gronkyco - just because

I have been a big fan of the band Ra since I first heard of them in the fall of 2000. Their first major release “From One” was a constant in my car stereo for at least a year. The guitar work is tight and heavy, and the riffs have those “hooks” that seem to get stuck in your head for a week. Some highlights off From One are “Do you call my name”, “Rectifier”, “Parole” and “Sky”. I highly recommend this record.

After From One came “Duality”. While not as fundamentally heavy as From One, Duality offered a more refined, produced sound that seemed to blend more into mainstream rock. Personally, I think Duality is outstanding and every song on that record is a hit. The guitars are not “hooky” as From One, but the vocals make up for it. I find my self singing songs off Dually all the time. Tracks like “Take me away”, “I lost everything”, “Got me going”, “Undertaken” and “Tell Me” have lyrics that I can relate to. It confuses as to why this record was not an enormous hit, it’s clearly better than 80% of the crap out there. Needless to say, once again I highly recommend this record.

Now.. enter the latest “Black Sun”

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I recently got married and decided to take a cruise for our honeymoon. Having never been on a cruise before, I really didn’t know what to look for when booking a trip. Actually, it was pretty easy… I wanted to biggest, most lavish ship I could find. After about two days of reading, we settled on the Royal Caribbean “Freedom of the Seas” 8 day, 7 nights - Miami, Haiti, Jamaica, Grand Cayman and Cozumel trip.

I had never been to any of these places, and needless to say was very excited about the prospect of experiencing the different countries. But, to be honest, I think I was actually more excited about the ship itself. I had seen countless videos and pictures of huge cruise ships, but had never been on anything larger than, say - 400 feet.

The morning after the wedding we flew down to Fort Lauderdale and took a bus to Miami, where the Freedom was docked. If you have never seen a ship of this type close up - words just do not do it justice. This thing is absolutely mammoth. The fact that it floats is a true marvel of modern engineering. I was speechless.

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Recently I had a client ask me why their Google Analytics reports did not show if anyone had clicked or downloaded any of the .pdf documents on their site. I explained that the standard Google Analytics code does not track any external link clicks, and that .pdf files are actually considered to not be part of the website and therefore do not get included in reporting. Offering a solution, I went on to say that Google does offer a script that can be added to any “external” link you want to track.

The only issue was that this client had about 50 .pdf files - located all over their site. Updating them all would have been a real pain in the a**, but the client needed this data for reporting during a search-marketing campaign that was about to launch… uhg

I just knew there had to be a better way to get this done without sifting through a huge site, updating links one at a time. I’ve been using jQuery more and more these days as the needs arise and found myself reasoning this way…

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I lived in Newburyport for twenty years, and spent a good portion of my teenage years working on a farm in the north-end of town. Having access to the farm was great because it abutted the 400’ish acre Maudslay State Park on like three sides, far at the back-end of the park – away from the main entrance and most of the foot traffic. This allowed my buddies and me to ride our bikes around the park almost every day, getting more and more familiar with the trail system from the inside out. In fact, I even used to drive Hay Rides in the park during the late 80’s and early 90’s.

I have a lot of history in the park, and a lot knowledge about the park itself. People have actually joked with me about giving tours around the park because I spit things out like “Hey, that’s the fairy garden,” or “If look down here you will see the old well,” or “The Castle sat right on the hill here, you can see the steps over there,” and a bout hundred other interesting facts about the park. Well, at least interesting to me…

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I recently picked one of these up. I absolutely love it, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a simple way to cut a demo or capture song ideas. The layout is very simple, the quality is good, and for the price you also get a decent mixer to boot! If anyone has any feedback or review, feel free to post about it.

Product Description:

The Korg D888 Digital Recording Studio is an eight-input/eight-output mixer and eight-track hard disk recorder in one easy-to-use unit. Best of all for those used to analog recorders the D888 has a very analog-like look and feel that’s comfortable and very easy to use. The input jacks trim knob three-band EQ controls pan knob and fader are all placed in a straight line for each channel and channel settings are obvious at a glance. A backlit LCD screen provides additional information that’s easy to understand.

Each channel has a high-performance balanced mic preamp with TRS and XLR inputs with 48V phantom power. As a standalone mixer the 1/4″ outputs are configured to provide Monitor Out L & R; Master Out L & R and individual outs for channels 5-8 or you can switch to eight individual outputs.

The D-888 provides 16-bit/44.1kHz uncompressed recording quality with eight tracks simultaneous play and record in WAV format. You also get eight virtual tracks for each track for a total of 64 tracks in addition to a stereo master track. The recording section has easy-to-use tools like punch-in/out copy and swap operations four editing locate points for each song one hundred mark points non-destructive editing Undo and Redo functions eleven types of digital master effects and 3-band EQ on each channel. The D888 also has an assignable metronome two indpendent headphone jacks 40GB hard drive a USB 2.0 connector MIDI Time Code transmit and optical optical S/PDIF outputs.

You also get Cubase LE Recording Software thrown in Free

Korg D888 8-Track Digital Recording Studio Factory B-Stock

If you want an example, I recorded this track using it: Hopelessly Lost - 4.9mb [MP3]

Thing Kicks Ass!
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