If you got here expecting anything marvelous, nope. How many times I gotta tell you my shoulder is sore? So I tested all my gear an extra time. From soldering irons to instrument cables. Man, I need about $500 just so’s I can throw all my junk out and start over. Almost everything electronic here has been repaired at least once. No wonder I’m all grumpy. I gave my recording mixer another chance found something. The next few days or weeks will make more sense if you read about this development.
We all love companies that were great in the 80s and earlier who have now gone downhill and live off their reputations. I’ve already mentioned Sony so often that I won’t do it again today. But Roland, you should know better. Calling the BR-600 an 8-track recorder is a bald-faced lie. However, by painstaking research I found a capability of that unit that is a concession to interfacing with the real world. Something that actually works.I'm happy, as it turns out to be the only feature of the contraption I can really use for stage work. (Trent, ignore that last e-mail and call me over this.) The BR-600 will export the individual tracks as WAV files one at a time. There is software that will convert the files as a unit, but you require a card reader that matches the weird memory disk on the mixer.
That's the big chip I'm holding here. I’m still twirling the metaphorical dials, but if this works, it is a considerable improvement. The one feature of the mixer that makes it compatible is not even listed as its own topic, but is found under the heading "Saving". How to do it is on page 167 of the manual, but not a word about how important it is.
ترافيك لايت
This [calligraphy] is what I found appearing in the blog sources over the previous week. So I did what everybody else would do. I went to Google translate to discover it means “Traffic Light”. I have no idea about that one. If I quote Arabic, am I supposed to use quotation marks? Did you know you can't write Arabic in italics? Why is the Internet silent on these momentous issues?
It is written that in his lifetime, each man shall find the café that is right for him. That is why I went to the bakery this morning and confessed. Yes, late afternoon after pushing the motorcycle, I stopped last day and bought a loaf of supermarket bread. I faced up to my weakness, I told them I had been alone, it was dark. I was so tired I spent money on some cheap Dandee whole wheat. It could have happened to any man so far from home and hungry. I assured the bakery, “I want you to know I was thinking of you the whole time.”
That got me a free refill, and you get more about home recording. I stayed indoors all day. I finally stepped through every menu on the Boss mixer-recorder for the results above. It’s a matter of recording philosophy. I just don’t have a room full of musicians that I can signal from the sound booth. Like indie-clones, I layer the music up, but unlike that rabble, I’m inputting by musicians who don’t even know each other. This assures nobody is sloughing off or showing off.
A feature of early music recording devices is they were universal. You didn’t need a technician to figure things out. The frustration level with the newer models is how each manufacturer wants you to do it their way. That attitude always puts me in a mood. I tried to relax with a fashion magazine and threw that against the wall. There are two types of men. Those who are cool and those who think they can act cool. I can’t stand men who try to act cool. Grew up like that, I did. Clint Eastwood is cool. My brothers are not.
How does one go about acting cool? Try the unshaven look and put some perfumed grease in your hair. Then wear a winter scarf in Florida. Never smile. Talk in spurts. Pose in front of every reflection. What, am I giving lessons? These people know who they are, for crying out loud.
My shoulder is not helping here. And I’m much too stubborn to take painkillers all day long. Instead I baked chicken and watched documentaries. Bachelors can get away with living that way in long stretches. My study pattern is a half-hour of reading, then a break, any kind of break. Today, it was a collection of video studies on the Six Day War. That’s the one where the media wants us to believe that scrappy little Israel kicked Egyptian butt all over the Sinai back in ’67.
But that story doesn’t stand the light of day. We know somebody cheated. Plus, the bull-headed US backing of Israel has always been embarrassingly conspicuous. This doesn’t let Arabs off the hook, since they were clumsy braggarts whose military was only trained for the parade ground. One video features a Captain Deraz who did not recognize the sound of jet engines and ran outside without putting on his boots. Captain-wise, you can’t get much worse messed up than that. Mark my words, armies which allow the clumsy to become officers will sooner or later start sending women into combat. What? We do? Well how about that.
A different type of transistor, called “field effect” was my topic today. I’ve still miles to go with regular transistors so this was a distraction. The reading was as bad as anything else in electronics. I want to know when and why these things are used, instead I get techno-babble about “p-channel holes”. May I suggest a novel concept to the world of electronics publishing? Always put the power source at the top and the ground at the bottom. If they had proven capable of figuring that much out themselves, I would not have spoken up.
It came as little surprise today to find most people who use a 4G network have no idea what 4G is. Sound familiar? I’ll give you the quick rundown, but really, since 2G there have been no breakthroughs. You never hear of 1G because it didn’t exist until somebody came up with 2G. In 1G, cell phone talk was analog. You could listen to it with any properly tuned receiver. In 2G, the bandwaves were timeshared, which effectively encoded the conversations. That was the last giant step.
With 3G and 4G, the transmission speeds are higher. That’s about it. They offer no other advantages, though there are some minor improvements. Same as computers, with higher speeds you get more features like streaming video and less drop-outs between towers. At the end of the day, 3G and 4G came from the marketing departments, not the laboratory.
ADDENDUM
HOW TO UNINSTALL OUTLOOK EXPRESS – OR SO THEY SAY
Message to all the geek-nerds on the Internet: Are the lot of you daft? You repeatedly post on hundreds of sites that to remove Outlook Express, just run this command. This command does not exist. If it ever did, MicroSoft removed it from the program file directory years ago. You cannot remove Outlook Express by turning off the switch in Control Panel, and renaming the executables will not work either. All these files will reinstall themselves.
In reality, Outlook Express is one of the nastiest Windows components and there is no quick fix. You cannot disable it, therefore you must delete the files that call it, and rename the files that reinstall it. You must delete seven registry keys – make sure you know what you’re up to. You must rename at up to 18 files that may have duplicates in different directories. This is tedious, as Windows constantly fights back all the way. Because they are assholes, that’s why.
I’ve slated four hours tomorrow to pull Outlook up by the roots. It seems it installed itself on my email when I inadvertently clicked a reply key in Craigslist. Don’t do that. Copy and paste the address into your separately opened e-mail, but I slipped up once and it will cost me half of one of my remaining days. I hate you, MicroSoft.
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