Hiya.

My name is Tony Ballinger, and I'm a web designer living in Oak Park, Illinois.
When I'm not designing for the web, I enjoy music, go to concerts and play with gadgets.

Archive for August, 2006

Catching Up With…

Monday, August 28th, 2006

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, but I’ve seriously been busy as hell. Having both a full-time design gig and a part-time design gig is starting to wear on me. But I’m working on a solution to that, so there is light at the end of the tunnel. But for the moment, that light [...]

Mac Pro: A Whole Lot More Machine

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

This thing is a monster: four cores, four drives, and capacity for 12GB of RAM. While I’m drooling over the specs for the Mac Pro, I’m still glad I purchased a refurbished dual G5 earlier this year for $1299, since the Adobe (Macromedia) software I depend on still isn’t native.
The specs on this beast [...]

Making the Leap

Saturday, August 12th, 2006

With great hesitation, I’m going to try to constrain my new music purchases to digital downloads instead of CDs. I have a number of concerns about this, but I’m going to give it a shot. I’ve purchased plenty of music from bleep, emusic, and the iTunes Music Store – but always as a last resort. [...]

Tom Waits @ Auditorium Theater

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

Seeing Tom Waits is a lot like catching a rainbow after the rain, or having them get your order right on the first try when ordering in a drive-thru. So I feel very fortunate to have seen him twice now. I debated going to this show for weeks. I had tried to get a ticket [...]

Wolf Parade @ Metro

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

Jim and I had a few drinks at Goose Island before the show, and ended up missing the first opening band, Frog Eyes. But we got there in time to catch, Holy Fuck, the second opener. To be perfectly honest, with a name like Holy Fuck, I wasn’t expecting much from the band. After all, [...]

A Tale of Two Festivals (Part Two)

Monday, August 7th, 2006

My previous post covered Pitchfork Festival 2006 and now I’m moving on to Lollapalooza 2006.
In short, I had probably festivalled myself out by the time Lollapalooza came to town. So I freely admit that I’m not giving the festival a fair shake. But I think it’s great that Chicago has a music festival (nearly) on [...]