This is Ryan here. I’m not know for my political views but I believe having a clean planet to live on when I’m old transcends politics. Next Tuesday, Californian’s have an opportunity to help save the world by voting yes on Proposition 87, which taxes oil drilling companies here and uses that money to help fund research into alternative energy resources. I’ve been doing what I can to help spread the word. It’s really pissing me off how the oil companies have spent millions on television advertisements and basically telling complete lies to try to scare people so that they won’t vote for this.

Hopefully I won’t have to wait more than another year or two to get an ethanol/flex-fuel car that can run on either ethanol or regular petroleum based gas. ethanol fuel already costs a lot less than gasoline and pollutes way less than gasoline. The real beauty is that all of our nation’s ethanol needs can be met by our farmers, so no more sending billions of dollars overseas everyday to fund questionable governments and terrorists. Basically, if a few countries stopped supplying us oil, our economy would come to a halt. Scary.

I recommend reading this blog which is written by an expert, leader, and investor in this new eco-friendly future.

Ugh, I can’t believe I’ve been putting off creating a site for myself for so long… I used to have an anjibee.com site a few years ago, but the coding was all mid-90’s and the info was out of date. Come to think of it, I based the current LSD site on my old code… Another site that needs overhauling! Anyway, rather than polish a turd, as they say, I just took my site down and have been waiting to work on it “when I have time.” Seems to me that day will never come, so I need to just *make* some time for it. I decided to do a blog, rather than a standard site like lovespirals.com, since most of my content will likely be podcast and vidcast related. I figure folks can subscribe to the whole site feed, if they like.

I honestly am not in the mood to design a site right now and have no idea what I want it to look like. I know what I want it to do, but the rest is a giant question mark. It is impossible to create something that you can’t imagine! And I feel like I should be working on so many other projects that I’m having trouble concentrating on site design. It’s times like this I wish that I didn’t do everything personally… Its hard trying to be good at a million different things and its exhausting! I need a staff of experts that want to work for me out of the kindness of their hearts. 🙂 Well, a girl can dream…

i’ve been a very bad blogger here. part of it was due to my primitive computer setup which didn’t make doing a lot of computing things fun or easy. i’ve got my main music making computer: an apple g4 tower with protools hardware. i see myself keeping that for a while still, but it’s not an ideal computer for daily net cruising for various reasons, one of which is that it can never go into sleep mode due to the protools cards not being energy star compliant.

so my awesome new computer also happens to be appple’s least expensive computer (sort of): the mac mini. the reason i say sort of is that i maxed it out with 2 gigs of ram. it’s replacing a slow apple ibook (circa 2001/2002) and a compaq desktop pc (circa 1999/2000). this little computer is cool. first, it’s about 1/20’th the size of the pc. and now that macs use intels, i’m able to run windows simultaneously with osx using a nifty program called parallels. so the pc is destined for the local electronics recycling center soon.

Life honestly seems to be a constant process of gathering and sorting. So much of my time is devoted to activity. Sometimes I think I should be more classically Buddhist by trying to not own things. I’m not even always aware that I’m collecting things until I notice that I need to organize them or discard them. My house is so tiny that it can’t fit many things in the first place, so just a few things can really make it seem crowded or messy. I’m at a point now where I look around and see small stacks piling up here and there which drives me crazy. I’ve been listing many CDs on lala.com just recently, but of course, more CDs come back to me… So my large stack of unwanted CDs will be replaced with a large stack of wanted ones. Which is better, I suppose. I’m stil in the process of digitizing my whole CD collection, which is pretty time consuming. I made smaller bit rate files of many songs back in the early mp3 days, so I’m trying to replace those with 320 aacs now. Plus I’m adding in the artwork, too. Gathering and sorting. Oh, and deleting.

Ryan and I went down to Ontario for the Podcast & Portable Media Expo, but ended up spending most of our time at the PodShow UnExpo2! Originally we thought we’d just go up Friday to check it out, but we decided to go back on Sunday, too, to hang out poolside with my PodShow homies and take part in the live PodShow Music Rewind recording session. You can actually check that out over at rewind.podshow.com — episode #45. Ryan and I come in next to last on the show, though you do hear me laughing or yelling in the background from time to time. Ha ha!

