Thoughts from the studio and beyond…

Today is strictly a “Me Day”. It is sandwiched in between the fiascoes of last week and the plumbing and wiring adventures of the week to come. This morning was church (Of course!) but once I got home I started cooking up dips, spreads, and appetizers aplenty. Then, since I was home alone, it was time to take the accordions out of their cases and blow the dust off them to the best of my ability. After the blog post is done it will be time to play violin and viola. Then it’s an hour of Pro Tools study before the football game. During the game we will consume the appetizers and then I will return to my latest braided rug project while I watch the Super Bowl. The day is fully planned and I couldn’t enjoy it more even if I tried.

Tomorrow marks the return to the basement rebuild since more parts and materials have come in. If things go well we will have water again by nightfall. If not then the domestic environment will become a bit on the harsh and sassy side.

I received a couple of questions from readers about the virus hack. Primarily, they wanted to know if they could catch it by visiting the blog. The answer is a resounding,”No you can’t.” The hack was hidden in the C coding that displays the Header to the blog and it did take quite some time to find it. It simply redirected your machine away from my site and to another random site. It was purely malicious and designed to shut down the blog. Many bloggers who use Wordpress as a host received similar attacks. Once again, your machine is, and was, completely safe from this attack.

Tonight I am playing in Calumet. I am the official ‘live music atmosphere’ for the Haitian relief at the cultural center there. It isn’t actually a show but will be fun anyway. My directive is to play whatever I want for three hours and then we all go home. I plan on bringing a PILE of instruments and spend a little time playing each of them. Currently I have guitar, bouzouki, fiddle, mandolin, accordion, concertina, and banjo packed up. That should keep me busy for a while.

Let me start by apologizing to those persons who hit the blog and were sent away to Chinese Language Schools or Travel sites or other random sites. That was NOT part of my blog! The last 24 hours has been a whirlwind. Yesterday, after posting, the blog was seriously hacked. If the hacker is reading this then I hope that you feel great about costing me over 13 hours of work and grief. If I ever find you in person I promise you great bodily harm. I would have you castrated but in all likelihood your personality and weasel face give you all the birth control society needs to protect itself from your faulty genetic material. Today things are running fine after many hours of searching through code. If, however, you have a problem with the blog of any sort or see anything suspicious please contact me right away so I can take care of it. I shouldn’t complain. I have been lucky so far. This is the first successful hack since I started blogging three and a half years ago. (fingers crossed)

My ProTools rig (Different computer system and network) went down in flames right after I performed the critical update that the sweet folks at Digidesign strongly recommended. Three separate two hour long downloads (6 hours total) and several new I/O settings were required to get that situation corrected. Now all seems fine on that front.

Of course, the first big problem that I wrote about was the death of the 24 track system. I am now able to get back to THAT issue once new parts come in the mail tomorrow. I don’t know if it will amount to a fix or not but I am nearly out of things to try. The last ditch attempt will be to take the drives out, buy a used machine on ebay, and reinstall the drives hoping for the best.

I bought my first computer in the winter of 1981. (A TRS80 with 4K of RAM!) I started programming (Because there was no software to speak of then.) the Z80 chip. Then there was a series of BASIC adventures. Then it was on to 8088 assembly language on XT platforms and a series of installs and data managements for clients. (That’s how In the Chips Production got started.) I ran a BBS in the early days on a 300 baud modem. After that it was using all the various platforms and ugrades to Windows based systems. In short, I have been a serious computer user for the last 29 years. Never once do I remember three days fraught with as much computer difficulty as the last three have presented. Any ONE of these issues would have been a major event. To have all three strike within 36 hours has been a giant challenge. At this point, it looks like there are two down and one to go. Keep me in your thoughts.

heavensdoor
Here is what I have done today. I laid the 6 tracks down in 20 minutes. Of course, THAT’S the part I know inside and out. THEN I spent a few hours rerigging my ProTools setup and messing about with the various commands and plugins. It would be great fun if I weren’t so intense in everything I do. I tried to learn PT in 3 hours. While it is true that I learned a LOT there is still WAY more to go in that regard. In the end I bounced everything to disc although I still don’t understand the ins and outs of automation very well. Once the file was in stereo I threw it into my old acquaintance Wavelab 6 and twitched it a bit. MOST of what you hear in the clip is PT. I didn’t like the compressor plugin that came with my LE system though so the slight comping you hear was done in Wavelab. My sincere apologies to Bob Dylan with this effort. It wasn’t, or isn’t, intended to be anything other than a quick and dirty file to help me fumble my way around ProTools. The song is copyrighted by Dylan and can’t be used in any form for any reason. I have just posted it to show what I was playing with today. It is very rough so I should probably apologize to each of you readers as well. It served its purpose for the day and gave me something to work on. As far as retrieving my old files…….that’s a sad story upon which I am still working. Maybe this time next week I will be able to share good news. Otherwise you are all invited to my old equipment bonfire, weenie roast, and weepfest.

