Recently I got contacted over AIM by a person who was sure to have seen me on a P2P (peer-2-peer / file sharing) network the previous day as the username was spiritofhouse.

Well what can I say beside that I am not using any P2P network. So if you come across the name spiritofhouse, it is someone masquerading (or should I say ‘hiding’?) behind that name, probably in hope of getting free music.

Please keep in mind that most activity on these P2P networks must be considered illegal. We kindly ask you to respect the rights of labels, artists and producers and not to share their work.

Mike Fossati

I couldn’t resist to share with you two gems courtesy of DeepHaven Music that will be available soon:

• Man-X featuring Mario Inchausti "Take me from you"
• ReelSoul featuring Stephanie Cooke "1000 ways"

Those who had a chance to listen to them on Man-X’s radio show in the past weeks on CyberJamz know what I’m talking about: serious heat not to be missed by any chance !!

Mike Fossati

It’s not to often these days that you get new music for review or club play sent on CD as most producers or labels prefer sending out MP3 (or sometimes lossless formats such as WAV or AIFF) files.

When you then get a CD which is broken, this definitely won’t make your day…

(this example is "Join the Disco ride" (Unreleased Mixes) by Direct Disco on Purple Tracks Records)

Mike Fossati

In recent weeks, I got a lot of mails from various social networks such as Facebook, Tagged or Xing to name just a few where I’ve been asked to join.

As you know, beside this website, Spirit of House is also present on MySpace. And of course I’m personally also on AIM. Just keeping up to date with these existing communities takes a lot of time. For this reason I decided not to participate on any additional social network for the time being and will therefore not respond to any requests received.

Mike Fossati

Beside my passion and love for music, I am also a big movies fan and recently upgraded my home cinema with high definition equipment. From the TV over the BluRay/HD-DVD/DVD player to the satellite receiver, its now all capable of handling HD signals and media.

Now if just consumer electronics wouldn’t be acting up as computers do… my satellite receiver records anything without problem onto the internal disk and plays HD material with ease, but when it should play SD material it just freezes…  and my BluRay/HD-DVD/DVD player acts oddly with some discs - in some cases you cannot play the extras, in other cases not even the main content can be played, or with another discs menus are missing…

It appears to me what Microsoft started with consumers becoming beta testers is now common with all kind of electronics…

Mike Fossati

Finally I’ve done another classics mixshow. I know it took ages to complete, but it will be yours soon…

And I’ve got already plans for #18 where I will turn back the clock for some serious early Chicago classics…

Mike Fossati

What a way to start Sunday off… receiving an email with subject Notification of problem domains…

Upon investigation, I found out that the traffic limit on one of my domains had been heavily exceeded. Looking at the access logs revealed that a single IP address was responsible as for the past two days, the same mix has been pulled over and over again…

So what else than blocking this IP from accessing the site? The downside is that this IP appears to be a (caching) proxy of a internet provider, so potentially more than just the responsible user is now blocked.

But until the internet provider reaches back and explains what happened, the block will stay in place.

Mike Fossati

Well, yesterday I said I’m not going with Vista… but another day came, and I had to realise that my Windows XP installation died after just one day due to some driver conflict…

Now the question was whether to try to fix this, or to do a clean re-install… So I decided to give Vista a go.

Now lets see what the next day will have for surprises for me… (I hope none as I still have to do the Short Reviews update…)

Mike Fossati

I’m sorry for the delay in the promised Short Reviews Volume 7. But yesterday I felt my PC is way to slow so I ordered some new equipment… ok, its not needed for daily work, but when editing my High Definition satellite TV recordings the power is definitely needed (I’m not the most patient guy…).

Guess what, I couldn’t wait in setting things up, which took (and still takes) some time as I have to reinstall Windows XP (no, I’m not going for Vista).

Ok back to work now… it will be a short night as I want to set things back up…

Mike Fossati

Oh my… we are kind of behind with reviewing some albums we’ve got in the past few weeks:

• Steven Stone "Entering my world" (Pino Music Records Mixed Album)
• Simon Starr "Blue lights to Saturn" (Simon Starr Music Records CD)

I try to write the reviews this week. And there might also be some interviews in the near future, as well as the promised Fresh Grooves Classics Volume 17.

Mike Fossati