Feb

27

Egnater Amp Building Seminar, Premier Guitar Magazine & Video Feature of Yours Truly

Filed Under amplifiers, audio clips, music, musical instruments, pete lacis, technology | Leave a Comment

This past weekend I had the priveledge to attend the Egnater amp building seminar outside of Detroit, MI. It was an amazing experience to build my own JTM 45 - inspired amp, let alone to learn about all of the theory behind how and why these things work. I was amazed at seemingly how few of the amp’s components actually let to it sounding like a Marshall, Fender, Vox, etc. The amp sounds great as is, but I’m psyched to get back under the hood and start some tweaking!

In related news, Premier Guitar Magazine’s Joe Coffey was in attendance to participate and document the class. Afterward he asked be to demo my completed amp (with my Suhr Standard). I just learned that the magazine decided to put that video up as a feature on their site! Check it out:

Feb

16

The annoying thing about upgrading to OS X 10.5.2

Filed Under annoyances, apple, technology | Leave a Comment

While overall I’ve been very happy with the results my new 200 GB hard drive, OS X 10.5.2 and Office 2008 install, I’m a bit annoyed that capability I had with my MacBook Pro out of the box with OS X 10.4 are now missing……namely iDVD, iMovie and iPhoto.  Sure, I can regain those capabilities via $99 family pack upgrade.  However, its the principle of having to pay for capabilities I already had (and had already paid for) that is just not right.  First the $200 penalty for iPhone early adopters, now this.

Feb

15

Upgrading the Hard Drive in my MacBook Pro and installing Leopard

Filed Under apple, technology | Leave a Comment

As a musician and multimedia creation expert, I’ve run into trouble attempting to maximize performance and storage space.  Specifically, my 17″ MacBook Pro had 90 GB hard drive at 7200 rpm.  It was speedy for sure…..but it was so loaded with apps that I had little to no room for data.  Being that I have almost three terabytes of external storage, somethings were just not as efficient as I would have liked (namely Native Instruments sample libraries for Komplete 4 had to be housed externally).  After much frustration and a bit of research, I recently pulled the trigger on a 200GB Seagate drive that runs at 7200 rpm.  After backing up things the old fashion way (I was running 10.4.11 on the old drive), I’ve replaced the drive and installed Leopard.  Stay tuned for how well the migration goes….Entourage 2004 is my primary concern (upgrading to Entourage 2008), but I have a LOAD of apps to install including NI Komplete, Ableton Live 6, Adobe Creative Suite, Macromedia Studio 8, MS Office 2008 and then some.

Feb

5

Colorado Caucuses and being a new resident

Filed Under life, pete lacis | Leave a Comment

Colorado CaucusWith all of the great enthusiasm surrounding the current election, my wife and I were looking forward to participating in the process in our new home state of Colorado.  However, we learned yesterday that in this day and age of Internet instant gratification, participating in a Colorado caucus can’t be a last minute decision.  Guess we’ll have to wait until the general election when our vote doesn’t really count.