My transition to ProTools wasn’t quite fast enough. I had hoped to figure out how to timecode all the tracks from the Mackie 24 track into PT and have both a backup system and a transition to an eventual all PT system. The computer devils have had other ideas and kept preventing me from running everything over to PT for some reason or another and tech support is a joke. When the line isn’t busy you can expect hold times which rival eternity in duration. In the meantime, my Mackie system has now died and I can’t access the OS. (30 power-ups without any luck.) The dreaded system 43 error that everyone talks about is now mine. I downloaded 3.5 floppy updates for the OS from the Mackie website but the OS won’t recognize the floppy either. I simply can’t get it to boot. The Mackie site says all my data is likely still there but if I can’t get to it then it does me no good whatsoever. I estimate there to be around 2300 hours of work sitting on the Mackie system since 1999. Now it is gone for good. Even if I can get the individual tracks off the IDE drives without timecode to sync them into PT they are little more than useless. This has been a very bad day. I am not proud to admit it but there is a very good chance that I will be consuming alcohol tonight.

Today the stove left the basement. I was able to do it alone just as I had planned. (Although I did cheat a bit and had the wife play watchman and holler out “Goes” and “Whoas” through the process.) The stove is heavier than I had estimated weighing in at around 475#. The whole removal from the basement was simplicity in action. I built a ramp out of scaffolding timbers. Then I used an eight foot iron bar to scootch the stove into position a few inches at a time. Then I hooked a tow strap to the stove and hooked the other end to the winch cable on my four wheeler. Then I chained the fourwheeler to the truck to keep it from sliding. THEN I FINALLY winched the stove up and out of the basement nice and easy. Once it was in the yard I used the plowtruck and a plywood skid to move it around where it needed to be. Within a couple of hours it was all done. There is much more room in the basement now. On Monday (the 8th) we are plumbing in an on-demand water heater. In the meantime there is electrical wiring and sundry other things to keep me busy.

In the afternoon I dug out the snowmobile from its resting area of the last three years. The remainder of the day was spent trying to get it running. It came close a couple of times and idled for a bit but then died. I was trying to pull start the beast and just ran out of personal oomph.Tomorrow I will give it another shot. For now I am giving my graphite bow a workout and calling it a night.

Today, after church, I spent time preparing fabric strips for rug braiding. They need to be double folded and rolled tightly into a ball to take a set for a few days. (I will use today’s strips during the Super Bowl next Sunday.) It is tedious work even though I designed and built a jig to do the double folding. It saves HOURS of work over doing it strictly by hand. I still spent almost an hour getting the next ball ready for action. Tonight I will braid/weave/crochet more on the rug during the Pro Bowl game. Like most Pro Bowls, this one promises to be a sleeper so it will be good to have something else to do while ‘watching’.

After fabric folding I spent some time with my new graphite bow playing violin. I am getting a better feel for the graphite as I use it more but I still greatly prefer my pernambuco stick. My goal is to transition over to graphite (And ProTools!) by summer. That way I won’t be forced to play my wood stick outdoors at festivals and will be able to use the graphite bow instead. I also will be able to offer clients (And myself.) the greater flexibility of a P/T system in the studio. Don’t even get me started on Autotune though. If the devil ever chose software in which to lie dormant it would definitely be Autotune. Hobbitses hates the Autotune…..Me too. This person seems to like it a lot though.

Tonight I am playing at the L’Anse High School Variety Show. Typically the audience is large and well behaved. I wouldn’t expect tonight to be any different although I may bring my tomato armor just in case. That’s the wonder of variety shows. You are able to judge how rough the crowd is before you go onstage by how well they treat the acts prior to yours. It gives you time to run away or ’suit up’ depending on what the situation demands.

Most of today was spent in the basement tearing out an old wood stove and water preheater. We moved a washer and dryer around to see where they fit best. Then I started reverse engineering to figure out where all the plumbing, wires, and walls will need to go. Tomorrow will be dedicated to getting a snow machine running and getting the stove out of the basement. It weighs in at about 350# so carrying it seems out of the question until the steroids kick in.

What are the odds that in the rural Keweenaw peninsula there would be two new banjo students on the same day? As it turns out they are 100% because that is exactly what has happened. Needless to say, I will need to blow the dust off my five string today before I head to the music store. I remember playing it for a recording session back in August but nothing since to the best of my aged memory cells. Mind you, I’m not complaining. This is a great excuse to pull out another instrument and completely waste another portion of my time here on earth. Beside that, fingerpicks are signs of great power and self-assurance. Both attributes have been in very short supply around here as of late.

We actually have a kitchen sink for the first time in a while. In truth, the sink has been there all along. It simply wasn’t functional in its former state. Now it works fine and the laundry ‘area’ is in the serious planning stage. This afternoon the washer and dryer get moved around to determine their final locations and venting. The routing of plumbing and wiring will be the next big planning task and then it will need to be implemented. Then an upflush system toilet will need to be installed and the old woodstove (300#) and water heater need to be removed or relocated. The floor will be epoxied and THEN I can start finishing off the walls and ceilings. The end of March seems like a better completion date as I look at expanding the project even further.

Tonight will find me in the studio working on my transition over to a ProTools environment. The old dog can still learn new tricks but it does seem to take a lot longer. Perhaps I need one of those shocker collars to keep me on task. The use of ProTools is tortuous and a clear violation of the Geneva Convention.