I really shouldn’t gloat over the misfortune of other companies in the music-tech biz, but somehow I can’t help but smirk a little. Seems that Digidesign’s parent company Avid got the attention of the financial world by announcing that sales of ProTools have fallen off badly recently. Their stock then fell 14% in response. Bummer. Maybe Digi’s monopolistic stranglehold on the DAW market is weakening more than I thought. Maybe people are starting to figure out that just because ProTools is ubiquitous doesn’t mean that you should use it, or that there aren’t better products for less money, etc. read more

I just cancelled my Earthlink accounts (one for general internet access, one for DSL). I’ve had the DSL account for five years and the general account for… uh… ten years, maybe? I opened it long enough ago that my email address was a single dictionary word. It’s a little odd to no longer have that as my default email address, but I’ll get used to it.

There were several reasons. One was that the quality of their customer support declined rather sharply when they outsourced the operation to India. Another was that I discovered that Comcast’s cable-modem service costs the same as Earthlink’s DSL service and is dramatically faster. (Suddenly YouTube makes sense. At DSL speeds all of the videos are blurry and not terribly fun to watch; at cable speeds they look like local video files.) read more

Okay, at the risk of public embarassment I’ll state here that “I Feel Love” is one of my all-time favorite synth songs. Here’s a video of the guy that did it:

Tracie just put a bunch of new photos up in the photo gallery. They’re mostly pictures of flowers and plants in our back yard, and some of the cats. (Yes, photos of our cats! Such a surprise, no?) Click here to go there.

[Not that I have a daily word puzzle, mind you.]

There are three words in the English language that start with the letters “DW”. What are they?

(Thanks to Chris for mentioning this.)

Well, that was pretty stupid of me. I went to some length to spam-proof the commenting mechanism of this site awhile back, and then I wondered why nobody posted any comments. I mean, I know there isn’t a huge amount of traffic on this site, but no comments at all? It seemed odd. Today I finally noticed that when I previously shut down the commenting mechanism altogether, I also disabled the user registration mechanism, and forgot to enable it when I turned the comments back on. If you’re not logged in you can’t comment, and you can’t log in if you don’t register… Duh. read more

I’m about to mess around with the layout and appearance of this site. I apologize if you happen to visit in the midst of this activity and find things shifting around in odd ways. “Do not adjust your picture–the problem is not in your set…”

Our friend Ann sent me this link to an interesting Discover article about contemporary origami. There’s a photo of a dragon that’s probably the most sophisticated bit of folding in the world, as well as some of Robert Lang‘s recent insects. It’s an interesting article, particularly if you haven’t heard of Lang and his work.