These G-Strings Ain't Shakin'

At the end of the summer I worked on my best Bob Vila impression, renovating the converted room in the back of my garage. At the point I left it off, there was some carpet down and an otherwise empty room. For the first bit of this term, while it was still warm, I let the room serve as a room for my buddy and I to crank our amps, or to host games of poker.
Since the onset of the cold weather however, the poor insulation back there, combined with the unrelated piling on of course work, has seen me go back there less and less frequently. I've since moved the weight machine that was acting only as a threat to toes everywhere as an obstacle back there, and not used it as much as is warranted either. I've found a little time to pluck away at my mid-range Washburn acoustic that otherwise hangs on display in my room, but other than that my guitars have been neglected. I haven't touched my electric since early October, or put new strings on either since perhaps late August.

But after I finish the lab work for my thesis on Monday, I plan on stopping at the music shop on the way home to grab new strings for both and doing something about all that. None of this means anything of course because I still have no intentions of ever playing for anyone but myself, but I still find my fun. Infact, I probably should have taken the time out from work more often this fall to plug in the guitar. Few things work quite as well for releasing tension as cranking the gain, and thrashing out some old school speed Metallica riffs, with no care for the quality.

Aside from the guitar, and its neglect, I've switched to Foobar for playing my music collection. Its a simple, plug-in oriented music player that I've known of for years but was unwilling to part with Winamp over. Winamp started pissing me off, and Windows Media Player is, in short, trash, so here we are. Foobar works well, with far fewer resources than either of the above, and has also lead to me re-tagging most of my collection, and starting to add track numbers to the tags to facilitate the excellent sorting options that it offers. The advent of mp3s has for most meant a lean away from listening to albums front to back, as some of the greater ones of all time were originally intended, but Foobar is getting me away from that again.

If you're not gonna give Foobar a try, at least buy/'legally' download the new Emily Haines (of Metric; I wonder how long that qualification will last) album, as its well done.

Oh, and I switched to 'Blogger beta'...we'll see how this goes.