MMM

I stumbled upon this site one day: http://oops-mmm.appspot.com/
"Who-ho-hoo, this will be a funny read", I thought as I was anticipating to find some bullshit about how you can invest money into this MMM foundation and magically double it up in just couple of months.

I believed, MMM was a huge financial pyramid scheme created by some Russian fraudster back in 90-ies and now he's back on his feet, trying his thing again.

Upgrading to Windows 8

I have this old ThinkPad laptop, recently restored to factory settings and running pre-installed Windows Vista. After receiving endless upgrades it now runs pretty ok. Amazingly, even the usual DPC Latency issues appear to be resolved and it handles my sound card without major clicks and dropouts. It's however enormously sluggish and overloaded with build-in Lenovo software I don't really need. Booting up this thing takes forever.

As we all know, Windows 7 is by far better than Vista and MicroSoft claims that the new Windows 8 is even faster and more efficient. 30 Euros seems to be a reasonable price for the upgrade, so I tried to get it.

Live PA Setup - Ableton Live

While Bitwig is still beta-testing, Ableton has made a smart move, announcing the long waited release of Ableton Live 9 and offering a discount for Live 8 + free upgrade to 9th version upon it's release. I decided not to wait and ordered it on spot.

It appears I finally have got all the legit software for working on my live performance as well as a great platform for experimenting with new tracks.

The only thing left now are some cables and a decent laptop for running all this stuff when not at home. I wanted to check out Windows 8 to see if it would really make my old Vista laptop less sluggish, but MicroSoft fails to sell the upgrade for Latvian billing addresses, so no luck there yet. 

But at least in home environment I've got everything I need to start preparing and learning to play Live+Reason by MIDI controls fluently.

Moving Substance Website to Blogger

It has been several years, since my substance.org.lv website has become outdated and I've been looking for alternative platform to move it to.

There were several attempts to find some suitable platform. The most recent candidate was the Google Blogger, formerly, BlogSpot. At first I set up my own blog there. After few months of evaluating it, I found that it provides basically everything I was looking for.

Last week I noticed, that they now allow disabling the Blogger's navigation bar at the top of a page, which was the last turn-off for me, so I took another try at moving the 85 posts and 57 comments collected through the years there.

Live PA Setup - The Big Picture

I've had a hobbies of DJ-ing and composing electronic music for quite many years now. So, the natural step of mixing these two things together and playing my own tracks at parties has bothered me for quite a while, too.

I've seen many people doing this, using Ableton Live, but, pardon me, a guy standing on the stage, clicking his mouse and staring at his laptop does not really look like any kind of Live performance. No offence, but he might as well be playing Tetris, leaving music playback to the Winamp.

Then again, I'm not a hardware purist, doing all production using tons of expensive physical equipment. Computer plus the right software and controllers seems much more efficient to me and this is the way to go.