I also did video interviews with Cali Lewis, of GeekBriefTV, and the Rumor Girls, so when I see those go up, I’ll link to them here — probably in the news section. Posed for photos here and there, including a great one with 6 other women PodShow podcasters taken by Frank of Media Artist Secrets.

We’re nearly done with our fifth new song, called “Nocturnal Daze”. We originally came up with the idea back in November but just returned to it last week. Unlike the last song, we didn’t have really strong ideas about the arrangement before going in to record it, so we started simply with the acoustic guitar and vocals of the demo and then let the ideas flow in around it. Ryan decided to play Rhodes throughout the tune, which ended up giving it a bit of a Zero 7/Air feel. I likened the sound to “Trip Hop without the beats.” Anyway, at first Ryan was just going to play his electric guitar at the end, but I had imagined it going in and out of the whole song, so he gave it a shot last night and we both liked the results. The song fits really well with the other 4 completed tunes and once again I am struck by how nicely the album is coming together.

dear cbs,

your labor day tennis coverage was incredibly frustrating! while the #2 seed game was going on, you insisted on sticking with the tedious #14 vs #18 seed game that drug on and on uninterestingly. i suspect cbs of being nationalist, trying to force amercian tennis players on us. get a clue; americans love nadal, not ginepri!

not only that, but you kept showing tennis news while you could have been showing live games. i would have loved to see some of the safin game, but instead you wasted time repeating scores and making commentary in the studio. we can already read the scores on the bottom of the tv screen – so why not focus on the live tennis games going on? frustrating!

i am completely dissapointed in today’s coverage.

— anji

The newest episode of Chillin’ with Lovespirals lists our Top 5 Downloads, which were quite a surprise to me, I must say! I also announce our digital sales vs CD sales ratio… maybe not as much of a surpise to us, but may be to some fans. We also chat about recent band happenings and share the intro to our latest song in progress. And if you’ve already heard the podcast, yes, introoutro.com is taken!

Some friends of ours offered us tickets to the sold out Zero 7 show at the Hollywood Bowl last night just a few hours beforehand. We both love that venue, so even though we don’t own any of their CDs, we decided to go check it out. I don’t know why I haven’t bought their albums yet, really. I’ve liked everything that I’ve heard. I really, really like the new stuff with Jose Gonzalez. He was so cute in person, too. And Sia was really amazing! Her voice really held up live, and her performance was quite charming. I’m definitely picking up the new CD for sure, and probably the other two, as well. I also want to get Jose’s solo album. Gotan Project, who actually headlined, were enjoyable but somewhat of a letdown after Zero 7. The songs were all compentent and pleasant, but a bit samey. There weren’t as many highs and lows in mood. I did dig them, however. Anyway, another great show at the Bowl with a wonderful picnic beforehand. Man, I had Rose two nights in a row this weekend. I feel a bit dehydrated today!

Started working on the 4th song for the new album last night. It’s a tune we’ve been writing over the past two months or so. It began life as a fairly fast tempo rocker with a funky edge, but being Lovespirals, we had to come up with a sad, slow part, which is the intro we just recorded. I have to say the song is nothing like anything we’ve done before, while still managing to sound like us. In fact, this album is shaping up to be quite different overall from the last two. Kinda picks up where “Habitual” left off.

One cool thing about the new album is that there aren’t any old left over tunes on it. The first album had 3 previously uncompleted Love Spirals Downwards songs on it, and the second album had several songs we didn’t complete for the first album. This time, we’re writing and recording everything fresh. Sure, some of my lyrics have been kicking around for years, but this is their first breath of life with music. So things are fresh and fun for us. We’re both excited.

If you’re a listener of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, then you may have heard this week that he has proposed a new PodShow LA drama starring the two of us. If not, you just heard it from me. Pacific Coast Hellway’s Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff is currently brainstorming ideas for this romantic comedy drama program. Should be a hoot, with him at the helm! Lovespirals may write the theme song, which would only be appropriate, eh? Mark thinks we should let the audience get involved in script writing and music, which is certainly an interesting idea. I just warned him against anything too sleazy… Let’s keep it classy, PodShow!