Today, I popped into Cash Generator, just to kill some time before a work meeting…and I saw a Godin LGXT-SA. Seymour Duncan pickups, piezo bridge for acoustic sounds, synth output, ebony fretboard…these bad boys retail for £1600 approx brand spanking new. The price tag for this one?
SIXTY.
FUCKING.
QUID.
I couldn’t get the debit card out fast enough.
It’s a bit rough around the edges (pots are a bit scratchy, no whammy bar arm, switch tip is missing off the pickup selector, the low E string is quiet in acoustic mode, needs a restring and a tidy up), but even so…£60. Fu-huck ME.
This can only mean one thing. I’m probably going to get T-boned by an 18-wheeler driving to work some day.
Did I mention it came with a Hiscox hardshell case? Well, it does.
A pic should be attached to this post, if I’ve used the iPhone WordPress app properly.
With the annual jump racing carnival on the Cotswolds just around the corner, I thought I’d go through the cards for each day and give some initial ‘gut feeling’ picks. I’ll probably do some more in-depth picks in individual blog posts before each day, but here’s where my thoughts are at the moment…
If there’s any Mac users out there that read my blog (according to Statpress I get a few hits from Mac users…) feel free to swing over to http://www.macheist.com and snag yourselves a nanoBundle of some nifty apps, headlined by the yet-to-be-unlocked Tales of Monkey island point-n-click adventure game and the Mac-only web design software Rapidweaver.
I’m even using one of the programs from the bundle to write this post- MacJournal.
Oh yeah, the audition went reasonably well. With any luck I should know whether I’m in the band by about this time next week or earlier. Keep ‘em crossed, folks.
This year, I’ve decided that my main goal for the year is to get back into playing live with other musicians. This mission gets under way properly this Sunday when I throw my hat in the ring for the vacant bass player position in the Glasgow hard rock outfit Blood Drum.
It’ll be a weekend of firsts; the first time I’ve ever auditioned for a band, the first time I’ll have done any serious motorway driving, and the first time I’ve ever driven myself to Glasgow.
I might do some in-progress updates about the whole deal. No doubt I’ll be tweeting, but I might throw some video or audio updates in there too. Wonder if there’s an Audioboo plugin for WordPress?
As you can see, if you’ve been here before, I’ve re-jigged the site. “Ah, it’s the same content, just a new WP theme,” I hear you cry. Well, to a certain extent, that’s true, from a user standpoint, but the foundations upon which the site sits have been overhauled.
I was with another hosting company for this here site for quite some time. They had a pretty sweet deal – a year’s hosting, plus a .com domain for something like £30 a year. However, it was all run by one guy out of his house using one of those ‘Reseller Hosting’ packages, and I guess he stopped giving a toss about the hosting end of things. Maybe he was having real life problems. Maybe he was eyeballs deep in his day job. Who knows?
As a result, I decided to up sticks and find a better host. I found a nice company called Vidahost that had a similar deal to my previous host, but is actually run as a business rather than a side project. Their customer service has been very good, and as a result, I decided to jump on board. Bit of a pain in the arse getting the neilmcdougall.com domain transferred over, but that’s now well in progress, and should cause no further issues. Best part is, I’ve paid for my hosting up front for the next three years (on a three years for the price of two deal). £60. Wahey! Bargain get!
Been footering about with themes and whatnot, and settled on this nice chunky effort. The site’s had a white-on-black vibe since I started it. Can’t seem to find anything colourful that tickles my fancy. *shrugs*
At the time of writing, some of the links in ‘My Music’ don’t work yet, need to get files re-uploaded and renamed.
So, onwards into 2010, and hopefully more blog posts from me! Huzzah!
Edit: Yes, I know the header image is guff. I knocked it up in 5 minutes. Any Photoshop wizards are free to submit new ones to neil@neilmcdougall.com
I originally posted this over on ScrewAttack.com, but I thought I’d repost it here, seeing as this is my main blog and all.
Hello, G1s, I’m NeiloMac, a jack-of-all-trades geek from the wintery climes of south-west Scotland.
