Archive for 2003

My pals Davina and Glade are here for the weekend.  They went to a Halloween party last night and Davina totally outdid herself on the costume!

Carving artistry by John Whitney

You’ve probably seen this already, but ’tis the season… retroCRUSH presents the best and worst in Halloween costumes.

I think I’m back to more or less where I was before my data started getting corrupted on the iBook.  WTF was that about?!?  I had to make a new username and delete the old one, but the new one seems to work fine.  Backed up my files first, and recovered what I could.  Nothing to speak of was lost that I didn’t have backed up… in the end it seemed the only files that were really corrupted were system-related.  I.e. many preference files were hosed, all the bookmarks, keychains, software licenses etc.  Which caused everything to go wacky and not let me view my files.  Dunno, I just hope it never happens again.

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I’m having some weirdnesses with the new iBook.  Glad I still have the old one to work on!  Things were working fine, I was using the new built-in home-folder encryption.  Started having some problems opening files, so I decided maybe the encryption thing wasn’t a very good idea.  Tried to turn it off, got an error.  Deleted the files I was having problems opening, tried to turn off encryption again, and it worked.  But then files started getting corrupted left and right — my bookmarks were gobbledeygook, even my keychain was screwed.  I’m repairing permissions now and it’s really cranking.  Wonder what the fuck happened?  Was it the encryption?  Did I confuse the thing mounting the external drive?  Is it a Panther thing?  A hardware thing?  Not enough memory?  Blargh.

I dreamed Beck changed his name to Exobeck.  You know… "exotic" plus "beck" equals… EXOBECK!!  Yeah, pretty stupid, but what if he really does it?  Just remember you read it here first.

I got rid of YDL on my old iBook so John can use it for gaming. I just made it one big partition again and I’m installing Panther.  I guess there’ll be no Linux laptop in this house!  I still have Red Hat on the PC, and I’m excited to be using the new version of OSX — speaking of which, Mark Pilgrim has a good writeup about all the new features.

I’m also going to be wiping the drive on the Maxtor hard drive and reformatting it as HFS+ so I can use it with the new iBook.  All the stuff I had on there was off CDs anyway, so whatever, I’ll import all that stuff over again.  I do miss working with iTunes, and I love my new laptop’s CD-burner, so it’ll be neat to be able to use them all together.

I’ve been saying I wasn’t going to get Panther because it wouldn’t work on my old iBook.  But then I found myself at the Apple Store on Michigan, got caught up in the excitement and umm… I got me one of the new iBooks, with Panther pre-loaded.  The devil made me do it!!  Of course afterwards I found out Panther will supposedly work on my 2001 machine, but oh well, I’m glad I have a new one.  It looks exactly like the old one, but cleaner.  Also it has a combo drive so I can burn CDs and watch DVDs; the old one just has a normal CD player, no DVD.  The new hard drive’s 30 gigs instead of 15, and it’s a G4/800 megahertz processor instead of G3/500.

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John sent me this cool link, Mini-ITX.com.  There are a whole bunch of descriptions for crazy computer modifications people have done.  Somebody made a computer out of a guitar, a lunchbox, a picture frame, even a teddy bear…!!

I went to the dentist today (=yesterday) for my first cleaning in too many years.  It was John’s dentist Dr. Guenther, the same guy who fixed my filling a month or two ago.  I got good news and bad news… the good news is, my teeth are so sparkly and lovely now!!  That stain on my front tooth I’ve been complaining about?  It is GONE.  Gone!!!  He cleaned off that frickin’ thing, gave it a little extra polish afterward and now it’s just like it used to be before that disgusting spot appeared. So my biggest cosmetic complaint is now dealt with.  I’m still stuck with those genetically yellow teeth, but I’m used to that, and can deal with that later, whereas the stain was really embarrassing and grody-looking.  I thought it would look that way forever, I’m just amazed!

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Fucking demons.  Now they’ve taken Elliott too, and it’s not fair.  :-(  How could this be, how could it have come to this?  He’s one of my favorite musicians ever, I put him on my last mix CD.  I was thrilled to get to meet him and see him play, twice I think, but that was years ago.  Weren’t we on a compilation together?  I think he liked my music, and boy I know I love his. My Holler Sister Deborah’s got to be devastated, she’s the biggest Elliott fan I know.  Roger Manning too, they were good friends.  And Birddog too, they’d recorded together.  This is too close to home!!  What a fantastic talent.  It’s not fair that he had to go through everything he did, and not fair that he gave us so much, but we the fans and friends couldn’t give him just a little more in return.  I feel that way about every musician and anybody I love who’s ever died, but this is especially tragic.

Fucking hell.

I finished another demo for Rian to hear.  ("Won’t Call".) I promised him I’d try to do twelve songs by the time he gets back in town later this week.  So three is kinda pathetic, but it’s somewhat better than two, and it’s a lot better than one, and much much better than none!  Besides, I have more in the hopper, and thirty-someodd older songs too.  I should be okay as long as I keep kickin’ out a new one every week or two.  I just realized this new one took me TEN years to finish!  The verses are from around 1993, jeez…!!  Just laying around 90% finished, and I finally massaged it into something that would work. I played it for John, he liked it.  It’s a spooky love dirge, not the Patience and Prudence-y song I talked about before.  I had to lay off from that one ‘cuz I just couldn’t get it happening right.  It was too lollipop so I tried to go the other way and make the lyrics more evil, but that didn’t work either.  It has a cool chorus… it’s almost there, I just have to figure out something that’ll lessen the treacle factor for the verses.  Maybe go more jazzy with it.

Update: I looked it up in my notebook; the page-of-words is dated 8/16/1995. But I’m pretty sure it all STARTED around ‘93, so whatever.  It was awhile!

That fiddle I got is very hard to play.  I think it’s a bow problem because the new bow that I bought will not produce any sort of resonance on the strings, no matter how hard you try or what angle you use.  I tried the rosin, and I know how to hold the fiddle, I know how it’s supposed to work, but this is impossible!  This is using the $30 cheapie bow that I got from fiddle repair guy.  Now, the old bow that I had does work — not very well, but if I tighten up the hairs enough I can produce a somewhat normal note on the violin.  But the bow seems to be bent in the middle so the hairs always touch the wood, and the hairs are always coming loose and making it even worse.  Ugh… it was never like this the few times I’ve picked up someone else’s fiddle to play with it.  I could always at least get a decent tone out of it, try to play a scale, try to play multiple strings etc.  I just refuse to believe this is entirely my fault.  :-(

I’m very psyched about another song I’m working on. It started out as a Patience & Prudence type thing, but I don’t think the demo is going to sound much like them at all.  It is very harmony-laden though.  I need a real celeste if I want to do cutesy lullabies.  I don’t even know what they look like, are they too big to keep in your house?  Who’s gonna loan me a celeste?

That reminds me, the violin that my friend RC gave me is fixed and ready to be picked up.  It’s totally playable now, and I’m getting a new bow too.  The repair guy told me it’s a pretty nice instrument! Meaning it’s not a piece of crap and I’m lucky to have gotten it for free.  I’m very excited to start playing around with it, it’ll be my very first fiddle.  Heheh… if you know what I mean…!!  I took cello lessons when I was a kid, so you never know.  At worst I’ll be the proud owner of one more working instrument that I can at least play with and use for demo-recording.  I should buy a book, right?  Classic Country Fiddle in 21 Days…

::sob::