So, Advanced Budget Studios took a bit of a break during the holidays, and with that came the usual curiosity as to how the new year would be. Well, I'd have to say that 2011 is looking great.  We started off the year recording a wonderful new artist named Taylor Miller.  He'll have a website up soon, and his music sounds fabulous! ...

So, when I started the re-design of my studio website, I knew I would need sliders, but I didn't realize how many unconfigurable, and generally static sliders were out there.  I must have gone through 5 iterations of sliders before I found one that matches my needs (and probably will be the go-to slider for any project I work on in the future)...

Man... I'm kicking myself right now for not taking a photo of this amazing musician, but I was way too interested in the music I was hearing to worry about silly cameras. Taylor Miller came in for a visit, and recorded 3 original songs tonight.  They have yet some proper embellishment to receive, but the tracks we got tonight were primo.&nbs...

About 2 months ago, a great musician, designer, and friend sent me a new design idea for AdvancedBudgetStudios.com.  After getting various opinions, I decided to have a go at it.  Also, with all the free time I had during the holidays, I thought it would be a good time to get crackin'. So, without further ado, I present you the new and ...

Okay.. Not really the "radio", but a cool little Internet radio station picked up Herod the Fink (a band I'm in), and decided to feature us.  They decided to play our song, "Desperate Husband's Chorus", and I think it's way cool. The radio station is called "LDS Music Today" and can be found at http://www.ldsmu...

Since we haven't been booking clients during November and December, we've had a few extra moments to really think about and research the needs of the studio.  The success this little studio has had is very exciting, and only makes us want to hone our craft that much more. Honing the craft is great, but pouring the success of the studio back ...

So, the Christmas season is officially here, and I'm feeling more Christmas Spirt than I ever have in my life - by a long shot. I attribute this to two things...  First and foremost, attitude, and making good choices.  To me, Christmas is a spiritual season because it's filled with love, good will, charity, friends, and family.  If...

Friday December 3, 2010 Today was filled with the usually chore, practicing for the Christmas Cantada, and puttting up the Christmas tree. Finally! me and my family put up our tree. We usually do it after Thanksgiving but we where a little late. You know. The more the years go by the faster Christmas seems to come. I can remeber when I was a litt...

Scramjet, a valued client of Advanced Budget Studios (and an amazing band, as well), has recently arrived in the top-ten list of a contest put on by X-96.  Please support them by clicking here and voting for them and their awesome song, "Tread Softly". Thanks, and thank you, Scramjet!  You guys are awesome!  ...

It might be that I'm a techno-geek, but the first thing I thought of when I read this was "social media".  People went from house to house and "labored exceedingly" all through the night to let it be known where Jesus was going to come the following day. Also interesting are the activities of the people when the arrived t...

First thing I noticed in this chapter is verse 1.  He tells his children that Christ will show himself unto them.  How is this possible if this was written approximately 550 years before Christ would come?  Very interesting...  I'll have to research that. Verse 7 pops out at me like a bolt of lightning.  I've been lookin...

One thing which caught my eye this time, was the phrase, "I know that if ye are brought up in the way ye should go ye will not depart from it." I had to stop and read the sentence 4 or 5 times, just to make sure I wasn't seeing things. The footnotes on that sentence seem to confirm the vague meaning I'm deriving from it as well. ...

So, in Gospel Doctrine, from time to time, we talk about praying, and how we're supposed to pray all the time, and then we get the comments that it's impossible to "pray" all the time, and then someone else says that we need to be praying "always" in our hearts.  That's true, and verse 1 of this chapter is Jesus' commandmen...

I recently bought a Toshiba Laptop (a Satellite A305-S6916), and with it, came Vista Home Premium. I, of course, immediately wiped the hard drive clean, took a shower for having touched a computer with Vista pre-installed on it, then proceeded to partition it, and install gentoo Linux on it. The compatibility with Linux of the peripherals on th...

I just got done preparing my message for my home-teaching visit tonight, and after reading through the matieral the 2nd time, a thought came to my head, although I'm not sure how I'm gonna get it out.  Here goes nothing. As I was thinking of home-teaching in general, the thought came that "love" is pretty much the strongest power o...

