Must start today with a picture, and since nothing interesting happened in the entire State of Florida (it gets dead here on long weekends). Here is a totally 1990s picture of the gravelly beach near Lincoln City, Oregon. If I recall this was taken from the balcony of the condo Marion and I shared for a week in the middle of winter. That is a solitary jogger right of dead center. That gives you an idea of the sheer size of the cliffs and the beaches out west. It is truly something you should see once. As I’ve said before, I would have moved to Oregon years ago if there was such a thing out there as a job.
[Sorry, a MicroSoft control-key error messed up this picture. I'll try to find it in my archives, but good luck. Never, never, never, never, never trust a MicroSoft command. Always go back and double-check everything.]
Today I find out why some MP3s didn’t play right [last evening]. Nobody noticed, except me. It seems to leave out a mid-range spectrum on certain tunes. It could be the wiring, the PA, the equalizer, the DVD player or absolutely any part of the entire recording process.
Step 1. It plays fine in my computer CD-ROM. In fact, several units play it perfectly. This is getting curiouser and curiouser. Step 2. Got it. That saves me half a day. On the new DVD player, it is just possible to push the input jacks (it has two) in a little too far, half-cutting off one of the channels. Two musicians I know of had that odd habit of complete stereo separation – Led Zep and Johnny Cash. Sure enough, the rhythm guitar on Jackson is only on one channel. Solution – glue a tiny flat washer around the port.
Which merely peels the onion. Now I see that the display has exactly 14 characters. I can’t be using three [of those characters] for a sequence number. Also, my twenty-second delay between tunes is too long on stage. That is easy to fix. What is less simple is how the [financial] books reveal I have not yet broken even, although I have not taken any cash out of my own pocket either. My travel expenses, including the ill-fated three months of practice with Brian, come to $106.15. Unlike most musicians, I know exactly where I stand on that issue.
Taking a break to watch the new TV, I see that Oliver North is narrating a war documentary. I don’t care for his personality, but I admire the way he stood up to the “investigations” by government agencies during the Contra affair. The fact is, these are illegal (violate the Constitution) interrogations and he stood up to them. My favorite was the Feds, when he didn’t confess, accused him of “obstructing justice”. I watched the program. It covers no new ground.
[Author's note 2016-05-27: to say I watched the new TV is a bad choice of words on my part. I turn the thing on, but it never holds my interest more that a moment, and I find myself just listening to the audio. And that is similar to listening to the radio, which I do a few hours per week. So pooh-pooh to those who say I lied that I don't watch TV. Hell, you can't avoid seeing TVs. They're everywhere, but let's get reasonable about it.]
Many hours later, determined to have more than enough music to play three hour gigs, I leaned back from the MP3s. Some tunes are just more trouble than they are worth, particularly the songs that are recorded a little off key to begin with. What I thought was an easy tune, “Love Potion #9” is recorded exactly between a G# and an A, making for an hour of back and forth to raise it a ¼ step. I’m also discovering that most Alan Jackson tunes are total studio productions that are hard to duplicate on stage.
Reading later in the evening, I see that Christopher Columbus only wrote 2,500 pages of material in his life. It has all been preserved, and very little of it is about his famous trip to America, or actually South America. I have not personally read those pages, but I am interested in what Columbus read to determine why he should take the voyage. (That is, why he miscalculated the distance to China.)
You’d think an active sea captain doing research would write ten times that amount. That is just my perspective; what do I know about writing? If you are keeping records, there are certain things you include, such as the record of your active mistakes. You know, like when you play 12 songs per hour where others play 8 (and spend the rest of the time talking about stuff the audience does not want to hear).
How about another picture? Remember I said I had a laptop twenty-five years before they became “popular” to show off at coffeeshops. Actually, people who do that are dorks, no two ways about it. There is very limited real work people can do in a public place. I wrote. I’ll take this opportunity to explain my distaste for laptops. They are too small and hard to work with for extended times. They have limited capacity, and although that is changing, they are also becoming more fragile. Last, they get stolen. I’ve had four laptops and had four laptops stolen. Unless you are meticulous with backups (hard to do when on holidays), you lose too much work. This is the Tandy 1100FD (for “floppy drive”, for that is all it had: one 3.5” floppy). It is being checked out by Robynette’s Siamese, named “Sapphire”. This picture was taken on November 21, 1991. I had just moved from Studio City, California, to north of Seattle. I had owned that particular laptop since 1985. The retail price was $999.
1985 was about the time that a ton of big players were trying to get into the personal computer market and were messing everything up. Radio Shack, Xerox, Texas Instruments, Orange, IBM. That is correct, IBM was not in the PC market until late in the game and even then with a bewildering line of models (like the Peanut) which never flew. I learned to use a spreadsheet (Visicalc). My first computer business, recalculating mortgages, folded in 1983 because no bank manager alive knew what I was talking about. Most of them still don’t.
I will reconsider a laptop when either I get one free, they drop in price to a reasonable $199 (based on what they really get used for) and have no moving parts, particularly no moving hard drive parts. Human brains don’t need moving parts and neither should computers. That is as opposed to non-functioning parts. Bank managers need those.
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