music

You know how something finally becomes official the day you decide to join in? Well, that's what happened today. One year ago last week, a few of us decided to attend the Coachella music festival in Southern CA. Except for the part where every time you went to the bathroom you were confronted by an overflowing porta-potty of poo, it was one of those events that lives in your mind like a combination of ambrosia and sandpaper. So very good and so very, um, sandpapery.

We wanted to do it again this year but Coachella sold out way before we got around to buying tickets. (Like, we went "duh," and three minutes later the whole thing was gone.) So this year, we're going to Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tennessee. But we weren't going until a few moments ago when I purchased my ticket. Because until then, the gang was them, not us. Now, happily, we're all going.

Here's our posse from last year. (I believe I owe credit for this photo to Rebecca Peizer, who we will miss dearly this time around.) Damn, we're a bunch of stone-cold thugs. That's the funny thing about tech-industry video training. It makes you so tough you can stare down a camera from several feet. Not to mention a few additional inches. And we're all so remarkably bearded!

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This week, we discuss Deke's second-most used application, iTunes. It's true, whenever he needs a break, our graphics guru spends copious amounts of time organizing his vast music collection. And with our favorite Macworld folk on hand, Chris Breen and Ben Long, we thought it the perfect time to dig into the peculiar behaviors of Apple's music-wrangling, phone-syncing, photo-storing, app-harvesting, video-playing hydra.

Here are the iTunes highlights (or, how Chris and Ben point out the obvious): Read more » 

Hey, Martini Nation. Sorry this week's Martini Hour is coming to you a day later than usual. Deke and I are in Las Vegas for Photoshop World and spent yesterday with some awesome dekeLounge denizens at our live show. In our excitement followed by exhaustion, it took us a little extra time to pull this week's show into alignment. But it's a good one: a fun conversation with Garrick Chow, one of Deke's fellow lynda.com trainers, as well as fine representative of the band The Jellybricks, who created the music for both dekePod music videos (101 Tips and The Droplet Song) and those catchy jingles for Deke's Photoshop Top 40.

We chatted with Garrick the last time we were in the San Francisco dekeLounge: Read more »