It is tax time again. If it wasn’t for the stress, I’d be doing returns on the side. I heard H&R Block is charging something like $100 a pop, which I’ll look into. For the official record today, I would like to confirm something for anyone who is not sure. I have a totally blocked cell phone. When I was talking to the government robot to schedule a callback this morning, I expected it to ask me to enter my number. It didn’t. Instead the robot spoke my number. Privacy, my eye. If you require anonymity, use a pay phone.This further gave me an excuse to look at the progress of other government undertakings. You’d think, in an era of identity theft and terrorism, the government would severely clamp down on handing out free information. Nope, and they’ve published my birth certificate, driver’s license and auto registration on the Internet. The government says your ID is public information, but you have no right to know who accesses that information. Talk about a half-baked sense of fairness.
Hey, more car problems. This time there seems to be no brake fluid. I couldn’t have an ordinary problem like other people, no. We looked all over the place and the reservoir is not leaking but the fluid is low. The brakes still work as they are new, but no power brakes. More Saturday fun by the sounds of it. The symptoms are a mild hissing noise when the brake pedal is displaced. Something is leaking.
Wait, there’s more. Computer problems. One of my CD-drives was knocking out the Master-Slave detector on both the opticals and both hard drives. This is one of the most difficult troubles to solve. Took the three of us two hours off and on, mind you, that could be a lesson in teamwork and networking. That explains why we are the top repair shop in south Florida.
Everybody’s shivering and this isn’t even a real cold spell. Just cold enough to make it extra hard to work on my car, I think. The good news is Wallace’s birds are back and they will eat cooked rice. They prefer it down on the ground rather than in a birdfeeder or on the fence. This also gives you an idea how exciting things are around here when business is bad. I’m working on the music disks.
Lately I’ve been getting some cutouts on stage. That’s where I’m playing along and the music stops. It is the CD and since it was mostly Clapton tunes it was not a priority to fix. My live karaoke is now just around a third completed, read on. I may have some good news by March 1 that allows me to leap into that full time. Check with me later as I have not yet done today’s show.
Okay, it is later already. I am most definitely on to something with the new music format. But what? I know the staff and regulars are still listening to my act after all this time. The real compliment is when strangers come in asking for the show. Not many, just enough that I pick up on it. The innovation today was leaving the microphones on while the juke box is playing. Normally I would not overplay somebody’s money but it turns out nobody seems to mind others singing along with their music.
I have not sprung the live Karaoke on anyone yet. Things are 30% done and stalled while I edit the thousands of lines of lyrics. There is more to this than word processing and a lot of it has to do with learning the new software. Quirks such as line length, number of lines on screen at once and the scrolling speed need to be learned independently. The new system is surprisingly flexible. I’ve had to go back and redo some of my earlier work once I caught on.
Sure, it is work, but talk about fun. This enterprise is directly geared to audience participation and it is not exaggeration to say there is nothing like it. I’ve already begun to enhance that aspect of the show well beyond the original package. For example, remember Porky Pig’s “Blue Christmas”? Ever seen a Karaoke screen stutter? Ha! Or right now I’m changing the scroll speed of “I’ve Been Everywhere” so that people who can barely read will be able to sing it. Keep checking back. This show is experience based and I’ll soon have some.
