaking it to your liking requires PHP knowledge, time and a lot of patience. Support on the forums is nearly non-existent. Seriously, don’t even bother making an account to ask questions. There aren’t nearly enough developers to help and/or they mostly seem to be on vacation. If you’re hoping to sell multiple versions of an album (Such as offering MP3, FLAC, etc.), you’re out of luck as product variations don’t work well for downloads. The only options you have for user downloads are the number of times the customer can download the album and “ip-address lock”, which restricts the downloads to the customer (assuming they have a static IP). If you would like an easy way for customers to listen to the album tracks, you’ll need some crappy MP3 plugin that they sell (that ALSO requires the “Gold cart”). Read the rest of this entry »

Tom> mark
Tom> i have 1 hour left to submit my essay on the website
Tom> i need to write 1 more page
Tom> 1 success i’ve had
Mark> triple space action GO
Tom> i cant think of anything other then playing my first GIG
Mark> I/O?
Mark> Unnamed Label?
Tom> but i gotta tell a story
Tom> “then my non-RL friend over the interwebs bought the domain and we where excited, cant wait to start coding PHP into the web pages”
Tom> lol
Mark> Be like “i single-handedly fixed the entire music industry using nothing but duct tape, a hair pin, and an HP laptop with a 3D screen defect.”
Tom> LOL