Fantastic news… 5.1 Rush!

My son recently popped up on instant messenger and asked if I’d heard the news about Rush’s Moving Pictures album?

My reply was, ‘Tell me it’s a 5.1 surround sound mix’.

‘Yes it is!’

Moving Pictures is still one of my favourite albums of all time. Seven tracks that mean a lot to me, even 30 years later. I’ve already mentioned elsewhere my sheer enjoyment of the night our eldest son played the Bass part in YYZ for his A-Level music recital, I’ll never forget that.

Richard Chycki is carrying out the remix and quite frankly I can’t wait for this. It’s being released 14 days before my birthday… and no I won’t be able to resist it for another 2 weeks I’m sure!

It seems we have the terrible original mix of Vapor Trails to thank for this project. Rush have finally admitted that the mix was bad and Vapor Trails is being remixed too.

Just listen to the difference between the two remixed tracks from Vapor Trails on the third Retrospective CD and you’ll hear what I mean. It was a sad day back then, when I released even Rush had been a victim of the Loudness Wars.

And to top it all, Rush are working on a new CD, expected to be released early 2012, with longer songs again. Excellent!

Mozilla software is just great…

Earlier in the week my aging Windows XP install had a wobbly moment and failed to boot fully after it’s ‘moment’. After disk checking, scanning and booting from the Windows CD, the install was hosed.

Time for the dreaded reinstall of Windows. I saved my profile from the old install and other data before deleting the old partition for the reinstall. A fresh start is always best at times like that.

With a super quick, fresh Windows install up and running it was time to put Firefox and Thunderbird back. I copied two directories for each program from my old profile to the new profile, as follows…

In theses two paths c:\documents and settings\myProfile\local settings\application data\ and c:\documents and settings\myProfile\application data\ both of the Mozilla and Thunderbird directories. These are hidden directories, but you have Show hidden files turned on, right?

With these directories laying in wait in my new profile, I installed Firefox and Thunderbird. No messages, or warnings… no news is good news? When I ran the applications everything was just as I left them, addons all worked (OK, View in Chrome didn’t, but anĀ  addon can’t work without it’s target program installed. ;) ), all my email accounts and email history were there. Superb and painless. Sorted!