Am I right? I saw this old bag-shaped lady walking down the street over here, I said, here comes trouble. Sure enough, she was asking my neighbor who owned various properties, and him, being an equally old loser, was telling her. (Turns out later she is the self-appointed busybody.) My guess is she’s the crone that keeps posting all those notices that you have to be “approved” to live here. She was also ugly, even when she was young and her attitude correspondingly stinks. How ugly? We are talking Oprah without makeup. Unpardonably ugly.
This is where I get to take a jab at the phone company, it was fifteen years there that taught me how to hate such people. Hate them outright. Before that, I only hated people who had done me wrong. Now, I hate this type. She wants your name, but not because she is friendly and likes to meet people. Once these types learn your name, they find it far, far easier to blame things on you, gossip, ask to borrow your gear, take credit for your work, pretend that they know you and to pull your file. Real nice crowd.
I’d gone up there to re-hook up a printer at the oil place. No apparent problem but reinstalling everything takes time with the Printer Mafia (Hewlett-Packard). Some kind of security update had knocked out the (printer) port and I could not reactivate it. Well, that call-out paid the rent, so it was back to the Thrift to see what Dickens is up to. He assures me this eBay friend of his is a reliable source of quality used merchandise. I would have brushed this off, but he added that the friend only liked “finding the deals”. Now it becomes believable, I watch for this condition.
Dickens and I want to check this process of selling on eBay. So tomorrow, I’ll measure out the back room. The deal is he brings in things, which I photograph and list. Dickens has learned to place his own ads, so other than securing an office area, we would not be risking much. Some 2x4s and a useless afternoon. The biggest work item is crating the goods up for shipment. He’s also found some vending machines in the $125 range, with coin mechs. I’m going along with everything because, well put it this way: If the race track can put in slot machines, why can’t we? (In the end, I concluded that selling physical objects on eBay is labor-intensive and not such a good way to make money. More trouble than it is worth.)
I chatted with Brian, noting but cheerfully mind you, that we are somewhat behind schedule. He confirms the words to a tune he plays, “Hippie Hippie Shake” are indeed “It’s in the bag.” Certainly it meant something at one time. I rigged up a double set of bass speakers and sort of have a 2.2 sound system now.
Before I go, the G never called back. He may be out of town. That means tomorrow evening is off. I talked to Brian about it and he brought out the topic of "not being confident". (Now he speaks up!) I assured him that 100% of all entertainers go through that, except me of course. They all get over it and I have enough confidence for the whole band. I explained a few finer details to him, that he had far more stage experience than other people I had successfully worked with. Nor was I artificially bolstering his confidence, for I picked him from a pool of available people largely because he enjoyed the game. Music can be like hooking, I’m told, it is a small step to getting paid for it.
He needed guidelines, I felt, so I basically told him he needed just two to three weeks of steady weekends to get the measure of this business. Another thing is that he will be on stage with me, cooperating toward the sound. He is still suffering from the hangover of G’s influence, that you need to be a perfect guitarist to play for money. I was trying to avoid that issue long enough for him to get over it on his own, but I also told him that 90 minutes is the time he has to learn any song we play. That means I show him how to comp next practice, and we move on from there.
It is 2:00 AM and I’m back. I ran through thirty different tunes seeking that combination of factors that will fit for Brian and emphasize his personality. Two, that is what I’ve come up with in six hours. “Words” by the Bee Gees and “I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tommy James and the Shondells.. (Yeah, yeah, what the hell is a Shondell?) I’m tending toward eight to the bar bass riffs so Brian doesn’t have to chord through. Better make sure I don’t get tendonitis. (It was around this time I began to figure out I could play the riffs better than your average guitarist.)
While all this is going on, I was watching old movies on DVD. “Death Rides a Horse”, with Lee Van Cleef. It is such a blatant rip-off of Clint Eastwood themes that I could not tell if I’ve ever seen it before. In the background I was also installing an OS on one of the neighbors HP Pavilions, since there is no Internet access at the shop. Seems the Sony I left there two weeks ago only had 64 MB of RAM. What’s more, I went through all the RAM I’ve got here and could only find 128 MB for the Pavilion. I also threw in my last 40 GB hard drive, how I hate to part with that.
Yes, I’ve also been studying my PHP in the off hours. I was right, the majority of the challenge is figuring out how to get this thing up and running on a web server. That is something I have zero or less experience with. Other than that, it is your typical mindless programming language thrown together by educated but otherwise dodo-brained geeks. It uses that ridiculous C++ shorthand and wastes the dollar sign to signify variables. Anything to disguise that it is nothing but re-hashed BASIC and they have not come up with one new computer command between them.
It also stinks of geek-think in many other ways. For example, they designed the output commands last instead of first. By then they had used up too many default behaviors, punctuation marks and keywords (a tactic I call "fall-through" programming). They had to slap together two output commands, neither of which is satisfactory. This is true of C++, LISP, Javascript and every so-called modern language. So typical of our declining national IQ aka the dumbing down of America. All the geeks combined have not yet been able to design a print statement that automatically leaves spaces between words and sentences, you know, kind of like the default standard of the entire English language. One should have to go through hoops to remove them, not put them in. Geeks bite.
[Author's note: "fall-through" programming is generally the type of code that presumes a default behavior. I've give you a clear example, but understand this is a very simple case. Suppose you want the operator to press one of four buttons within ten seconds. Proper code would act on whichever button is pushed. "Fall through" code would just test for three of the buttons and assume that if none of them were pushed, it must mean the fourth button was pushed. It is also called very stupid code, or sometimes just called C+.]
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