One year ago today: April 19, 2024, lunatics & misfits.
Five years ago today: April 19, 2020, Nashville on $15.61/day.
Nine years ago today: April 19, 2016, a third vehicle.
Random years ago today: April 19, 2015, that Swiss lady.
Hoping to get back to this if I find time, I took a closer look at a stick of the old 2D RAM, the simplest piece I could find. This photo shows mainly that I don’t posses any decent camera or microscope for such work. I had to scan this at 600 DPI. Shown is a 256 megabyte RAM card of the Bill Gates era. It has what appear to be 8 IC (memory) chips with a small unlabeled chip in the upper right corner. Probably, it is a chip select. This is SMT, meaning surface mount technology, where the chips are robot-soldered on one side of the board (the “substrate”) only.
The bigger chips bear the label Samsung K4S560832D-TC75. Made in USA, pardon me, assembled in USA, whatever that means. The individual chips are labeled Korea. Nothing indicates the manufacture date in readable form. These further represent that state at which I got out of computer repair. The component is not repairable by mere mortals. The pink markings on the gold contacts are for my use.
Let’s grab a coffee and do a GP. Not because it is difficult, but because it is fun. It is no2 11:27:19 GMT, also called UT (universal time). The Age of Microsoft is defined by people who change the names of things and pretend they invented them. This is a tricky calculation as the Sun is almost directly south of Greenwich. Results in the addendum.
Rehearsal was the only productive part of today. We got together for several hours, again these get a lot done when things are kept moving. We went over another twenty tunes, this time focused on intros and chord progressions. Over time you learn which ones give any trouble and it is wise to help to the new guy learn the easy way to play them. This is a bit mechanical and is obviously speeding up the all-important time to first gig. Most new guitarists recognize the incredible value of such practice.
Examples are passages that are confusing for beginners, such as the refrain in “Country Roads”. Or the easy way to fake that Am to Bm in “Pirate Looks At Forty”. Another is that known hard-to-play Bm itself, and where it can be faked with a B7—or not. The input from the Prez is incalculable just in the time saved from me having to switch to guitar. This explains a lot about how so many tunes get done at once.
Roberto is inhaling all this info and it’s somewhat hilarious some of the things he reports back. He’s crashing with his brother who knew right away this was a far different sequence than the expected “playing in a band”. Results are fairly rapid and the move toward performing is evident we mean weeks, not months. Listeners handily detect there’s changes, again very engaging because it causes that “this guy may actually pull this thing off” reaction.
Michigan high speed ferry.
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Things may get slow here these days, but never a standstill unless I croak or they drag me kicking & screaming to the FEMA soylent plant. Here is the reverse side of the RAM chip revealing the pin layout. No two patterns are alike, so this likely represents how the pins are configured to match the contacts. Somewhere on the Internet there is a pinout diagram, my task is to find it. Eight chips means there are 32 megabytes per chip. There are exact relationships between the number of pins and the number of memory locations, this is what I’m reading up on these days.
But there is also a close link to my energy levels, so return another day. For now, we observe this ancient component is still for sale on eBay and various aerospace providers. The datasheet shows this is DRAM for dynamic RAM, meaning is uses transistors and capacitors for the memory gates. In its time, it was the cheapest memory available. It had to be refreshed at 133 Mhz or the capacitors would leak charge.
Later, it was a three-hour stint, I’d rate it highly successful. The new guy lacks confidence, but I attribute that to him learning guitar. He’s confident with vocals but I suspect he has not done much solo work. He’s at that critical stage where chords often do not cooperate. This is where experience steps in, showing solutions that otherwise take forever. Roberto knows he has hit a musical goldmine here. It’s a quiet day, so I’ll give a couple more cases.
You meet far more guitarists today who capo. This has a side effect in that some four-finger chords get harder to play. As you move up the neck, the frets get closer together. The answer is to learn several methods to fake such chords. Another is the importance of suspended chords and ninth chords. For some reason schools and books don’t impart the best way to present these variations. Listen to the intro to “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”. It’s more of a piano riff and learning which note makes it the fourth is an instant improvement. We covered that in some detail, nearly an hour’s work. But immensely worth it.
Also important was the fundamental of the basic chord. Lessons teach you the chord, but experience teaches you why you need three different notes, and not just any three. Pianists learn these are inversions. It can take forever to learn them until somebody shows you the easy method to learn which ones sound right in a given passage. This, by the way, is why a often warn guitar players not to try following what I play on the bass.
I hope you got something out of today’s report. I’ve had so many ups and downs with band playing that I otherwise would forget. I got a couple pointers myself, spots where I confess to playing piano runs where guitarists use notes that are more convenient to play. I watch for them and change to how they do it, but today I found one sequence I’ve been playing wrong for fifty years.
The song list is adapting toward “veteran” songs. This means more Toby Keith material, the first we are learning is “Courtesy Red, White, and Blue”, that’s the boot-up-yer-ass song. It has a different chord pattern every verse.
ADDENDUM
We are in the tropical paradise of Nigeria, known for its oil reserves and wealthy princes who need your help. Let’s zoom in. Isn’t technology wonderful? I take it Ungwan means district in the local dialect and the nearest town is Ungwan Chitumu. The Internet says it has a hotel, restaurant, and bowling alley, but the Mundi map shows it to be four or five small buildings on a dirt road. Hausa is the language and the area is called Kaduna, which means “crocodile”. They used to be everywhere until the natives ate them all. It’s also the area where the Miss World riots erupted back in 2002 when Miss Nigeria won. The nearby Nigerian College of Aviation Technology offers the world’s cheapest degrees in that field.
