The Big Payoff

I have lots of great pics and videos of the Houston rodeo, which will be up on the blog next week.

This week, I'm at South By Southwest in Austin. After months of hard work, the Samantha Murphy Show (which I'm directing and co-hosting) is finally premiering! It features great singer/songwriters and bands, as well as interviews with heavy hitters in music and technology. A new show will be up every night at smtvmusic.com. You can see two episodes as of this writing, and the third will be up in the morning.

We are spending every second shooting, editing and uploading. We're tired, we're sore and we're sunburnt, but if you enjoy the show, it's all worth it.

Here's the trailer:

Jumping Through a Series of Fiery Hoops

Okay, here's what happened.

Wednesday

I lugged my (surprisingly heavy) MacPro into the Genius Bar. The Genius (in name only) looked through the error logs on my computer. He pointed out to me several lines that referred to the processor, and said, "Wow, see? It looks like your processors are the problem." He continued to scroll through lines and lines of errors.

Minutes later he showed this to another (much more knowledgable genius) who said, "Those aren't errors. Those just show that the processors are enabled."

Genius #1 said, "oh." And I started to see what I was in for.

They tested, poked and prodded my ailing machine until Genius #1 said, "Well, here's the thing. It looks like there are problems with the hardware", (absolute duh), "but we can't really figure out what those are."

I asked, "Can you just replace the whole machine then?" To which he replied, "No. Your machine is custom," (just because I added an AirPort, which is a very common part that comes in all their laptops, just not usually in the desktops), "so you'll have to take it home and mail it to AppleCare."

So I dragged the stupid heavy thing back out to the parking garage and called AppleCare from the car. After about 15 minutes on hold, I spoke with a kind man who thought it was so sad that I got such a troubled Mac. However, he couldn't help me. He had to transfer me to his supervisor. After another 35 minutes on hold, Mr. Supervisor Adam picked up.

He was not as nice. In fact, he was downright passive-aggressive, and actually seemed angry I was even inferring there was a problem with a Mac computer. Instead of trying to help me diagnose or fix the computer, he was extremely defensive throughout, and kept trying to convince me it was a "software error." I said, "so you're saying that every single program I run on this computer, all of which are made by Apple, are just randomly having errors? You're not willing to consider that it might be caused by an underlying hardware issue?" He gave me a diagnostic test to perform, and told me to email him the results in the morning. He was tired and was going home. So I did that.

Thursday

He woke me with a call me at 8am. The results? Guess what -- it was a hardware issue. After reviewing my email, he declared the machine an "out-of-the-box failure." I love this term. The car was doomed before it ever left the garage. All of a sudden, Adam was very apologetic. He knew I was leaving town for San Francisco on Friday. So he said they were going to email me shipping labels, and he guaranteed I'd get them in a few hours so I cold send that sick puppy out.

Well, after waiting all day, those shipping labels never arrived. Around 3pm, I decided to raise hell. I called Apple and spoke to an employee, who said that the labels need 24 hours to process. I said that Adam promised them to me today, and that I was headed out of town. So I had her transfer me to her manager, who told me the same and passed me off to another department. I spoke to an employee there, then his manager. This went on. Seven transfers and an hour and a half later, I was told flatly and definitively, "you will not get your shipping labels today. Adam must not be informed as to our policies here. It is an automated system and it takes 24 hours to process these labels."

So I went off, saying things about how I would never buy an Apple product again, how this is a terrible way to run a business, etc. It wasn't pretty and it didn't really get anything done. Or did it?

The phone call ended. I wanted to throw my new Treo at the wall and see it smash into pretty pieces (Don't kill the messenger!).

Minutes later, I received an email with shipping labels.

I set up a home pickup with FedEx for the next morning (because I wasted the afternoon on that marathon phone call). They had a box to check for time of pickup, so I specified that they had to get here by 10:30am at the latest. We were leaving for San Francisco at 11:30, and I figured this was enough time in case they were late.

Friday

We were packing gear like madfolks. Once everything was ready, I checked my watch. FedEx never showed. 10:30 at the latest, and it was almost noon. Nothing.

I called my sweet parents, who live a few streets over, and asked them to take the computer to a drop off location, since we had to get out of town now if we were going to be on time for the Jonathan Coulton show. Lovely people that they are, they agreed.