I’m not sure what prompted me to sign up for a ScrewAttack account, but I thought it’d be fun to start writing about my current thoughts on videogames, as many of you are already doing. I probably won’t be writing anything Earth-shatteringly out-of-the-box, but I hope what I do write is a fun read nonetheless.
Before I start harping on about my opinions, I thought it’d be an interesting excersise to think back over my videogaming life for the past 20+ years.
So, this here is the first (of many to come?) blog posts using the WordPress client on my shiny new iPhone 3GS.
I was using a Nokia N95 8GB before now and that has served me well for the last year and a half, but I never really felt like I was using the phone to it’s absolute fullest potential. I never really used the email functions (writing email on a numeric keypad would royally suck), or the office type stuff, and I had my iPod for music and podcasts, so the multimedia side of the phone kinda went to waste too. It was basically phone calls, texts, calendar, web browsing at work, keeping up with Twitter at work and the odd game of Tetris or Bejeweled at work (yeah, working in a bookies can get dull sometimes, especially in Kilmarnock).
However, things finally came into shape for me to finally jump on the iPhone bandwagon. My iPod went tits up, my phone upgrade was due, and Apple released the iPhone 3GS, which ticked most of the boxes I was waiting to be ticked before I was iPhone-ready- better camera and more storage being the main ones. If a phone was going to be my all-in-one device, I needed it to have at least 32GB on board to replace my 30GB iPod Video. Lo and behold, come WWDC, Apple drop the 32 gig 3GS. And it was good.
So, what am I enjoying so far?
The apps are tremendous. Well, some of ‘em anyway. There’s plenty of shovelware on the App Store, so it’s definitely worth doing a bit of snooping around for app recommendations and community word of mouth. Alternatively there’s often free trial or lite versions of some apps to tickle yer fancy. Check out this Twitter feed for a feed of apps that go from being paid apps to freebies. I’ve got a couple of decent ones out of that. There’s also a podcast called Appslappy that’s available on iTunes and the like. It’s all about iPhone app reviews, but it’s quite entertaining.
Anyway, I reckon that’s enough iPhone blogging for now. I’ll be updating this blog, my twitter feed (link at the bottom of the page) and my audioboo feed (more on that soon) with more stuff in the days to come.
Oh, incidentally, thank for all the great feedback on the Rick Astley/Dream Theater mashups. Glad so many folk enjoyed them
Using the Producer Edition disc with the limited edition boxed-set version of Dream Theater’s new album, I’ve created a mashup mix of Dream Theater’s ‘Wither and Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. It had to happen eventually. Have a listen with the Flash player below.
Update: How about it going the other way? Wither’s vocals over Never Gonna Give You Up’s music? Here it is!
See the ‘My Music’ link over there? Yeah, click that shit and listen to the tunes on there. You might actually enjoy some of them.
Nothing majorly noteworthy happening of late, unfortunately. Get paid on Thursday, though, so shouldn’t be too long before I’m back on the road.
Oh, that’s right, I got shot of my DeArmond Jetstar guitar and replaced it with a nice Ibanez Soundgear bass. Need to get it set up to remove the pretty chronic fret buzz on the lower frets, but once that’s done it’ll be pure bass sexyness.
Pics of bass and eventual new car will be forthcoming soon.
So I backed Mon Mome, amongst others, in the National last saturday. 93p each way – it was all I had left in my Paddy Power account after I backed all the horses whose form I liked. I picked it based on the jockey silks. Same way I picked Numbersixvalverde in ’06. And probably Silver Birch in ’07. Yeah, I’ve picked three out of the last four Grand National winners. w00t.
Not had much chance to get to grips with Logic Pro yet. Noodled around with some of the virtual instruments and installed Addictive Drums (my favourite source for multisampled drums – they sound terrific with some careful programming. Just wish there was a couple more cymbal slots, mind you), so I might have a crack at doing some proper recording in the near future.
My next door neighbour died of cancer today, and it looks like my mum’s cousin might not be long for this world either, thanks to it. Fuck cancer. Fuck cancer up its tumerous arse.
On a lighter note, my friends/bandmates Toma and Ross produced another comedy music video, based on Biffy Clyro’s song Machines. You can watch it below.
