All posts by ericdano

Polymath, musician, awesome.

So…..we crashed

Well, yesterday, Monday December 4th was interesting. The computer that was sitting around and serving up all my jazz- sites decided that it’s SSD drive was going to die. Completely. Not even enough for me to clone it off to another one.

So it was decision time. Keep hosting it at home, or perhaps do something different.

Something different won.

So now we are on Dreamhost on a VPS. It’s a little more expensive per month to run…..but the less traffic and electrical (plus not having to pay for static IPs) it should even out.

The other sites, other than my personal one, are still down. Hoping to get them up tomorrow.

Gig Bag 2023

Since 2022, gigging has been picking up. This year, I revamped my “Gig Bag” to reflect better what I am doing now.

The “OLD” Gig Bag was a Landsend Canvas laptop bag I got in the late 90s. I believe I had two of these, a black one and a blue one. The black one basically fell apart about 10 years ago, and the blue one has been my go to. It has done great….except I wanted something slightly more “rigid” to better hold items I am carrying. Also something slightly bigger. This “tool bag” fit the bill perfectly. In fact, one of the Amazon reviewers uses it for a gig bag. Small world.

In one of the new bag’s pockets, I have two of these rechargeable LED lights. So handy to pack up your stuff with proper lighting.

Next pocket has a small philips and straight blade screw driver, a stubby 6-in-1 screw driver, a Gerber Gear Dime multi-tool, an extra lightning cable, usb microcable, and a usb c cable, and small charger for them. And an extra USB stick. And an extra pedalboard patch cable.

Final front pocket is filled with a business card holder that holds my business cards, and a Logitech Crayon for my iPad.

In the bag, I have 2 6 foot XLR cables, 1 15 foot XLR cable, 1 15 foot power cord, two Hola! Music iPad holders that I mounted on a K&M Adjustable Stereo microphone bar, a RE-20 microphone, a Nuemann MCM 114 microphone, my pedal board with is really scaled back setup that has just a PedalTrain Metro 16 with a Elite Acoustics StompMix 4 and an Eventide H9 on it, two iPads, one for music, one to control the Roland AE-30 and IEMs, an Amazon Basic case with extra reeds and stuff, and my IEMs box (Xvive U4R2 with Sennheiser IE 40 Pros)

It’s a lot of stuff, but its been working really well for the pop group I have been playing with.

Musician.Social

Hello all. Perhaps you have heard of Twitter? Did you hear that a rather suspect guy now owns it outright and is basically allowing all the bad actors back on the stage? Perhaps you want that sort of interactivity where you can follow people or topics, but not have the Ads or the garbage that comes with Twitter nowadays?

I am proud to introduce Musician.Social, a Mastodon instance that is very much like Twitter, without the crap. There lots of people flocking to Mastodon “instances” now that Twitter is Elon’s vanity project.

Basically, every Mastodon site is linked together via “Federation”. Think of it as like email, where everyone has @gmail or @yahoo or whatever, but are still able to communicate. Mastodon is like that. You can follow people you like (like director Rob Reiner who just started on Mastodon). And you can choose the @ part you want at the end.

So, check it out. Follow some #hashtags, and make some connections.