For example, some software does not automatically share between users on the same computer, at least not where you’d expect it to share. When I put three user accounts on each computer, I had to install three copies of Opera, the anit-virus and Limewire. Worse, some of these seem to have clobbered the original copies [I think].
The City Council got lambasted on the Internet this morning over the no bicycles rule [that I brought to everyone’s attention]. I put in my two cents, not on the rule directly, but over the fact that I am a proponent of user-pay. Where I could even agree with taxing bicyclists for their own park, I could never agree with taxing everybody and then excluding a few. In addition, the very thought of having to pay the salary of security guards to prevent me from enjoying public property sticks in my craw.This is day four of the flu and I have a persistent shallow cough. I failed at several tasks by late afternoon. They are the CIMG file, the Adobe address list and the video duplication. The CIMG is a wav file, but it is compressed somehow into a format I cannot convert to MP3. Adobe cannot decipher its own text files, that is, it cannot read the text of a file created using its own fonts. This is made doubly sad because the Adobe OCR program truly sucks. You’d think they’d tied the OCR to the spellchecker, or at least add a button where you could tell the program you are scanning a mailing list. The video may be a batch of bad disks. You get those regularly from Hewlett-Packard, disks that will not burn on some computers, but will with others using the same software.
Adobe also turns out to not be any better than Word for producing a printed booklet. It may be there, but so well-hidden I could not find it within the hour. I want a program that can take any document, such as this one, and automatically format it to print a booklet by simply telling it the size of the pages. It should reformat everything to match, even the photos. I print one side, then flip the paper over. When it is folded and cut, out comes a booklet. Why is it such trouble to find?
Tracy, the football player, is another natural food fan. He supplements with food additives, I tend to view all except vitamins as chemicals. We’ll overlook the way I ad diet soda to my drinks to sweeten them up. In two hours we covered anti-virus, setting up anonymous e-mails and downloaded some Limewire tunes. That is my kind of student, pays cash and listens intently. Funny thing, the security guards who let me in, upon asking my purpose, suddenly needed lots of computer work themselves. I’ll drop back tomorrow and help them out. Tracy did play for the NFL for ten years. Now he sells upper end real estate.
Wrapping up early, I report that that lady rat in my house met a gruesome end while I was out this evening. Some people also questioned my statement that Brian would shock some of his old fans. For crying out loud folks, I was talking about music, so don’t go overboard. I meant that his showmanship and presentation have surged, so maybe you’d like better the word “startle”. Think of it like the gal who walks out after an extreme makeover. You go “Wow” but in your mind you know it is just the same old Sally. Just apply that effect to his music, but unlike makeup the effect is far more enduring. He is most aware that he is getting experience here he could never get anywhere else, so he is knuckling down to it. That, plus he knows keeping me around is a big part of the formula.
In fact, here is something nobody’s seen. It is one of the charts I’ve devised to keep track of programming in the Alesis (which I from time to time mistakenly call the Alexis). The difficulties of getting this machine to work right entirely explains why I require commitments from the whole band about which tunes we play. The manual is poorly written jargon and assumes you know far too much. The chart confines itself to the beat pattern from a selection of twelve sounds. [Later, I've decided you cannot see the chart unless you pay me money, so here is a picture of a pink flower outside a Trump construction lot.]
The chart does not reveal the nuances that make the progression sound “live”, just the timing and volume of the beats. Here is the first (16-beat) measure of “Memphis, Tennessee”. You can see the basic Kick-Snare rhythm and the (loud) hand clapping. For those of you lucky enough to be too young to know this tune by Johnny Rivers, Limewire it. This is a classic.An interesting feature of the Alesis is the ability to determine the degree of exactness of each beat. If you set it on “high”, every beat you tap will be exactly on the quarter note. Great for the kick drum. Set to medium, it gives a looser timing to the snare, like a lazy drummer. Turn it off, and you can make the hand claps sound as messy as a bar full of drunks, possibly a concession to Florida. Alesis calls this “quantization” thus ensuring most people will never use it. Also, in a tactic borrowed from Bill Gates, quantization appears to originally have been a glitch. Instead of fixing it, they re-wrote the manual and called it a feature.
To those of you who read the chart and say, “Hey, this drum beat looks like it is customized to complement that fancy bass line of yours”, I don’t know what you are talking about.
