(MoShang by Mark Forman - used under a CC by-nc-sa license)

My friend Mark Forman (or bbluesman) offered to do a photoshoot for me, so we hit the Martyrs’ Shrine here in Taichung last Wednesday. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out – the photo above is my clear favorite. Have a look at the rest of the set here.

Mark obviously put quite a bit of work into it, and now I’m looking forward to another shoot, again with Mark behind the camera, but this time together with Chris Bailey. Hopefully we can get a couple of nice shots as promo material for Chris and my upcoming Suncake Lounge album.

Releasing the Asian Variations free album was a bit of an experiment and in order for it  to be somewhat useful as “market research”, I’ve been keeping count of full-album downloads as far as possible.  Somewhere in this month, the number of downloads since August 2007 passed 5000 (the figure is 5095 at the time of writing). The downloads I’ve been able to count came from my own site at asianvariations.com, jamendo.com and archive.org. I’ve not counted single downloads from soundclick.com, and for obvious reasons haven’t been able to count bit torrent downloads or people sharing copies of the album with their friends. How does that jibe with your expectations for a free album on the web? For my own part, it’s about halfway between a figure I would have been very excited about and one I would have been extremely disappointed with ;^)

Happy 2009!

Having skipped on Vista, I’ve eagerly signed up for the Windows 7 Beta. It’s been getting good press and I think I see why. I’ve installed it in a dual-boot config. on both Em.’s 5 year old Ben-Q laptop and now on my own dual-core system. It offers a very smooth experience on both machines (the laptop has less than a gig of ram!), especially with aero running on my desktop system.

I’ve yet to experiment with my audio apps, but I think that’s going to have to wait for a Win 7 driver from M-Audio. I installed the Vista 32 driver for my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra in compatibility mode, and although it works (I have sound) I’m noticing a glitch in mp3 playback with the Win 7 Media Player and in Firefox every 10 seconds or so. While it’s good enough to play music with in the background while surfing the net (Win 7/Firefox is performing like a champ in this capacity), actually making music with this driver is another question.

I’ll probably go ahead and install Reason and Sonar soonish. For all I know the glitchy playback affects mp3’s only. Either way, I’ll be booting back into XP to do production work until Windows 7 is officially released and available in retail.

My desktop specs:

Asus P5B-E motherboard, Intel 6420 CPU (2.13 GHz Core2Duo), 2 GB ram