Gearwire’s Crosstalk returns from Los Angeles in its new audio podcast format. Bill Holland is joined by Owen O’Malley, and special guest Liz McLean Knight (Quantazelle, Createdigitalmusic.com, Liz Revision). Meet Liz and hear the Crosstalk picks for the best and worst things at Winter NAMM 2008.

My voice has a bit of unintentional distortion since I’ve been fighting this trendy virus thing that seems to be making the rounds (not this Virus–I’d gladly accept one of those). And I escaped with only one nerdy dork snort at a joke about the intertubes. I was stuffy.. yeah that’s it.

Crosstalk 38: Bashing Something That Deserves It — Guitar Hero

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About

      

Nextwebgen posted their 10 Worst Company Domains, which are apparently the result of people registering their domain names without running it through their public relations department, branding / identity / in-house graphic designers or at least one other literate human being who speaks English.

Gems:

The Italian Power Generator company…
www.powergenitalia.com

Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange
advice and views at
www.expertsexchange.com

Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net

Let that be a lesson to anyone starting up a company and thinking about names and domains… run it past a few people first. :-)

Top 10 Worst Company URLs

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The only problem with James Howard Kunstler’s speech at TED is that it’s too short. In his entertaining, oftentimes hilarious view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life — the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about. Reengineering our cities will involve more radical change than we are prepared for, he believes, but our hand will be forced by earth crises stemming from our overconsuming lifestyle. “Life in the mid-21st century,” Kunstler says, “is going to be about living locally.” Passionate, profane and funny, this talk will make you think about the place where you live.

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If you’ve got an electronic musician on your gift list but are clueless as to what would make them grin with delight on Xmas morning, I and the other staff at Create Digital Music are on hand with our suggestions for gifts for electronic musicians. Among them, a Ground Loop Isolator (for killing that annoying hum when you’re playing live), an excellent Laptop / Gig Bag (shown), and the Korg Kaossilator, a battery-powered synth that combines the touch interface of the Kaoss Pad with a bunch of Korg sounds and effects. Unfortunately the Kaossilator isn’t available in the US yet, but if you’re overseas you get first shot at playing with this cool toy.

Read the full guide: Our Favorite Things: Music Technology Holiday Gift Picks from CDM

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So my laptop’s motherboard died, but thankfully I had done a backup a few days prior so no data was lost this time around. Seeing as replacing the motherboard would be just as expensive as buying the same computer on eBay, I opted to spring for a new ‘puter seeing as I could desperately use the extra processing power and RAM. I went first with a sexy little Toshiba with Vista on it, thinking I could just install XP on it instead. Twelve hours later after Nuking the hard drive, attempting various methods of slipstreaming, I gave up in frustration and went to bed.The next morning after weighing my options before I got out of bed I did a few scenerio-based researches online and figured the way to go was a Macbook running Bootcamp so I could still run all my Windows programs, along with a PCMCIA to ExpressCard adapter to run my sound card and EVDO card. It would cost more in the beginning but I felt I’d be happier in the next 3-6 years I’d own my next laptop, since the long term Wintel solution would either be to trudge along with XP or dual boot with Ubuntu or a similar Linux distribution. Seeing as I am heavily dependent on music and graphics software I was hesitant to rely on drivers for Ubuntu, and was wary about future device support for XP. I hated Vista before I met it (DRM issues, handholding, slow performance, making their OS serve content providers and not the end user, etc), and the little time we did spend together didn’t alter my opinion.

And I have had more than one friend over iChat offer to throw a party in my honor for “seeing the light.” That’s promising. :-)

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Everyone’s favorite LOLrus who was overwrought with grief after having his favorite blue bucket stolen has passed away (in 2005 but we just figured it out). His real name was Minazo, and we are certain that he and his bucket have been reunited in seal heaven for eternity. We will miss you.

Check out my collection of LOLrus-meme photos and remember him fondly.

Turns out Merzbow dedicated an album to him: Minazo Vol. 1 and there might be some t-shirts floating around featuring him.

Here’s a collection of large portrait shots of Minazo.

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In high school there were just as many girls as guys in my AP Biology and Organic Chemistry classes, but fewer hanging out and talking BBS smack at Computer Club. In college the Intro to Computer Science class was pretty balanced, but CS II showed the first signs of a noticeable gender imbalance, skewing toward guys having the majority. I’d go home after classes and log a few hours on Quake, and noticed that my opponents tended to be all men. Usenet newsgroups that focused on cryptography, open source computing, and similar subjects also seemed to have a higher number of male names than female. These days, I show up at electronic music workshops or log into similar forums and am usually one of two or three other girls there. And there’s only a handful of recognized women electronic musicians in the field as opposed to the countless men. Seeing as we’re supposed to be a pretty egalitarian culture, that’s weird, right?

Girls and young women are less likely than boys and young men to agree with the statements “I like mathematics” and “I like science,” in a national survey:

• 40% of girls and 31% of boys said that math is their least favorite subject
• 21% of girls and 17% of boys said that science is their least favorite subject *

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On the heels of the announcement that Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 is scheduled to drop in November of this year comes a few interesting revelations regarding their production methods and raises some questions about the “ethics” of production.

Kanye West’s new single “Stronger” features a sample from “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” slowed down and rearranged as suitable backing material, a fact that’s easily recognized by anyone who’s familar with DP’s work. But in a strange, meta-twist, it turns out that KW is sampling a sample, and even self-referentially referring to the sample-sampling in his own lyrics:

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