New old show, waffles, and HDMI cable blues

New year, same old shit. Mostly.

I’m just glad I wasn’t greeted with any new snow this morning.

What is new is that I decided to relaunch my old college radio show, The Vampire’s Ball, as a Mixcloud podcast. I’ll post it on Saturday evenings and this week’s episode and track listing can be found here.

I made a new opening bumper yesterday by Frankensteining a couple old ones with a bit of new music cut in, a new voiceover, etc., but I still need to make a matching closer.

After that it was time to print the show in Pro Tools (I know there’s easier and faster ways to do it, but I wanted to just start immediately and I know Pro Tools very well.) Midnight came during Izzy Stradlin’s “California,” which I hope was some sort of omen.

I realized in programming the show that I don’t have a lot of new music like I always used to have. And I’ve been buying a decent amount of music over the last year, but mostly back catalogue… which meant that the only new music I had on the show this week was from Duran Duran’s new album.

This led me to hitting up Bandcamp this afternoon, picking up the new Faderhead album and a few singles from We Found a Lovebird (Vancouver indie pop band, I used to see them live a bunch when I still lived in town and even opened for them once). Then I found a new album by a Vancouver band called The Gathering (who are probably going to run into issues with the European band of the same name sooner or later, but whatever).

I also got a couple older albums from NoMeansNo, Sonic Youth, and The Power of Dreams.

And I know there’s some upcoming releases on the horizon, too.

Not that I mind spinning mostly older material, but I figure it’s good to have a sprinkling of stuff released in recent memory as well.

So I’ll keep an eye out.

What else… well, as per last week’s blog, yes I made waffles. Which was actually the first time I used the waffle iron portion of the George Foreman grill thing, and they were really good.

Too good.

I might be addicted to waffles, lol… good thing I’m lazy and don’t want to bother making them from scratch more than 2 or 3 times a week.

In other news, I think it’s been 4 months since I got my brother’s old TV up on my wall and connected to a cheap Amazon DVD player via HDMI. I’m starting to have major issues with weird artifacting and color blocks and jittering in the picture, and I know it’s not the TV because it’s intermittent. I suspect that it’s the HDMI cable as it’s a heavy one, which I thought would be better since it would be stronger, but maybe I don’t want stronger, maybe I want lighter and more flexible.

I also wondered if the HDMI port was messed up, but the problem happens regardless of which HDMI port I use with that cable and the DVD player.

Anyway, I threw a new cable into my most recent Amazon order and I hope that does the trick. If not, it might well be the DVD player, which sucks, but at least it was a cheap one.

Sigh… of course this comes at a time when I need to be distracted by sitcom DVDs as I start spending more time with my ass on the exercise bike.

Oh, and the rowing machine, because that arrived yesterday.

I haven’t assembled it yet, though.

So… photos to wrap the post up with. I didn’t go outside today, but I did on Sunday and things look the same but with an extra 4″ of snow, so here ya go: