Hackintosh

Four mostly unrelated things:

1.    An apology. Sorry for not blogging much the past couple months. I’ve missed you.
2.    Hackintosh. I’m building a Mac with my friend Drew Scoggins. It’s called a “Hackintosh” because people don’t usually build their own macs. For those of you concerned, there is no illegal hacking involved, but it’s tricky because you have to carefully select the hardware to work with the software. As it turns out, there is a community of people online who do this. It’s called the OSx86 project. These people, many of them computer experts or enthusiasts, carefully document the hardware that has been tried, what works, and what doesn’t. Drew and I are using this resource (and Drew’s experience) to build a powerful production machine from scratch for roughly a quarter of the price that Apple would charge. I intend to use the computer primarily for audio and video production. This next part might be for nerds’ eyes only, but here are some specs on the hardware I purchased:

• Processor: Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66 GHz Quad-Core
• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX
• Memory: 6 GB DDR3 (PC3 10666)
• Video: GeForce 9800 GT Superclocked Edition 512 MB 256-bit
• Two (2) Seagate 640 GB 7200 RPM internal hard drives

I’ll try to keep you updated on our progress as we build the machine in the next few weeks and attempt to run OS X 10.5 on it. I’m excited.

3.      Speaking of audio production, I just had a recording session with my friend Marty Pendleton last night. Marty is a talented performer who does a great cover of John Legend’s “Ordinary People”, so we decided to lay down some tracks for kicks. We hauled my gear over to St. Augustine’s, a small chapel on campus with really live acoustics. Marty had a decent karaoke track to use, so we only tracked vocals there. To make the most of the space, I tried a new mic’ing technique… well, new for me, but a classic technique in general. I close-mic’ed Marty with my large-diaphram condenser, and I put a stereo pair of condensers (XY) at the opposite end of the chapel to function as room mics. Hopefully I can adjust the levels on these later to create a higher-quality reverb than I could have faked with a plugin. I haven’t started editing Marty’s takes, so the track isn’t done yet, but I did post some photos from the session. Check those out.

4.    Google evidence. This is completely random, but when I repeatedly see people do things that don’t make sense, I feel the need to blog about them.  I have encountered a certain presentational phenomenon with greater frequency recently, and it has started to make me crazy. By “presentational phenomenon”, I mean something that I only see when people are presenting information, like delivering a sermon, giving a lecture, etc. Over and over again, I’ve seen pastors and professors use the number of Google hits on a search term to suggest that the particular concept or topic in question is popular or relevant in our society. Have you seen this?  The other day, my professor was lecturing on leadership ethics, and she showed a slide with a bunch of these search terms with negative ethical connotations and the number of hits they generated. One of them was “infidelity”, which generated 5.6 million hits. Others were similar. Her point? Leadership ethics is lacking in our society today. Weak sauce.

I think people are using this technique in an attempt to be relevant in a dot-com-wifi-ipod-internet era, but it only weakens their arguments for one simple reason: There is not necessarily a direct correlation between the number of internet references to a subject and its relevance in our society. That is a massive assumption. Furthermore, given vague, one-word search terms, Google cannot differentiate the contexts from which all of these references come. Using my previous example, any sites that include the word “infidelity” would be returned with the search results, whether the sites supported, refuted, or were completely unrelated to the point my professor was trying to make.

I’m not saying that my professor was wrong, but she fell victim to the trap of using poor evidence to support her argument. To further illustrate my point, I have included a few Google search results of my own below. What claims could I make about our society with these “statistics”?

• “rape” – 7 million hits
• “stealing” – 24.2 million hits
• “murder” – 103 million hits
• “racism” – 24.4. million hits
• “elbow” – 24.5 million hits
• “glue” – 27.4 million hits

Clearly, we live in one messed up, amoral, elbowy, gluey society! Heaven help us.