Where my mind was 2000-07-31...
© 2000 Per Johansson All rights reserved

2000-07-31
Today i uploaded my good old site to my cable-operators homepage account( http://members01.chello.se/distort). Sort of a mirror...it will probably change from the original over time(mabe I´ll translate some into my native Swedish tongue). The original site can be found at: http://listen.to/distort or http://members.fortunecity.com/energy2001 while the url where it started, and no longer is updated, is http://home.swipnet.se/~w-93247 . I´m happy, though, to find that this cable account at last works. Anyway; broadband is real cool. Todays news is that I installed the Cubase VST/32 5.0 demo from http://www.steinberg.de/ , it will be interesting to see what differs from my own Cubase Audio VST 3.553. For now I only have had time to notice different looks, sort of sportier, I´m not sure if it´s an improvement... I´ll end today with a very good tip for those of you sitting on cable connections like myself, download and install "Zonealarm"(free) from http://www.zonealarm.com/ as soon as possible. Theres lot´s of intruders out there, and while you can´t block those who really want in out very long, you sure as hell can block out most casual intruders and they are not a few...For myself(I´m curently on Windows 98SE) I had lot´s of crashes when connected which all disappeared when I installed "Zonealarm". There´s other(commercial) firewall software out there, I have only tested "BlackICE" which have had good reviews but on my system it caused more crashes than it did resolve. Zonealarm works amazingly smooth and is not heavy on resources...Happy surfing/Per

2000-07-29
Made some minor design changes here, that´s all/Per

2000-07-23

Ouff! Tomorrow it´s back to work again. I´ve actually had some vacation, but spotted the bad weather. Lot´s of fishing though, got me a rather big fish which I barbecued and ate as a nice dinner outdoors. So now I have the whole autumn and winter before me to create some great music and present for you here...Hmm, I got a mail from some web-surfer I haven´t had time to answer. My best apologies. He asked me if I had some know-how about the music-business over here(Stockholm), as he had been greatly impressed by the work from those guys at the "Cheiron"-studio in Stockholm(Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys etc.).I have mentioned them at my site before. He wanted to record material for a CD and already knew a guy who had assisted at the "Britney Spears"-takings made in the U.S who also recommended the "Cheiron"-studio. Of course I´m flattered for being asked because of my well known reputation of expertise, but in this case I´m way over my head. If I really had that expertise about the music business over here or even was socializing with the lot, guess who was spending most of his life in studios around making great recordings ? No hard guess. I really would have loved to help that guy, but actually, I´m not ready myself to take that time to dig into the business before I have some demos of substance myself to come along with. I hopefully will some time. Never dreamt about the tasks of a manager though, but I would really love to have one. Anyway, that´s all for now folks. At least you know I´m alive...AND Fortunecity seems to be a quite OK web-space provider.

SeeYa/Per

2000-07-06

Hi again!
Nothing really amazing going on here, but I´ve upgraded some of my music stuff: Now I´m sporting the full version of Cakewalk Pro Audio 9, it will be real fun to get into it and see what can be done(report later). Some of my other software have gone through minor updates, and I feel my computer works terific at the moment. Still have to get midi-sound under Linux though(mp3:s works great with XMMS). Also; Visual Studio, the Windows programming suite, have had another huge service pack(4) so I moved my Visual Studio install to Windows 2000 Pro instead of 98(only games and music from now on) and installed the service pack. Let´s hope something will come out of that move. By the way, I´m soon off to the countryside on vacation so I wish you all a really great summer and see you back this autumn when this site will groove..../Per

TODAY'S DISTORTION BY PER...
Welcome, dearest visitor, at Per´s music site. Nothing new really on the web-space front (or any other front) for this site, so I guess I´ll have to do some further occasional updates viamodem. Of course I´m eagerly awaiting the time when mycable operatorwill get their ftp-accounts together so I can move my site and start kicking some ass...

LATE BREAKING NEWS !
Fortunecityis my latest alternative for webspace, seems pretty cool except they are having problem with their server running out of hard-disk space now when I´m uploading, if they get their act together mabe I´ll stay here for a while...

EVEN LATER NEWS !!
Wednesday 28/6-2000 ; the server is alright now and everything seems to function perfectly, fast and smooth - even the audio files. So I´ll probably stick to this server for a while now, already fixed the redirect from my "old" URL http://listen.to/distortso it will continue to function just fine. See Ya and have fun//Per••

pastdistortions»

