Bass gear and Updates

First things first, my time with the Tom Bertram band has come to an end. It was great fun and I definitely recommend that you check out his album when he releases it.

I’m not doing a lot else at the moment, I have some band auditions coming up, and I’m trying to get a pop-punk or post-hardcore band started up, we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve also changed some of the gear I use, on the amp side I’m using a 500 watt Markbass Little Mark III, as the Ashdown gave up the ghost when it blew the power amp. I can still use it as a pre-amp, for practice and recording, but It’s never going to make it to a gig again.

On a happier note, the Little Mark III is an absolute beast of an amp, it sounds just as good, if not better than my Ashdown while being smaller, lighter and running cooler thanks to its class D transformer.

I also have a new bass guitar. It’s quite possibly the nicest thing I have ever seen, never mind played! It’s a custom ESP Phoenix II, with the custom part being the finish, which is a negative of the black version, so it’s a white body, with black pickguard and headstock.

I’ll post some pics when I dig out the DSLR, or take some pictures at a practice.

Ethernet Cable Wiring

Just a quick post about something I did a long while ago (but have recently updated).

Ethernet Cable Wiring (Google Docs)

It’s a guide on making Ethernet cables I created a while ago, parts of it can be used as handouts or part of an information pack for students. It has proven quite useful and attempts to walk people through a ‘correct’ way to make cables. I sourced information from a couple of websites, including a great article here.

Theme updates amongst a wasteland of procrastination

A few changes, some big (header images), some small (loads of small CSS positioning changes).

I expect changes will continue, as always, these things are works in progress for the most part as I see things that could be better.

Everything else has been pretty much left as it was, for the moment. I will be doing some recording this Sunday for the ‘Metal project’ and I’ll be getting back into the Rails development with a vengeance, ill probably work on some ideas I’ve had for some build up projects to get me used to various aspects of rails development.

Just a quick one

I’ve made some more progress with Ruby on Rails and have also got some of my ideas down to flesh out the project I want to create with it. It should be a fairly easy project that I can build up over time and mould into something pretty cool.

In related news: Git is awesome. I prefer it over the alternatives. I never really used it until I started this RoR thing, but now I wouldn’t use anything else.

Ruby on Rails (RoR)

I’ve been learning some Ruby on Rails recently, it’s been pretty good fun. If you are looking to get started with some RoR, here’s some of the recources i used:

I’ve also got two books on the way to use as a reference and help me along:

It’s going pretty well and I’m enjoying it. I’ve got some ideas that prompted me to learn this, as I wanted to use something other than my normal web development process, which  involved stacks of PHP. I do like PHP, but I do occasionally feel the need to learn some new stuff on occasion. I like the way Rails provides a nice framework for everything, this foray into new territory might improve my web design too!