Session Drummer | Studio Drummer | Touring and Worship Drummer for Hire | Dale Baker | Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, NC

Drummer Hunter : Find your next drummer here!

Today I received an email from Todd at Drummer Hunter in Austin, Texas.  He has set up this online site for drummers looking for bands.  It seems like a promising idea and I like it's narrow, niche-like focus.  The concept for the site is sort of like a mash-up of Craigslist, MySpace and E-Harmony. 

Right now, the site looks fairly basic, but it only launched at the first of the year.  But for what the site offers, fancy graphics and crazy ads aren't really necessary and I think would discourage folks from trying out the site. 

Basically, if you're a drummer, you need to post your details here.  If you are a band looking for a drummer, you need to visit the site.  I think in time, this will be the way regional and some national bands will find available drummers.  Of course, if you live in LA, there is one guy out there who hooks all the musicians up with the bands (or so I've been told).  In my humble opinion, this site looks like it could eventually become the online version of this guy in LA.

Here's a blurb from the press release I received today via my inbox:

"Drummer Hunter, launched New Year’s Day, is an online social utility designed specifically to connect drummers with bands, and vice versa. It’s “online-dating” approach is aimed at engaging the overlooked niche of drummers – a niche musician Todd Hansen, creator/founder of Drummer Hunter knows all too well from 15 years of playing and touring as a drummer in the indie-music scene."

and then later...

"Drummer Hunter’s “online-dating” approach allows drummers and bands to create profiles that specify: location, influences, styles, party preferences, practicing/touring availability along with MP3s, videos, myspace / website links all in a searchable database. Plus, each profile receives a public URL. Thus allowing the band or drummer to promote them self outside of the site as well."

Check out Drummer Hunter...I hope to get my profile on there at some point...so be on the lookout for that.

Hackintosh

Now that the "Free Mac" deals are few and far between, I stumbled upon this site about creating a Mac computer from off the shelf parts, for $600-800.  It looks like a pretty smoking machine, but I don't know if I'm up for all the work and coding/ hacking stuff, though there is a version where no coding/ hacking is required.  Still, if I get desperate, I might give it a try.  I figure I've got a couple more years of use out of my PC.  Anyway, it might be worth a try.

The first post I found about this was featured over at Lifehacker.  Here is the link to the post, "Build a Hackintosh Mac for under $800."  The author even has a parts list over at Newegg.com.  Here's an excerpt from the post:

"If the high price tag for Apple hardware has kept you from buying a Mac but you're willing to roll up your sleeves and get adventurous, you can build your own "Hackintosh"—a PC that runs a patched version of OS X Leopard.  What?!, you say. Apple's move to Intel processors in 2006 meant that running OS X on non-Apple hardware is possible, and a community hacking project called OSx86 launched with that goal in mind. Since then, OSx86 has covered major ground, making it possible for civilians—like you and me!—to put together their own Hackintosh running Mac OS 10.5."

Yay!

Relief!  Now my blog posts will show up when I hit save.  I know it seems like a small thing, but for me it's taken me since Christmas to figure this out. 

Awesome.

Alright, one more time.

I just changed a few things in the "engine room" and so let's hope that fixed it for good!

Apparently not.

Ugh.  Well, that didn't work out like I'd hoped.  Back to the grindstone!

Is it working, now?

Just another quick post to see if I've finally figured out the bugs in my site.  Here's hoping for no error messages when I save this post...fingers crossed...here I go!

Alright...just checking to see if the changes took effect.

Okay, I just changed some code on my Main Index Template, and now I'm going to see if this post appears when I save and publish it...here goes...

My Free Mac

Many of you know that I received my Mac Book for $75 this past summer.  I did it through finding a link (thank you Gavin!) at Josh Clark's site, and as I've been here in TN visiting family for the holidays, I've mentioned and bragged about the fact that my Mac only cost $75, and so have gotten quizzed on how I did it. 

My wife has enjoyed using my Macbook, and so I thought I'd see if I could get her a Mac using some of the same methods I used before.  So last night and early today I went back to Josh's site to find out if it was still possible to get a "free mac."  As it turns out, the particular method I used (via ShopFreePay and completing 12 offers from 3 different categories) is no longer available, so I looked for some other options.  On this page, Josh lists out the sites that he recommends and so I picked out the one for YourFreeiStuff and signed up. 

At first I was going to do the offer completion method that I'd done before.  This is where you get credit for completing a certain amount of offers or (in this site's case) you get points for completing offers, and once you've accumulated enough points, you get your item.  However, this time out (after looking at how many offers I'd need to complete in order to accumulate enough points (23 offers plus...), I decided to switch my account over to referral based. 

Now, I'm tasked with getting 13 referrals.  Each of those referrals need to sign up with the site using my referral code and then complete "one level A offer OR 50 points or more worth of Level B offers."   

Many of the offers are for things that you would already be interested in, like Blockbuster Video membership, NetFlix, Children's book clubs, Magazine subscriptions and the like.  So after signing up, it should be fairly easy finding an offer to complete that interests you. 

Please note:  First get an alternate email address (via hotmail or gmail or some other free email account).  It has been my experience that the account you sign up with will be spammed (usually not by the site you're signing up with, but by plenty of other sites.   By having an alternate email account, if the spam gets to be too much, you can simply delete the account.

So, do you want to help me get a free mac?  If so, click this link to sign up using my referral code! I'll keep you posted on my progress, and if you want to drop me a line letting me know you signed up, that would help me keep tabs on my progress.  Let the fun begin!

Again here is my referral code, should you want to manually type the info in:

http://www.YourFreeiStuff.com/index.php?ref=4512234