Adobe Acrobat. If I recall, it is another one of those page-making programs that, like MS Publisher, purports to be capable of producing a book. I tried it years ago and didn’t like it but will take another look today. When you have to fix each page in place, like typesetters did centuries ago, that is not what I call an improvement. I stayed up late to study the pdf ebook process and it is dominated by Adobe. And full of unfamiliar terms like “leading”, “base 14”, and “kerning”.Unfamiliar to most, I mean. Remember, I used to work at Kinko’s. Leading (rhymes with “bedding”) is the amount of white space between lines of sentences, named because it was originally a strip of lead. Base means the size of the smallest font used in the body. Kerning is the technique of printing a subsequent letter underneath the “overhang” of the previous letter instead of beside it. That is also your trivia for today.
One of the customers at the shop is starting to annoy me, he reminds me of small town people. He’s gotten past the “noble good listener” stage and has moved to the “mental inventory” stage. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you have never analyzed the small town mindset. People who are very paranoid need to know everything about you and call you paranoid if you don’t want to tell. (I learned at the phone company that you can make people who gossip about you look stupid if they don’t even know your name.) He’s not an evil customer, but my alarms are ringing. Always those prying questions that lead to other prying questions. “So, exactly what part of Texas do you come from”, “So, what names do you publish under on the Internet”, “So, exactly what kind of places do you play at”, and “So, exactly how many languages do you speak?”
Ominously, he doesn’t seem to realize I know he is meddling because he’s forgotten any difference between what we’ve talked about and what he’s eavesdropped on. For instance, I never told him I was from Texas. I finally made up an excuse and left the shop. I biked up to the Thrift and connected the new BellSouth modem. It is a Netopia. The setup was almost too easy and now the shop is wireless. Time to fix up a couple of the units around here and sell them. Everybody who’s bought a computer from me through the Thrift still speaks to me, so I’m doing okay in that department.
The dog place has been calling. I get to say “I told you so” an awful lot. Sure enough, they are running into the very problems I warned them about if they did not take my advice. Now I can’t help them if I wanted to. I have no idea where other people stored inventory or what passwords they used. But I was ignored when I advised management to make sure it was all written down somewhere. Again, there was no time to write it down but there seems to be time to interrupt me with it a month later. Where have we seen this before?
Rose, the singer I thought I might audition, has jumped the gun. It seems she told a passel of her friends that we had a Stevie Nicks cover band and to show up at Jimbo’s. That’s kind of too bad for her because I told her my method was to rehearse a tune once or twice, then go play it. But I have to know the tune and she seems to have forgotten about the rehearse part. I told her maybe we can run over some music next Monday, but no, I’m not making any excuses if her friends show up tonight. (They didn’t.)
Let me do a little extrapolating. Rose says she graduated in ’93 which was 14 years back and we can assume she was around 18 at that time. So she’s 32, and looks like a cross between Dolly Parton and Pamela Anderson, if you look at her just the right way. If she can sing, I’ve never heard her, it was just a question I asked when she was using my Internet café the other day. I’ll fill you in on the details later. When she asked if she could change backstage, I had to inform her there was no stage, are you with me here?
Later. A great show! Rather than draw business away from Jimbo’s, the new club up the street drives people to stop in here for cheap drinks and it is easy to get lost in the area. The regulars weren’t expecting the change (although I told them it was on the way) and the walk-ins were solidly astounded . The lo-hat was clearly a fantastic idea. I had every person in the place including the staff dancing in the aisles during my rock set. There was a twenty in the tip jar. A couple of drummers in the crowd were wildly impressed and I got a steady stream of compliments all night long (it was a short three hour gig tonight).
Then again, I know that all novelty wears off. Another factor was at work, the (relatively) huge number of tunes on my list. I have 76 regular songs and that will climb past 82 this week. That means it is often several weeks between repeats, a boon for the regulars. There are too many other single acts in town trying to get by with less than 30 songs. I’ve received many offers but why would I join a band now? I’ll stick with what I’ve got and besides, so many people have seen my act that nobody would dare copycat. Another besides, I’ve got a couple more ideas I’m working on.
