One year ago today: September 4, 2023, a generic day.
Five years ago today: September 4, 2019, presuming . . .
Nine years ago today: September 4, 2015, that Trump guy is right . . .
Random years ago today: September 4, 2007, I visit Johnny’s.
Caltier just paid another $209.76, that’s over $500 in the past two months. I’m happy with that but remain disappointed on their lack of communication. That pause (they call it) is in effect, so no money can be added to the account. In a sense, this is okay since the events since July 11 have put me on pause as well. The Reb & I chatted another hour and there is a lot of foreboding around the future. The Democrats have gotten ridiculous with their promises and claims as past facts are now haunting them for a change right within their own voting cycle.
I’ll tell you is in trouble. The Airbnb people. They shot themselves in the foot with too many extra fees, hidden costs,and generally all the things only hotels are supposed to get away with. The company is guardedly admitting revenues are down, but over how long? This year makes it serious, this month makes it a disaster. Personally, I hope all the people who bought property over this lose their shirts. It was supposed to be a business run out of spare rooms .to people cleared as okay by the parent company. Taking on a mortgage is altogether a different and risky ploy.
It was overcast all morning, but the humidity squelched any hope for work. I sorted more tubes, but then drove 30 miles out to Rural King for that fan. Sure enough, sold out of the 22” model I need. Instead I bought one of those squirrel cage shop units with a honking 1/5 HP motor, rated at 800 cubic feet per minute. I also priced out two heaters, one 5,000 BTU and one 7,500 BTU. This is for the upcoming winter, I’ve wanted to stop using space heaters for a while. These are fan forced ceiling mounted. The small unit for the bedroom, the big unit for the front of the building. Heating and cooling just the room I’m in saves around 40% of my utility bills, but I would have no problem leaving everything on if I felt like it.
Here’s one I’ll let my detractors howl about. Rural King has free popcorn and coffee, and as I walked in, I saw the staff lady look at me. I was in the store around a half hour and as I approached the till, there were eight people in line. Then I hear the voice saying she can take me here, and there’s the lady at the next till. We hit it off just like that, so I outright told her I’m a bachelor and I live alone. She was half my age. She said I was a month too late, she had just met someone and made a commitment.
I gave her my biz card and told her where my band plays in case her status changes. Her reply was that if I had asked her first, her answer would have been “definitely yes”. It’s the slim brunette with the ponytail and dynamite curves. Near the hardware entrance, trust me, walk in, you’ll know the one.
Karl Marx Theater, Havana, Cuba.
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Once again, I come up with an idea that has few or no facts on-line. Sound amplification without electricity. My starting point was those old gramophone trumpets. All I got was stuff everybody already knows. I recall from physics, the apparent amplification is due to resonance, so I figure that might explain the characteristic shape of the horn. I remember once seeing a hollow box with a series of tubes sticking out the sided. Any sound fed into a hold in the top of the box was enhanced by one of the tubes. But could this be scaled up to work with bass notes? Another idea was, if the guitar-shaped body would not naturally resonate loudly enough, why not install an actual small bass amp hidden within to assist it along? That is, take my old idea of an internal speaker and see if the speaker can be eliminated by boosting the natural sound within the cavity? Tomorrow, I search for the best smallest bass amp.
There are a number of ways to approach this. One is a small Bluetooth speaker, they have great bass response. I know the one I’d like to try, but the Reb loved the sound right away, so that one is out of the picture. Tomorrow, I will see if I can connect my old Dean Markley to sone of these devices. Work with me here, we just need something that works well enough. Don’t stop thinking, this is a developing process. Right now I can’t crank the speaker I have (see pic) because all my gear has that dipshit European volume limit for wimps. I mean, old people go deaf, has anyone proven it is due to listening to rock music? I didn’t think so.
A review of the gig shows the acoustic set at first amused the crowd who thought we’d quit, but after twenty minutes, they really were paying attention. We will need some way to play music on a break so nobody walks in and plugs on the juke box. That means we can never go fully acoustic. (Yeah, yeah, just play CDs though my bass setup, very funny.) If I didn’t say, my Fishman let me down as a backup, with too much crackling coming through the speakers like it did years ago when I bought it.
Next, I ran some of my older software setups to test this Windows system. Sure enough, Win 8 and beyond are built to reject these setups. This is deliberate, since all those systems still have XP as their kernel. Especially missed is my program for converting Sony MP4 into real MP4. Then my other software can convert that MP4 to mvi, because only MircoSoft would produce video editing software (MovieMaker) that does NOT work on the world’s most popular format. It may have been the DMV that took arse-hole-ism to new heights, but it was Bill Gates who turned it into a profession.
ADDENDUM
At long last, we have some final stats on the tube count and prices. This culminates several months of work, which I rather enjoyed but the money is not there. Reason? The difficulty of selling the tubes on eBay. There are (in boxes) 2,816 tubes, quite a mass. The next statistic tells you why we at least had to try selling these tubes. The combined wholesale price, even with a slightly outdated chart, is $11,700. That is likely to increase by several thousand as I fill in the gaps and get updated prices on the rare tubes off eBay. (It is the rarity of the tubes rather than function or quality that appears to make the most difference.
The smaller boxes of tubes reflects experience. All boxes are now this size or smaller. It also means brand names are no longer kept together except at box level, shown here are some medium sized Sylvania tubes. It’s confusing as I call both this container and the small boxes inside by the same name. This box is easier to lift over head and makes it significantly faster to find a given tube. They are arranged inside the box, but using that hackneyed numbering system designed by a madman or an engineer, take your pick.
For now, the strategy remains the same. If I lower the threshold to $8 wholesale and cherry-pick those tubes, and find a buyer for the rest at $3 per tube, it will breakeven the operation. I’m already moving on to the next project, which involves the purchase of that $250 computer without the software and doing what needs to make it operate the next time I’m in Tennessee. It’s probably nothing, but the church bells began ringing at 2:30AM. Very unusual, but nothing on the radio. Still, if someone had just forgotten to flip off the switch, why wasn’t there ringing earlier? They must have got a call, it was turned off by 3:00AM.
