Tomorrow night (that’s Saturday, May 3rd) I’ll be playing with Ghetto Fabulous at the Lo Kai in Dracut, Massachusetts. Here in upper New England we have a slew of Chinese restaurants with attached bar/club rooms complete with big stages and sprawling dance floors. It’s quite odd to me, but hey, it works, and that Lo Kai is one of them. Great setup for a band, to boot.

Those of you who know me are likely aware that the day or two leading up to a gig is always filled with dread of having to go through the gear-change of shifting into “gig mode.” This entails adjusting my day/night schedule, packing the car with all the required gear, driving to the gig, getting set up, and making sure everything is going to work for the gig. Once I get to the last step, I’m actually quite stoked about the night, and remain so all the way through the gig and even through tear down, load out and drive home. So I’ve learned to ignore my desire to cancel gigs and know that it’ll be great.

This weekend, we have two curveballs that are adding to that cancelation desire. The first is that we have a sub for one of our sax players. Now, he’s a fantastic sub and a great guy, but it’s a sub just the same and that reduces the comfort level of the gig somewhat. On top of that, I just found out that our sound engineer can’t make it. This is a huge shift because he brings his own audio gear and lights. WIthout him, not only do we have to mix from the stage, but we have to bring all our own gear, cobble together a PA, and then do the “braille mix” from the stage. We’ve done it before and it works out great, but it adds quite a bit of time and stress to the gig, in addition to adding a distraction DURING the gig that makes even the enjoyable part significantly less enjoyable.

But it looks like we won’t be canceling, so we’ll make it work, and I’m sure I’ll look back and realize all this whining was unfounded.

Monday night I fly out to San Francisco for some meetings and also to attend ad:tech. This ad:tech is a bit different in that we (the Association for Downloadable Media) are presenting our proposed ad standards as well as guidelines for audience measurement.

And, as it turns out, the former will be introduced by yours truly. I have spent the past few months working with the other members of the Ad Standards Committee crafting these, and it will be my honor and pleasure to introduce them for public comment.

So if you’ll be in town, come on down to ad:tech on Wednesday morning to hear about these two fantastic new developments. If you’re not, they’ll be publicly available for your review after the event. Either way, please take the time to digest what’s been created, and offer any comments you may have. We look forward to hearing what you think.

The audio and slide-video from the “Running Your Mac Lean, Clean, and Mean” session I did at Macworld Expo 2008 is now freely available online.

On Friday night I played at The Peddlar’s Daughter in Nashua, NH with Knock-off, a band with which I used to play full-time, and now pick up gigs with occasionally. It’s a female-fronted, 4-piece classic rock outfit, and the gigs are always a lot of fun. But, for me, Friday night’s gig was more than just fun… it was quite something.

It all started at about 3pm when I went up to my studio to play for about 30 minutes. Since I so rarely get any warmup time at a gig itself, I try to at least play on my practice kit for a bit just so the downbeat isn’t the first time I’m hitting drums that day. As soon as I started playing I realized that my hands and feet were being very well-behaved. Everything I asked of them, especially my left (weaker) hand, was being delivered with precision and perfect speed. I remember thinking, “if this keeps up, tonight’s going to be fun!”

While setting up at the club for some reason I decided to move all my toms and snare lower, and my seat higher. I had been struggling with my gigging setup for a while, and I had a gut feeling this might help. It certainly didn’t hurt. From the first note, I realized I was playing very aggressively. Not overly loud, per se, but really driving things, especially with the kick drum. I was expending a LOT of energy making every stroke count, and the thought, “you better hope you can keep this up all night” quickly went through my head. And sure enough, all that speed and dexterity in my hands and feet was still there, everything being perfectly executed. If I could think it, my limbs could play it, and that’s a very rare treat!

Vocally, I couldn’t get comfortable until about mid-way through the second set when the crowd requested, “Superstition.” I was a bit concerned with how it might go given that I would be singing lead from behind the kit. Indeed the first verse was shaky, if only because I couldn’t get the right words to come out of my mouth! But by the chorus everything was fine, and it got even better from there. After that, I was fully warmed up, and throughout the night we had some fantastic 4-part harmonies just falling together with little effort.

It’s rare that I leave a gig fully pleased with my performance, and even now, 2 days later, I still find myself thinking about it. I’m surprised with how aggressively I played — to a level I hadn’t reached or even aimed in a long time — and I hope to figure out how to capture that and stick with it. I think it really helped drive the band quite a bit, but I just need to be careful to not overdo it and either speed things up or play too loud.

I think over the years I wound up sacrificing some of that aggression and drive in favor of playing at moderate volumes to accommodate the other musicians and smaller rooms I might be in. But I realized the other night that I need to bring an additional level of intensity back into my playing to take things to the next level. I need to do that without also reintroducing too much sound level! Balance is the goal… It will be interesting to see how it all plays out!

Going forward, I think I’ll use my blog to keep you all posted about upcoming gigs, and if I have anything notable to say afterwards, I’ll do that, too. If I have something to say during the gigs, I’ll update my Twitter stream during the setbreaks, cell service permitting.