I'm always pleased and grateful that the Spirit comes so quickly when I read the Book of Mormon.  Sometimes I forget how much I love how the Spirit of God makes me feel and think and act. Anyway...  Great chapter this was.... Of all of the stories in the Book of Mormon, I think I like the one of the 2000 Stripling Warriors the best.&n...

I don't think that ever you will find any words of righteousness associated with Laman and Lemuel, not once, but twice, within 4 verses more than in this chapter alone. Not sure why that stood out at me this time, but once in verse 1 and again in verse 4, Nephi said that Laman and Lemuel were on good behavior.  I thought I'd take time to suc...

Holy cow.  My journal is done.  I still can’t believe it.  Wowza. I started writing in my journal every day on January 1st, 1990.  About ten years later, I found that I had journals scattered all over the place, and with my technical background - I hated the disorganization of something that might be precious someday.&nb...

All I gotta say is, I'm glad I had a lot of clothes on this morning. Yes, it was friggin' cold outside, but that was only a small nuisance. The real reason I'm glad I had many layers on was due to the large amount of crap I shot in my drawers when I checked the main server log files this morning. Around 9:30, the floor admin came to me saying he...

Since we haven't been booking clients during November and December, we've had a few extra moments to really think about and research the needs of the studio.  The success this little studio has had is very exciting, and only makes us want to hone our craft that much more. Honing the craft is great, but pouring the success of the studio back ...

Soon after I began recording audio, I had a feeling I would be in the pursuit of an unattainable goal.  Finding that "perfect" recording space, or even creating that "perfect" recording would be difficult, if not entirely impossible. 10 years after I began, I was able to pour my heart and soul into a new recording space, ...

My job has me creating a website derived from data housed in an Oracle database. It's getting to the point now where we're going to co-locate the server and press the big green button. Well... My boss came in today asking about the connection between my postgresql database from which the website runs, and Oracle from which Postgres is populated...

Tired of the same old colors?  Try customizing the color scheme of your ILMJ blog!  Here's how to do it: First, make sure you go to your blog home page.  If you're not sure how to get there, simply click on "Blog", and choose your blog.  You will then be at the home page of your blog.  From there, you will noti...

I'm not in the mood to write much, but I figure that since work is kind of slow today, that it would do me good to watch and write about a conference talk right about now. Elder Perry's talk seemed to talk about a topic which would benefit a lot of people today - simplicity. As far as I go, I can think right now of one specific thing which I co...

 So, lately I've been thinking a lot about what life is all about, and kind of pondering upon times when I've been doing well, and times when I've been doing not-so-well. I think the most important thing you can do in life is stay close to the Spirit of God.  Lots of things seem to get in the way from time to time, but that's the nature...

Wow....   This will probably be a short entry, but I thought I'd write down what is the first hardware failure of my server! I built this server 3 years ago, and it has been serving up everything that is served in my house (mythtv, web (this site), ftp, ssh, music, photos).  Well... Yesterday evening, we tried to fire up mythtv...

We've been recording a bunch of drum-takes to be added to otherwise "ready-to-go" songs lately here.  The latest of which happened to be a genre I particularly don't like much - country. But, the music sounded so good for this particular song, I decided to have at it anyway - and 4 hours later, we came up with the final result. I...

So...  Yeah... Holy cow.  I started writing this as a Facebook update, and quickly realized ther was too much to say, so, into the blog it goes! The bottom line is - We are back in business, people! As of right now, the new studio is close to being finished, but the good news is - we can record.  I've got 3 channels wired up, a...

What do you get when you mix a couple of black lights, a fog machine, a strobe light, a dark hallway, and a couple of demented minds with Halloween?  I'll tell ya what you get: A whole lot of scared teen-agers. WOOOO HOOO!!! With the debut happening just last year, there hasn't been a whole lot of time for refinement, but all things cons...

 When I first installed the 64-bit version of gentoo on linode, everything looked good - except I couldn't get apache to send email.   When I emerged PHP, it pulled in ssmtp by default, but that didn't seem to be sending mail at all.  So, I emerged sendmail.  That got me a little bit further, but the logs were giving me an error...