Did I show you what happened to Mike’s boat? He didn’t know you could not leave it in the ocean the same as in a lake up in Wisconsin. Look at all them barnacles. I know nothing about how to clean such crap but I’ll wager it is not much of a picnic. I’ve read how the old sailing ships had to be “carreened”. I don’t know if you can see it much, but that layer of shells is all over the boat and the motor. (The motor is easier to make out, it is the large black object diagonal on the right of the picture.)
I went to small two-hour jam with a couple of my buddies. The place was empty, but I was requested to come back. These jams are always great for getting an update on the music scene gossip. Shaun, the guitar player, I checked out last week is really named Ray. He is a weak blues vocalist, which I had already figured out. I knew I had seen him before, and it seems he was at Cort's coffeehouse a few times, and I may have backed him up playing Johnny B. Goode. The word is that Shaun is multi-banding, that is playing in several bands at once. That basically means I fire him on the spot. (The problem is not playing in more than one band; the problem is doing so without being honest about it.) That situation always results in a conflict of interest. Besides, Blues is synonymous with “pattern-playing egotistical guitar player”. Part of that ego is always thinking they are far better than they really sound.
The Hippie was mentioned, it seems he's pulling his stunts in Fort Lauderdale. He tells a club that he has a large following, and then invites musicians like it's a paying gig. His scam is that he'll tell you to be there at nine, but when you arrive, he's been playing since seven. Then he'll tell you he has a bunch of “requests” to play and makes you sit there over an hour, hopefully ordering a drink. You play audience at your own expense, but then he won’t pay you because you “didn’t play all night”.
As each town learns his tricks, the Hippie has to keep moving further away. Now he's halfway to Boca Raton. Apparently he was fired from some German pub when nobody showed up. In his defense, I maintain he was telling the truth when he told the manager that all his friends would be there. There are about four tough guys gunning for him over his bad behavior on the Internet. The Hippie will be the last one to learn that times have changed, the world has moved on, and there is no longer any market for either his act or his opinions. Don’t look at me, I tried to tell him years ago to change.
After a five mile bike ride, I decided to stay in and keep Pudding-Tat company. I’m also copying out some lyrics so I got a chance to test Dragon Naturally Speaking in a useful environment. This program is something one could study for months, for while easy to use, it is extremely complicated. Worst quirk for now is that it can misinterpret what you say and do a format that proves very difficult to undo, like suddenly starting to capitalize every word.
It takes just under a half-hour to transcribe each of my old writings into electronic format. The trade-off with my older material is that a lot of it was never meant to be entertaining. Does not matter, out it goes. It is doing no good sitting in a scribbler around here. A lot of it was written while I worked for a living and it is terrible how that so drastically changes one’s thinking. I wrote about databases every other day, though a lot of that might have been because there was no time to keep the records independently.
Last, I misplaced my flash drive. It was bound to happen. Of course, all was backed up, but not in the same order so the reconstruction could take hours. No blog material was lost.
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