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Today was the second day of skiing. It was awesome! The trees, the snow, the quietness on the top of the mountain, the view, very nice. Having said that, I severely underestimated the amount of hard labour it requires to slide off a mountain. How some people are able to do this for an entire week is just beyond me… I am totally exhausted! But I did get to slide off a blue slope, and there was this one time where I even managed to do so without landing face down in the snow. And I conquered the last part of a red slope, reassuringly titled “Ravinen”… Definitely going to do this again, especially when it includes driving an Audi and listening to Frank Sinatra. All in all: fun

Today me and Sini went skiing at Romme Alpin, a snowy mountain to the north of Stockholm. This was the first time I’d ever put skis on my feet or even seen real people on skis! I took a couple of basic lessons with a bunch of six year old kids, and then I went straight to the excruciatingly steep green slopes. Now I’m writing this post from our nice hotel room at the Active Stay hotel in Borläng. Check the video of us on the knapplift. I’ll put some pictures on Flickr when the connection is better.

Yesterday I discovered there’s a new GTA version out, called Chinatown Wars. This version was released exclusively for the Nintendo DS. Being a big GTA fan I bought the game straight away and I got this cool widget from Rockstar Games as well. The bird’s eye view takes the game back to its roots, and the good quality of the graphics surprised me. The touch screen functionality has been used for several things, for example to start a car

I’m starting to learn Swedish. Sini teaches me a new word every day. I was thinking I should start writing them down so I don’t forget them, so why not on my own blog. Today’s word is Hur mycket är klockan? Yesterday it was skidresa and before that we had gosa, dubbdäck, plånbok, and some other obscene words which I wasn’t allowed to put online

Luckily there’s an online Swedish-Dutch dictionary available which has helped me on many occasions. It even reasonably translates complete blocks of text.

Kremit the Frog and Bigbird learn a new letter every day:

Rutger and me are exploring the possibilities of distributed composition. I wrote a bunch of chords and put them in a basic techno track, and emailed that to him. Then Rutger rearranged the whole thing to form a rock track, programmed some basic drum samples,  recorded guitar tracks to it and emailed the whole thing back to me. Then I setup a mic’ed drumkit, played his drum arrangement on the real thing, recorded and mixed that and sent it back to him. He then recorded new bass and guitar tracks to it. Then I mixed everything together. We have some lyrics lying around, anyone up for laying a vocal track?

The starting point:

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The status quo:

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Today looks like the beginning of spring. The slushy snow stuff on the streets is disappearing, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, and it’s almost possible to change my wintercoat for my summer jacket…

A few years ago I got hold of a Philips Philicorda. A pretty cool machine, not extraordinarily rare, but it’s nice to have one. When I got it, it was pretty dirty and I planned to take some time for it, clean it thoroughly, and pimp it with a line out connection. Unfortunately that never happened… it’s just been standing in my living room as a nice piece of furniture. I finally decided to put it up for sale. Maybe someone with more time can invest some time in it. Note that the machine does in fact work, it’s just very crackly and noisy when you play it.

I don’t need much money for it, just make a fair offer and either come pick it up yourself (in Breda, Holland) or pay shipping costs in advance. Contact me and we can discuss the details.

Over the years my iTunes library has been growing substantially, and so has my collection of computers and harddisks. As a result, my personal archive had become quite scattered. Documents, photos, videos, mp3s, it was everywhere! In my quest to archive everything to a big harddisk attached to my Ubuntu server, I came up with the plan to also have a central music server. That would save a lot of space on my laptop harddisk. Plus I would be able to listen to my music wherever I was, in the house or in the world!

In this article (continue reading…)

One of the first things you should know is that most (though not all) of Logic’s internal controls respond to Fader data, rather than MIDI controller data. To be able to control just about any fader in Logic using an external MIDI controller device, you will need to create the appropriate Transformer objects in the Environment.

In the following example (continue reading…)

Went to a Swedish swimming pool and had my shoes stolen. But hey, I’m not complaining, I got these 2-sizes-too-small awesome snowboots instead!