Last week we jaunted off to Vegas for a bit for Erika to attend RollerCon 2007. Me? I just went for the sun. We stayed at the lovely (if you love stuck elevators, bad service and all-around dumpiness) Imperial Palace, where the con was held. All times are Eastern I think, although I was on Mountain. (most photos by Erika)

August 07, 09:09 PM: Viva!

August 08, 4:10 PM: $12 gelato... what happens in vegas should indeed stay there


August 08, 9:15 PM: Embracing inner/outer nerd at star trek experience


--- Interjection: It was somewhere in here that I met up with Alex at the hotel bar. ---

August 09, 9:20 PM: Derby on fremont street


August 09, 11:07 PM: Fremont st has a much higher neil diamond ratio. I'm impressed


August 10, 1:29 AM: Double down saloon: PBRs, stooges on the jukebox... Little bit of home in sin city

August 10, 5:55 PM: Old guy: "I seen all these young people with tattoos." hotel maid: "me too I think they're from california."


August 11, 5:51 PM: Did not ride NYNY rollercoaster. Zero regrets.

August 12, 12:11 AM: Some mighty fine sushi at osaka... Finally something that doesn't taste like vegas food.

August 12, 2:55 PM: Spirit computers down... Awesome (hi alex)

August 12, 5:19 PM: Headed home

After a while saving some cash and struggling on my old circa-'99 machine, I finally built a new music computer. This time, instead of going to a computer show and grabbing all the cheapest white-box parts I could, I went to NewEgg and the local Micro Center and "splurged" on some brand names and good quality parts. What'd I get?

• an Intel "Conroe" 2.13Ghz dual-core processor
• a crazy Rosewill heatsink/cooling device
• a Gigabyte motherboard with onboard video (I'm not a fancy vid card kinda guy)
  
• 2GB of 800Mhz DDR RAM
• a Western Digital 160GB SATA hard drive (in this case I did go cheaper, Seagate was $20 more)
• an Ultra steel case with a classy flip-open front bezel

I attached my M-Audio Delta 24/96 card, my M-Audio FireWire solo, E-MU Xboard controller, and Samsung 19" monitor to it, and boy did it fly. Or at least, it would have, but I forgot to buy a CD drive. So one crappy no-brand part was moved over from the old machine. Ironically, it's one of the main parts that frustrated me into the decision to get a new computer. It requires the old classic CD drive tool (bent paper clip) just to open. But a couple paper clips later, a new copy of XP was installed with that classy new Zune theme, and the "cheap" Cubase, version SE, was cranking out tunes.

I decided to wait out the purchase of Cubase 4, considering it costs quite a bit of money and I am just now entering the world of actually spending money on music software. And with the total dearth of time to work on tracks lately, $100 versus $400 seemed like a worthwhile sacrifice for a while.

All that in a weekend -- along with a roller derby match (Erika's team, the D-Funk All Stars, crushed the Devil's Night Dames), finally re-tiling the entry way, lots of house cleaning, and even some Emurse stuff.