Why is the cat watching me? What can I say to you non-cookers out there? You have seven minutes to make Kraft diner into a feast. I had a call-out and did not come rolling in until midnight. Worse, I had to feed a cable through a crawl space and got covered with cat doo-doo. Don’t argue, I know cat stuff when I see it. And when I get it between my shoulder blades just before I go visit a lady friend.Pudding-Tat has several nicknames, one of which is difficult to pronounce correctly. The words are “That cat, that cat.” Trust me, everyone will know exactly who you mean. It is the inflection that is tricky, it is said with a tone of exasperation. Some people cannot say it right. Give it a try, the easiest way is to remember the lyrics of that song that go, “This kiss, this kiss.” Mimic that tone and you got it.
It was (thankfully) another quiet day at the shop. I have to leave Wallace to his own diversions. The US government sent me a check for 65 cents interest. This compares fantastically with my savings account which pays about 1/10th the rate. How do I invest in late tax returns?
These strange emachines. I’ve got one with no floppy and no CD support. You can’t boot it without Windows, which is what I need to do. It has a great restore feature, but that does not fire up the CD-ROM. There has to be a trick to it. Keep coming back and I’ll share it with you when I find out.
Still no luck finding the change-giver machine. Something will emerge, for I’m not near smart enough to have an original idea like this. One of the failings of the English language is the difficulty of naming new things something distinct. What search criteria would you use to look for such a contraption? Nothing I can think of in close to 8 hours comes up with anything except ordinary Laundromat bill changers. Like the “printer monitor”, it will be known by some words just wrong enough to make it hard to find.
Who remembers Patrick, the fantastic cook from Jimbo’s? He may want to put together a pool party. Well, what I call a pool party even if there is no pool. I had the same idea a year ago but as you know, one must wait for the other person to think of it. Patrick and I had been talking about music lessons for his daughter. Let me think, she’d be a teenager by now, so that is the right time to see if they take to music. But you watch, within a week, he will want lessons, too. Sigh, what a different course life would have taken had I met somebody like me when I was 13. Instead, I surrounded by bohunks for 350 miles in every direction. Not one single hero.
Arnel has spoken about a product called Sonar 6. It is from Cakewalk, the application on the Hippie’s computer that proved too difficult for practical use. But the extensive MIDI arrangements Arnel uses shows that it can be done. He gave me some material to get me started (I’ll have to revamp my entire act). I found reference to Sonar 7 and this is expensive software. The literature mentioned it had the ability to take an ordinary piece of music and covert it to MIDI. I don’t see how that could possibly be, but now I have to check that out.
You see, with MIDI, you just cancel out the bass part. The way I do it now is to remove frequencies below 150 Hz and turn my bass up louder. The problem is this method often damps away the lower mid-range harmonies used in many tunes. Unless my old 14 channel equalizer is custom set for each performance, my backing music sounds a little reedy.
