One year ago today: May 18, 2023, a generic day.
Five years ago today: May 18, 2019, half-way to Nashville.
Nine years ago today: May 18, 2015, Patsy Line tunes.
Random years ago today: May 18, 2005, well, I made money.
A power dropout y’day ruined my tower fan and knocked my computer hear for a loop. I’ll attempt a repair, but unless it is a fried connection, fans have proven a difficult repair. Sometime you can bypass the control circuit and wire up a switch. I’m considering a dehumidifier, the summer mugginess gets me every year. Y’day was a sauna, worse inside the house, and I do my own cooking a lot. Silver inches toward $32 per ounce.
A morning in the cool, out in the shed, sorting tubes. And thinking. You know, there may be a way to make a 5,000 ohm variable resistor out of a 100,000 ohm model. I read a theory last evening that makes sense. The potentiometer works on the principle of the voltage divider, you can look that one up yourself. So, if one half of the divider is drastically increased, it would affect the other half in the opposite manner. I measured the small pots and they have a 5/32” stem. I have no skills at fabricating metal, but I know how to drill pilot holes that size.
Much as I tergiversate to rate it tops, the fan and boxes were the big events of the day. By late afternoon, I had put in some seven hours. It’s light work with plenty of tea breaks but as boring as it sounds. It have me a chance to use the word “tergiversate” in a sentence, so that’s something. It just means to change your mind several times about something.
Intrusive advertising, the Gaza Strip of the Internet, has another round getting through my filters. These ass-clowns have no business here (I do not buy anything advertised in that manner), but they do persist. The latest round goes to them, but I did semi-block their latest youTube tactic. Semi- because the ads still do show up, but as stills which I have to manually skip. This morning, I’m going to build some more sorting trays before she warms up and see how far I get with the tubes.
Later. Four hours and it seems like barely a dent in the tubes. But the concept is right, file the tubes where you can find them. All the brands an numbers are together. The brand is the easiest system to warehouse. If somebody wants a tube, ask them what brand first. The second category is the number. Mostly 6 and 12, which could change.
The Queen of Denmark.
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The afternoon isn’t over yet but I had the energy to work through, a good sign any time but a relief that the fatigue was temporary. I’m inside for coffee and have the news clips showing up. Holland has had it with the immigrants and their problems, it seems. The community holds its breath since Sweden and now Holland, the first two nations to go woke, have seen the error of their ways. To get it out of the way, here is a photo of one of the sorted boxes of vacuum tubes.
Learning as I go, I’ve found the only reasonable way to store these tubes is not in boxes, but in trays. Sure, trays are shallow boxes, but let’s not quibble. The only easy way to find a given tube is when they are in a single layer and what you see here is the result. These are General Electric model 6 tubes. It is too much work to sort them within each box, rather just read them each time. If it was up to me, I’d sell this whole trav for $400.
I had a short list of 15 clubs that would hire. My analysis of what was going on said there was a market for a country-based duo dance band, yet I got no calls back from the four clubs I approached. Was I wrong, and even so, how and by what amount was I wrong, and if so, why?
The initial conclusion is that my work was outdated. I did not keep everything current since 2019 when I began the study of the clubs. I knew I was not wrong about the song list. I paid very good attention to what other bands were doing wrong and most of it was playing the wrong song mix for the area clubs. These bands were also over-priced and their song lists were carved in stone.
Mistake 1, my list was outdated. Of those 15 clubs, 11 folded, likely due to the COVID hoax. And the clubs did not re-open, for that is rare and expensive. Most of the clubs I checked were in north and east Lakeland but the results were consistent. I was partly fooled by what I had known was bad data—these clubs often still had Yelp, Google, and GPS listings.
Mistake 2, lead time was too short. I reckoned on clubs booking two months in advance and it is really three or more. This caught me double, not realizing the clubs would book bands that were not really best for their crowd. Turns out they were stuck with what bands were available and the number of bands has shrunk. Market entry is not as easy as it was. This one is complicated but from what I learned last week at the Legion, I should have known the clubs are now more leery of startup bands.
Mistake 3, not watching how the clubs had adapted. Karaoke, comedy, and disk jockeys are competition and I should go back to including those clubs on my searches again. It was hasty to conclude they went with those shows mostly to save money.
I know I’m not wrong about my song mix. The situation is clubs continue booking these not-quite-suitable bands because that is all they’ve got to select from. The kava club was a head’s up on that factor. These clubs have stopped looking in many cases. Advertising won’t work if they aren’t searching. Where am I right? The song list, if only because it avoids every tune I’ve heard in this area that puts the crowd to sleep. Every place we’ve played has like ort mix, mind you that is subjective, they did not throw tomatoes. You can play the best mix, but if the barmaid, or one customer gets cranky, you get the torpedo.
The Pavilion has no pavilion any more and the jam session was trying to stock an empty room. These are inefficient uses of my resources and I knew it at the time. My decision is to stick with the plan. The song list is great and the club that takes a chance on us will have the first truly new and different dance band I’ve seen since I got here in 2016. Inflation is biting hard and as a duo we can negotiate fees that would cause others to lose money.
What I won’t change is the band philosophy. People can tell when the band is having fun and it’s hard to beat us on that count. I emphasize I am not looking for a circuit, but two (maybe three) house gigs. Private parties have never been a good plan and a much smaller equipment load is, at my age, becoming a must. My target price when I started was $160 for the duo, now I’m shooting for $200 plus three free beers for the band members. And the other guy does not drink.
The LAPD has stopped posting mug shots. Turns out that is “too racist” for the general public. And today’s most expensive KFD item in the 16 piece tenders meal at $62.
ADDENDUM
Reading more on vacuum tubes, they say silicon transistors have reached a speed barrier in the gigahertz range. Enter the nano-tube. Hailed as a way to double switching speed, it is not really a tube, but does operate in a vacuum. Known as vacuum channel transistors, I’ll listen for news but have never otherwise heard of these devices.
Thanks for reading this far, here’s a link to the Monocab, with a German narrator using a perfect “English” accent.