Last night I had the pleasure of joining Tim Robertson, Guy Serle, and David Cohen for a segment on MyMac Podcast #177. Truly was a blast.

I also neglected to mention that I did the Mac OS Ken Day 6 podcast with Ken Ray a few weeks back, and it, too, was an enjoyable experience. You’ll have to subscribe to Day 6 to hear that, but it’s OK. Ken’s a great guy, and produces even greater content. It’s totally worth the money.

Makes me think we need to figure out how to incorporate guests into the Mac Geek Gab podcast. And more product reviews. All while keeping your questions and comments answered. Maybe we just need to do two shows a week!

Last week at South by Southwest, we saw Twitter and Meebo used to really shape the show in real-time. As I wrote, I think this is a good thing, since it combines the elements of the “unconference” (which I find too disorganized) with a traditional trade conference months in the making. Last week at SXSW was, to me, the *perfect* marriage of all of this, and it was extremely well-balanced.

And that’s my fear. The concept was fairly new, certainly not planned to turn out this way, and it was perfect. Next time there’s a congregation of savvy social media-types at a trade show, though, I’m concerned that too many will come into it planning to do something like the Zuckerberg audience-keynote, and completely overdo it. Obviously some ethics will develop over time, and it will balance out.

But we already *have* the balance. So can we all please just keep it in check? I don’t really have any interest in seeing trade conferences ruined just “because we can.”

Wield the power responsibly, folks. We have everything to lose.

As most readers know, last week I attended the South by Southwest conference for the first time. I caught the last bits of the film festival, and then was there for both Interactive and Music. I reported on this over at The Mac Observer and iPodObserver.com throughout the week, as follows:

• Twitterized Attendees Shape The Show
• Music Through Wednesday: Béla Fleck, Van Morrison, R.E.M.
• Thursday Music: Body of War, Wheatus, The Presidents of the USA, Bowling For Soup
• Friday and Saturday Music: Vampire Weekend, The Redwalls, The Supersuckers and The Rolling Stones

The music festival really blew me away, and in basically 4 days I saw more than 24 acts, including:

• American Bang
• Béla Fleck
• Ben Harper
• Billy Bragg
• Blue Cheer
• Bowling for Soup
• Brendan James
• Dead Confederate
• Foreign Born
• Jonathan Rice
• Kate Nash
• Kevin Gordon
• Papercranes
• R.E.M.
• RX Bandits
• Serj Tankian
• The Presidents of the United States of America
• The Redwalls
• The Supersuckers
• The Vines
• Tom Morello
• Vampire Weekend
• Van Morrison
• Wheatus

Was a great week, and is also great to be back home!

As I’ve mentioned recently, I’m heading to Austin, Texas again next week. I’ll be there Sunday through Sunday, and my trip is double or maybe even triple duty. I’ll of course be visiting our BackBeat Media Austin offices, meeting with Jeff Questad and Toni Nelson Herrera, and Greg Snyder is coming down from our New York office to meet, as well.

I’ll also be attending the South By Southwest conference. First half of the week is the Interactive conference where I’ll likely be providing some coverage that will appear on our iPodObserver.com site as well as our Mac Geek Gab podcast. Second half is the music conference, which may also generate some content for us, and might just possibly offer me the opportunity to tuck the laptop away and enjoy an evening or two of bands performing. It will definitely be a busy week, and likely a fun one, too. It will be nice to get back to Austin again.

As many listeners of our Mac Geek Gab podcast know, I recently purchased a new 2.6GHz 15″ MacBook Pro from Apple. It arrived yesterday, but I really didn’t get a chance to even begin setting it up until today. Honestly, if I wasn’t traveling to Austin, Texas next week, I probably would have waited longer — things have just been too busy around here to be distracted with a computer migration.

And while in the past I’d used Apple’s fantastic Migration Assistant to clone my old system onto my new one, this time I decided I’d better start from scratch. After all, the system that exists on my previous MacBook Pro had been Migrated and Upgraded since about Mac OS 10.2. That’s all the way back to a time when I was living in another state, running on a different CPU architecture, and was a significantly younger man. It’s possible I even had less children then, too. Suffice to say, it was time (time, perhaps, that I don’t have this week!).

So I manually migrated my documents and data over, and have been reinstalling apps one-by-one. Thus far, it’s actually gone MUCH smoother than I expected, and I’m now up and running “full-time” on the new box. There are still a few things I need to get in place, and I’m sure I’ll realize most of those while I’m traveling next week, but that’s the fun, isn’t it?

[UPDATE April 7, 2008 -- The audio and slide-video from this session is now freely available online, as well.]

Last month at Macworld Expo, I presented a session entitled, “Running Your Mac Lean, Clean and Mean” where we talked about all sorts of ways to ensure your Mac is running at its best, and what to do when it isn’t. Many of you who were there asked if you could get a copy, and now I’ve posted a PDF of my slides for you all to peruse.

As a buffer against having too little material, I also prepared a bonus round of helpful hints and tips just in case. We didn’t have time to go there, but that material is still helpful. I’ve left that included as well.