2000-06-10

And the monster guitarist was back again ! Yes, my new cable modem operator still haven´t made their promised webspace available for me. And the old webspace can´t be updated without a modem connection. Therefore I make this a quick update just to show I´m still kickin´. I won´t give them more minute rate than necessary now that I have cable broadband with flatrate. Otherwise, the broadband is amazing; now one can use the internet in quite a different way than when one sits with a snail modem connection. Apart from all the "napsting" and burning of one´s, of course not illegal, home made "greatest hits" CD:s so are there many other fun opportunities which arise. For example; the other evening I downloaded two complete ISO images for CD-burning of the latest "Linux Mandrake 7.1" Linux-distribution and also burned both the same evening. The evening after I installed the whole "shit" on my machine, 1.8 Giga-bytes of the latest and the greatest in the way of Linux and free open-source software !!! Totally for free! Really awesome I think. By the way, the Mandrake Linux works really smoth, it even got my Sondblaster Live! kickin out some mp3 in my speakers under Linux. The only tweaks I´ve made so far is that I´ve upgraded to latest Helixcode "Gnome 1.2"-desktop under "Sawfish" windows-manager and upgraded Netscape to the 128-bit encrypted 4.73-version. The cable-modem works equally well under all my operating systems, with mabe a slight speed-loss under Windows 98 but Windows 2000 and Linux seems speedy on par. Otherwise, so am I really impressed by Windows 2000, if one just uses "ready" hard and software so is it really hard to find any bugs while Windows 98 as you all know is quite plagued with bugs and so is all Linux-distributions. In fact, Linux is the buggiest of them all but then it really is intented for oneself to find the bugs in ones personal installation and personally get rid of them as all source code is free and easy to recompile into something that suits ones needs. Fun and awesome, but just don´t tell me that Linux already is ready for the desktop. Cause it isn´t. But it´s great for professionals who knows exactly what they want out of a OS, in many cases are Linux the best choice available under those premises. It´s also a great hobby OS, and to learn from if one intends to go professional in the future...

Well, Have Fun and See Ya folks/Per

2000-04-21

You´re catching me right in the middle of easter. Today is the first smell of summer in Stockholm, I´ve been out at a wonderfully beautiful village by the archipelague named Saltsjobaden and aquired a lot of sun. Right now I´m sitting by the PC drinking a cooled glass of white vine and feeling quite comfortable. Tonight it´s party in the house so I´m pretty sure I won´t be writing anything tomorrow. Mabe I´ll record some hard rocking piece of music tonight, heavily affected by alcohol as I will be...

Other things going on is that I have upgraded my installments of Borland C++-builder and Delphi Pascal from version 3 to version 4 of both. I havent had time to check out the actual benefits, but Delphi 5 as I tried out recently did crash upon me repeatedly while version 3 of both programs have been very stable. The Borland programming environments is anyway very attractive as they share many simple programming solutions with Microsofts Visual Basic but provides programming with more powerful languages and compiles to real executables. Pros tend to prefer Microsofts Visual C++, mabe the best compiler, I haven´t had time to try out eventual benefits there either but as I´ve mentioned before I have the full installment of Visual Studio Enterprise so it´s just time that beats me. Something that speaks for that one should learn to feel at home with Borlands environments is that they are getting more and more platform independent, soon they will have compilers and environments for all their languages on virtually every platform including the rapidly growing Linux platform. Beat that Microsoft...

Anyway, now I definitely feel like putting on Tony Martin Sabbath´s "Headless Cross" and rock on to Satan...

See Ya//Per

2000-04-16

Hi ! As you see for yourself; I am back here at my main-site once again. Unfortunately, another week without much related stuff going on. I´ve just been working all week, and enjoyed my new car some at my free time. Of course I´ve been sitting a little in front of my synthesizers but not done anything constructive. The guitar have just been collecting dust, but I have played rather much electric bass as relaxation - it´s quite fun to play and it´s a challenge to create something cool with just the minimalistic sounds from an electric bass... Anyway, next week is "Easter week" so I will have some time off, I hope I will find a small piece of timeframe to create something then.

I´ve been at Stockholm International Car Show last weekend. At the show I saw the successor to my car, the brand new Peugeot 607, a real beauty isn´t it ? I got this picture from the press-material CD-ROM I cheated into my possession. When I was preparing this picture for the web I did an amazing discovery. Adobe Photoshop is outstanding ! It outright outclassed two other heavy image editing softwares I first used for preparing this picture. You just don´t notice the difference on normal low resolution pictures, but when you as in this case are transforming really high-res pics to a smaller format the difference is daunting. In this case it was print-originals on a promotion CD, but it could just as well have been your patiently scanned high-res images who got destroyed using inferior image editing software. So what happened ? Well, the original image was over 10 Megs of size in JPEG with full CMYK color separation. First I tried Micrografx Picture Publisher 8 to compress this image into a small RGB JPEG for the web, the result was disastrous, grainy and ugly looking (ever noticed the big quality difference on images from various "scanmasters" sites, it could as well be that some of them can´t afford Photoshop...). Next I tried a really hailed pre-web software, Macromedia Fireworks 3. This software has lots of cool features for web-production, but the quality of it´s compressing algorithms wasn´t barely noticeable better than Picture Publishers. Unusable ! Then I had to resign to using good old Adobe Photoshop 5, as you see for yourself above; the quality is excellent and the file is also really small ! This was a perfect example of that you can´t probably produce a good quality photographic site without using Photoshop ! What more can I say ? If you haven´t allready; buy it. Photoshop must be one of the most necessary softwares you can have on a Personal Computer.

Yowsah, Yowsah, I´m getting tired now so I think I have to go to bed and read a book. What book ? Something about C++ I think...