We hit the road. Around 1:30pm, when we were in the middle of the desert on the 5 freeway, I received a phone call. It was the FedEx guy asking, "where are you? I'm here to pick up a package."

Are there competent employees? Or is that an oxymoron?

One Of Those Prawn Salad Waiting Room Days

Today was a glitch day. First, my brand new MacPro erased my iPod and has been locking up every time it tries to sync it. So my 7,000+ songs on the iPod are gone.

Then, said brand new MacPro locked up in every conceivable way in every conceivable program. This is after I've already reinstalled my OS and reinstalled all the programs. This takes hours. And I've had this computer less than a week. You know what they say about how "Macs Just Work?" Not so much.

I have an appointment tomorrow with an Apple Genius. (Could they be any more full of themselves!?)

Then, I had Ben over again (he's leaving town soon and I'm trying to see him as much as possible) to watch a movie. After five minutes, the disc started skipping. It was a rental, and sometimes they're a little dirty or scratched. I pulled it out to clean it. It was literally THE dirtiest disc I've ever seen. Something was smeared all over it. I couldn't get it off.

So we abandoned the movie and started playing Bioshock. I wanted to show the game to Ben. After about a half hour we ran into a gamebreaking glitch. I have never found a bug in this game. Ever. Until today. Prawn Salad Waiting Room Day.

Ben showed me this video, which completely describes how I'm feeling.



Now I need to just go to bed and not touch anything. I'm a little afraid my bed might fall through the floor or something...

Pretending It's July

It's 2:15am. Other than lunch with my friend Jan, I've spent the entire day working. Yes, I decided to celebrate Valentine's Day this year by flat-out ignoring it.

I've finished upgrading my studio to be fully Mac, and now I'm learning Final Cut and Logic and the other eight or so programs in their respective suites. That's a lot of learning, which equates to a lot of hours staring at a screen.

My parents were sweet and dropped by with a salad, some fruit and a little heart full of chocolates. So I took a five minute break and ate. Treating myself.

But this is probably for the best. I have my custody mediation downtown tomorrow, with Nicole joining us on the phone. It's stressful, and depressing, and absolutely ironic in its scheduling.

So I'll just keep working and try not to think about that.

Geeks Speak

We're working away like elves on The Samantha Murphy Show. I'm so excited for you all to see what we're doing.

One of the segments, "Geeks Speak," features Samantha and I answering questions about all things tech, including websites, computers, gadgets, software, the junction of music and technology, etc. This is where you come in.

Got any questions? Any comparisons you'd like to see? Anything you'd like to ask a couple of huge geeks?

Party In Hotlanta!

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of meeting up with my dear friends Lindy and Janie in Atlanta. Janie is an uber-talented singer/songwriter and Lindy is an amazing web designer and musician.

We checked out a local gourmet eatery that we'd heard good things about:

It was tasty, and we had a lot to catch up on.

(L to R: Janie Chu, Lindy Freeland and me)

Lindy showed me her delightful little pocket companion: an electronic dictionary.

The US version doesn't have backlighting, so she had to import hers from the UK, which means that most of the pronunciations are British. Pretty awesome. Also, it has a full-on book of quotations, complete with biographies of all the quoted folks. I wants me one of these!

For dessert, Janie led us to a charming Korean bakery called White Windmill. We had to make some hard life decisions about which dessert to get:

I opted for the coconut bubble tea, which was apparently "crazy!"

And I had the strangest little strawberry pastry roll, which wasn't as good as I was hoping, and as Janie pointed out, was sort of like a Korean Ho-Ho.

Lindy took a picture of me taking a picture of my Korean Ho-Ho.

Janie had to scoot, but Lindy grabbed a husband (fortunately her own) and came out to the show. Lindy and Jason and I spent some time playing around with Ableton Live, which she's currently learning. I dropped some mad wisdom on her.

Only not really. I have no idea what I'm doing.

And in return, she took some amazing photos of the show, which I'll be posting. This one just became my new Myspace photo:

Yay for good cameras and people who know how to use them!

Oh Calamity!

News broke all over the internet last night that a Toys R' Us in Houston sold a copy of Bioshock. The street date is next Tuesday. Video games frequently come out after their street date, but never before. All eyes were on the gaming forums as many people compared stories of finding a copy at their local Toys R' Us.

