Alright, so I received an iPod Touch a few months ago and it seemed like a cool little toy at first but now I think I’ve realized that it’s got a few annoying flaws that I wish they would fix. It seems to me that they tried too hard with the internet/wifi part and kinda put the music part of it aside and didn’t worry about it as much. I think the most annoying thing for me is the lock thing, every time the stupid screen goes black you have to unlock the damn thing when you want to mess with it again. So lets say you’ve got your iPod Touch hooked up to your car stereo like I do, then all of a sudden you get a call on your cell phone. Well I had a 3rd generation iPod and all you had to do was tap the ‘ol pause button and answer you phone, but not with the iPod Touch. First you’ve got to press one of the buttons to turn the screen back on, then you have to slide that fucking unlock thing, then you finally get to press pause, which by the way doesn’t always register, so your sitting their tapping at this fucking iPod trying to get it to pause all while your driving and trying to hurry before your phone stops ringing. I guess they figured your just suppose to turn down your radio’s volume and miss all the songs that are playing while your pre-occupied with your phone call. (Edit- Later I found out you can tap the bottom button twice in succession to get the pause screen to pop up without having to slide to unlock it, but trying to tap that damn pause button and get it to register while driving is still a chore. I also found out that if you just unplug it from the headphone jack it automatically pauses, so that’s what I do now).
Another thing is the on-the-go playlist. I liked how the 3rd gen. iPod was, you just went and pick the songs you wanted to add by going to a song and holding down the middle button on it until it blinked to tell you it was added to the on-the-go playlist. Then you could go and play that song from the playlist and continue adding songs to the on-the-go playlist and it would automatically play them one right after the other. The iPod Touch doesn’t do that, if you add a song and then play it, and then go back and start adding more songs it won’t play the songs you’ve just added until you go back through all the menus and press the little done button. Although mine is version 1.1.4 because I don’t wanna upgrade and not be able to jailbreak it, so I’m not sure, maybe they’ve fixed this since version 2.0, but even so it was kind of silly to ship it like that anyway. (Edit: This seems to work on my iPod Touch now. I never updated it, still 1.1.4, but I think I may have restore it once or twice since I wrote this article. I’m not sure if that’s why it’s working now or because I was doing something wrong before, it’s anyone’s guess).
I think the last thing that would have been nice is adding a mic or line in jack so that you could record voice notes like on the iPhone. I think I’d prefer a line in jack for the simple fact that I found this app for the iPhone that is a simple four track recorder which would be cool if you all of a sudden got a song idea and the only thing you had on you was your iPod Touch. You could just quickly record into it without any problems, but the iPod Touch doesn’t get this without buying an external mic, but even then I’ve read that the iPod Touch is picky and some of them don’t work on it. I sure with my 3rd gen. iPod wouldn’t have broke, I’d so be using it for music instead right now. I think they should combine the two like this:

Anyway this doesn’t really have anything to do with the band, but I felt like ranting about it so there it is.

About a month and a half ago Billy and I were jamming while I was waiting for the members of this other band I’m in to show up. I decided to record ourselves on a crappy little boom box to test the sound for the other band. Anyway I kinda liked it and decided to post it here, even though the sound quality is shitty, you can’t really hear what I’m saying, and Billy doesn’t know how to play the drums . So here it is, in both mp3 and FLAC formats, enjoy.

So remember in my last post when I said to go see Lipstick Homicide last Tuesday? Well guess what, if you didn’t you should have because not only would you have seen Lipstick Homicide put on a fucking amazing show, another awesome band called The Blacks played, and they fuckin’ rocked too. But guess what? Unlike when we saw Baby Guts with Lipstick Homicide that one time and I only could get one of their cd’s, this time I was able to get not only The Blacks’ cd but also a 7 inch and a shirt. I’m listening to their CD ‘Nom de Guerre‘ right now, these are some cool frikin’ tunes! I only wish I would have been able to see them play again the next day at the Picador, but unfortunately I had other plans, it being New Years and all.

Sorry for the lack of updates, we’re kind of in a transition phase at the moment. Though I always have this feeling that nobody really reads this anyway so I kinda doubt that it matters that I write this. But nonetheless just in case anyone who reads this crap that I write every so often is wondering what’s going on, I just have this to say: be patient hopefully new and exciting things are about to happen, or perhaps not, who really knows anyway? Of course now that I thought about it for a bit I think the reason I really post is to show the band is in fact active. So every time I post something, no matter how irrelevant or insignificant, it shows the band isn’t dead, and I still maintain the site even though my last post was something like three weeks ago.
Oh yeah, before I forget, even though I don’t really think anyone reads this, just in case they do I wanted to say Lipstick Homicide is playing this Tuesday on the 30th, and anyone who sees this before then should go see them because they’re awesome. Check out their myspace page for info on where it’s at and stuff.

Since I didn’t quite have a song uploaded for last month I decided to at least share these old demo songs we made a long time ago when we went up and practiced with Mike one time. They aren’t that great of quality and their isn’t any vocals in them, but hopefully they’ll compensate a little for the lack of a song for last month. We actually did three songs that day, but one of them is the song I wanted to post for last month, so I decide to just post two so that I don’t spoil the surprise. (UPDATE: The third song, Montezuma, had been uploaded.)
These songs were all recorded by me on my Tascam 4 track Portasudio MKIII, with me on guitar, Billy on bass, and Mike on the drums. Anyway I’ll put the one I omitted up with the others when I’m finished re-recording it, and have uploaded it to the audio section. So without further adieu, here’s the link to those demo songs.