This past weekend was quite a musical one for me. On Saturday, I went to a surprise birthday party for my old friend Nick that I played in a couple of bands with. The party was attended by several musicians who have played with each other in various configurations over the years and so naturally the guitars came out and many tunes were played. And I got to see a bunch of folks that I have not seen in too long. Great fun.

On Sunday, I braved driving through the rain to jam with Vlad, a colleague that I know from my time at Yahoo. It was so much fun that I lost track of the time and stayed long enough for my wife to freak out. Realizing this on the drive home and then realizing that my cell phone battery was dead, I went through the frustrating experience of getting change and then trying three separate banks of pay phones, none of which were in operating condition, before giving up and driving home. I guess these days even 8-year-olds are probably carrying around cell phones so the phone companies don’t bother with maintaining pay phones anymore.

When I got home, I located my Logic Express CD with the serial number and fired it up on my MacBook Pro for the first time. There are some pretty nifty loops in there (including drum, guitar, bass, harmonica, and others) so that should be fun, although I was fairly overwhelmed by the user interface. I wonder if there is a good book out there that explains Logic Express, or if I should check out the alternatives like Cubase.