First thing this morning I called the Los Angeles store and sure enough, they had two copies in stock. But I couldn't go right away, as I had an 11:00 violin session with Daphne Chen.

So after the session, at 1:30pm, I called the Los Angeles store. They greeted me with "Are you calling about Bioshock?" and I knew the jig was up. Apparently a memo was sent to all the TRU stores nationally that a mistake was made, and the stores that broke street date were being fined heavily. I proceeded to call other local TRU's but they had all caught on at that point.

The thing that sucks the most is that all these stores have stacks of glorious copies of Bioshock trapped in a box in back of the store, just sitting for a week.

Boo to you. Booooo.

There are enterprising jerks who bought multiple copies from TRU and are selling them on eBay for $120, and people are buying them. No one could be more excited about this game than me, and even I can't imagine paying double the price to get it a few days early.

Of course, I don't really have time to play it this week anyway. So perhaps it's all moot.

Mac Attack

I've just spent (literally) the entire day installing plugins and trying to get my email to work. I've input the exact same server settings from my other computer (servers are platform agnostic - right!?) and I can receive email in all my accounts, but I can only send from Gmail. Weird.

And I wanted to take it easy today. But now it's almost 3am and I'm all bleary eyed and about to fall over. So I'm going to bed, fully beaten-down by my new computer. And I thought technology was supposed to make life easier, faster and more convenient.

Oops.

The Dirty Word: ***intosh

I'm headed up to Washington on Monday, to be with Nic and Noah. But I have a lot of work to do while I'm up there. And with the SMtv show starting in August, I needed a laptop.

So, I finally did it. I bought a Mac. Yes. The world is ending. Here come the four horsemen.

I've been a notorious Mac poo-pooer for years now. I was raised on PCs. There are pictures of me at 7 years old, playing around in DOS. Yes, that was the kind of fun I had. So, anyone who knows me is probably either fainting, or laughing a hyena (or coyote) laugh of "I knew you'd come around eventually."

Every experience I've had with Macs in school were terrible. They were always crashing and freezing, and also...WHERE IS THE RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON? Okay so I still don't understand that. Why is there only one mouse button? This is stupid. And the keyboard layout felt totally weird and wrong to me...

Anyway, I got over it and decided to throw myself into the unknown.

It wasn't just a whim either. This was premeditated. The recent release of Windows Vista means that much of my software actually won't work until each one is updated, which could be a while. Also, I need to be able to run many tracks of audio live for this show, without any hiccups, or "oops, you need to update your drivers," etc. So it finally happened.

So far, I'm definitey impressed. Other than the fact that hardly any of my VST plugins are being seen by Ableton Live (which is weird, annoying, and absolutely making me want to toss this laptop through a plate-glass window), it's mostly very smooth. Not one error message, freeze-up, or even minor slowdown yet. And the on-board camera and microphone are a nice touch. Here's what it saw when I first got my hands on my Macbook.

HP Hates Me

Every light on my printer is blinking. Every last one. And there's a big flashing "E" too. Why? It's full of ink and paper. Maybe it just died of old age.

All I wanted to do was transfer my digital pictures from my camera to my computer through my formerly trusty printer. I've done it a thousand times.

I thought technology was supposed to make our lives easier. Mostly, it's like a quirky roomate who has his own agenda, and suffers frequent emotional breakdowns. I just sort of co-exist with it, and on good days, it's kind to me and enables me to work faster. On bad days, I spend most of my time reassuring it with loving words, and praying that it doesn't finally succumb to depression and end it all.

A couple months ago, on of my hard drives died. My music hard drive. The one with all my clients on it. Awesome!

I called IBM. Their answer: "We expect a drive to die after 4 to 5 years." (Don't expect to see that printed on any of their advertising). They just build them to fail. It would be one thing if they made shoes or something, but hard drives? They really expect you to lose all your data every few years?

Luckily, I had most of it backed up. Except for the client I was working for at the time. Major bummer. I had to start all over on the mix. It's not like IBM would lose money if their products lasted; it's been working for Volvo for years!

I unplugged my printer, and plugged it back in. The lights came on one by one, and then went off. The flashing "E" was replaced by a ready light. Lovely.

So I tried to transfer my pictures again. "An internal programming error has occured."

Well how nice for it.