michaelGregoire (beta)

A new day!

mGee — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:55:20 +0000

I’m sitting here watching the news coverage building up to the Presidential Inauguration that’ll take place later today. I quite honestly never thought I’d see the day that a black man would become President. I’m proud to be an American today. Perhaps the first time that I’ve TRULY been able to say that. In my lifetime of 38 years, this is the brightest American moment – even with the economic crisis and ongoing war factored in.

2009 will be both a refreshing and a challenging year. President Barack Obama won’t be able to perform miracles, he’ll definitely have a tough job ahead. However, I’m confident he’s the perfect man for that all-important job of President of the United States of America. Congratulations America, welcome to the first day of the rest of your life! The world is watching.

The Maine music scene…is it ready for Creative Commons Licensing?

mGee — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:16:47 +0000

An article I wrote, extolling the virtues of Creative Commons licensing has just been published on the Portland Press Herald’s NXT blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Each month when preparing the next compilation for the website I run, I scour the internet for shining examples of music that’s released under a Creative Commons license. I always find plenty of excellent music from all over the world that meets that criteria. Each time I look for these musical gems, I quietly hope that one of the artists I discover will be from my home state of Maine (there’s nothing I’d love to do more than to promote bands from here). Alas, after 18 of these compilations, I’ve yet to find one Maine music artist utilizing this important tool that’s so easily at their disposal.

blocSonic and Nine Inch Nails projects

mGee — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:34:45 +0000

Over the past couple months I’ve been using my spare time to port my site blocSonic.com from Ruby On Rails to PHP in order to help loading time and site stability. I’m still in the process of porting the administrative back-end. Probably another month will be required to complete that. After a short break, I’m resuming the release of monthly collections of free net audio gems. Currently you can find 13 releases at blocSonic.com and 2 more are in the works. They should be released within the next couple weeks.

Besides blocSonic projects, I’ve been keeping myself busy with Nine Inch Nails related creations. First, I’ve been taking part in the Nine Inch Nails “Ghosts Film Festival”. Below is my video ‘EMPIRE’ which features three “Ghosts” tracks. Please go to the youtube page and vote for it. If you’d like to download it in HD quality, you can do so via the vimeo page.

EMPIRE (Featuring music from Nine Inch Nailsâ€™ â€˜Ghosts I-IVâ€™) from Michael Gregoire on Vimeo.

Secondly, I’ve been participating in NIN’s remix project and produced a remix of their most recent single “Discipline”. You can listen and vote here. If you enjoy it, download it via the links below in your preferred format:

192kbs MP3 format: Nine Inch Nails - Discipline (Borderline Obsessive Compulsive Remix)

320kbs MP3 format: Nine Inch Nails - Discipline (Borderline Obsessive Compulsive Remix)

Lossless FLAC format: Nine Inch Nails - Discipline (Borderline Obsessive Compulsive Remix)

Relaunch of 04064.com

mGee — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 05:13:21 +0000

Well, I finally went ahead and did it. 04064.com is now a dynamic site. Rather than developing it with Ruby On Rails, I decided on PHP. I got pretty fed up with Ruby’s sluggishness and Rails’ habit of crashing. No more RoR development for me. Though I can honestly say that all that time developing blocSonic and nvzion with RoR wasn’t wasted time. One thing RoR did for me was to help me get a grasp of MVC-based development. Bye bye RoR, hello Kohana â€” a nice PHP framework that strictly adheres to OOP and PHP5 utilizing the Model View Controller application pattern. So check out 04064.com when you get a chance. Also subscribe to the RSS feed to be kept up to date.

nvzion relaunch!

mGee — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 20:23:55 +0000

It’s been a while since my design company’s site has been updated. Behind the scenes for the past few months, I’ve been redeveloping it using Ruby on Rails and today I finally was able to launch it. You’ll also notice the latest projects that have been completed since last year. Check it out!