tigertoy

We headed up to the Bristol Renaissance Faire on Sunday. We got there a bit later than we might have hoped, mostly (I think) due to my own lateness getting out of bed and functional, but we got a nutritious breakfast into everyone before going, so I will count that as a plus.

The kids had a great time running around looking in stores, buying a few things, and enjoying various shows along with us. I didn't spend much time in the stores as Gretchen and I own a great many things and there were a variety of attractive benches available, as the crowd seemed a bit thin. I don't know if this was because the weather so far this summer has been miserably hot, but today the weather was quite nice and didn't get much above 80 degrees.

We came home, fed takeout Chinese to the kids and got the Midkiffs on the road home once again later than we might have hoped, but fed. :)

Overall, I will count this as a successful weekend.

And now I am going to go take a cold shower and cool off. :)

billroper

Jen finished recording the bass parts for the six songs that we'd targeted for this weekend, so we'll call that a complete success. :)

Dinner tonight was a lovely brisket, mashed potatoes, green beans, and rolls.

Tomorrow, off to the RenFaire. (And then back to Indianapolis for the Midkiffs...)

The kids are still having fun downstairs, which is all good.

billroper

Jen and the kids arrived a bit later than they hoped, but earlier than they might have. While the kids were out with Finn collecting free Slurpees from 7-11, we went down to the basement and got a couple of takes of Jen on the bass for "Inconstant Moon" so we could get an idea of what was working. It all sounded good and we will do the minor editing tomorrow before we go on to the rest of the tracks on the schedule.

But so far, so good!

billroper

I am getting one of my blood pressure meds at Jewel/Osco, because when I initially started getting it, the cheapest way for me to obtain it was from their pharmacy via GoodRx. This is no longer true, as the med is now on my formulary for my health insurance, but it's convenient to have a good reason to go to Jewel once a month and buy the things that I can't find elsewhere easily. And the automatic text when it was time for a refill worked splendidly.

Except then they started calling *and* texting, with multiple phone calls for the same prescription, all of which was entirely too much of a good thing. So I set out to cancel the phone calls. Apparently, I canceled everything, which I finally realized when I was staring at one pill remaining and no sign of a refill anywhere. Oops.

I have managed to turn text messaging back on and got my prescription refilled today, so I have my pill for tomorrow. Yay, me! And as long as I was at Jewel, I picked up most of the things that I will need for the weekend. The remaining items can be picked up at Sam's Club tomorrow and possibly at Mariano's depending on how things work out.

And then the refrigerator will be *very* full of brisket...

billroper

I wanted to haul Julie's new mattress and the bunkie board upstairs tonight so we could install them in the morning. We did that and this caused the instructions to surface. They said that -- although the mattress will continue to decompress for the next three days -- Julie could go ahead and sleep on it tonight.

So the old mattress is hauled away to the first floor for disposal with the next trash pickup, while the new mattress is happily on the bed and covered with a sheet. My conclusion after trying to find the right sheets to do this with is that it is time to buy more twin-sized sheet sets, because there's a distinct shortage of the fitted ones.

But done is done.

And it turns out that the mattress that died the big death was a Serta which I apparently bought at Sam's Club. I thought that it was a mattress that I'd bought on Amazon, but that must be some other mattress. In any case, I've never seen a mattress die in quite that fashion with a big crater in the middle of the bed.

I am unimpressed. (Well, actually, I *am* impressed, but not in any good way.)

billroper

I had to get up early today for a meeting which would have been fine. The two phone calls apparently looking for a fax machine that arrived before my alarm was scheduled were *not* fine.

But the meeting went well and broke up early enough that I was able to grab a haircut before the rush, then lunch, and then a trip to Sam's Club to pick up some staples. And I even got work done.

So it was all good.

It will be better when I get some sleep. :)

billroper

I have managed to replace all of the scratch guitar tracks with guitar tracks that are at least candidates for the released version of "Crosstime Bus", as well as recording new scratch vocals that aren't contaminated with the scratch guitar tracks. All of this is good preparation for the recording session this weekend when Jen comes up.

In the meantime, I'd like to share some work-in-progress with you. "Wings" is one of my favorite songs that I've written and I do not sing it nearly as often as I probably should. The fact that it's 19 years old now probably has something to do with that. It was the last-written song that is going on this album, as I wrote it while we were traveling to the Worldcon back in 2006, which was our last Worldcon before our first child was born -- an event that put an end to our long-distance Worldcon travel.

So here's the current state of the song:

Wings.

billroper

I took a day off from studio work today, because I went to the Cubs vs. Cards game down at Wrigley, which was scheduled to start at 5:10 and was only delayed by an hour. But all of that meant that there really wasn't time to get down there, even to record a single vocal track.

Recording is back on the schedule for tomorrow, along with work, where I hope to make some good progress.

billroper

I have guitar tracks for the last three songs to replace the scratch track. They may yet need some more work, but they are in good enough shape I think.

I then went back to record revised scratch vocals for those songs so I could drop out the original guitar. I got through two out of three songs before the iPad that I am using for a remote control announced that it was out of power and would like to retire for today.

So tomorrow! Tomorrow will be good for this.

billroper

Back to the studio again and just about to start recording. We'll see how much I get done.

A note about the new computer. The previous computer, which is still on the network and which needs to keep its unique name, is "Thunderbolt", although the Thunderbolt card that prompted the name has been removed.

The *new* computer is named "Cei-u".

If you know why, you will know exactly why that is appropriate.

billroper

I rambled downstairs today and got back into the studio and worked over three songs for Crosstime Bus, leaving me three to go, all of which are fingerpicked guitar, so they will require a slightly different setup. I'll see if I can get those to behave tomorrow.

One of the songs that I worked on today, "Dance by Starlight", is going to need some fixup before I'm done with it. I wrote that song back in 2005, about ten years after Gretchen and I got married, when I was an ocean away from her at the British filkcon which was very, very full of wedding vibes that weekend. I like the song a lot, which is why it's on the album list.

It is, however, being a pain in the butt, because I wrote it *before* I started using a pick again. When you're not using a pick, you can easily transition between the fingerpicked section at the beginning, the strummed section in the middle, and the fingerpicked section at the end. When you are using a pick, this is not something that can be managed at my skill level.

When I'm playing the song *now*, I have worked out that I can arpeggiate the formerly fingerpicked sections and play them with the pick. However, the timing on that is just slightly different from the timing when fingerpicking. The scratch tracks, which have some accompaniment associated with them already, were played without a pick.

Today's session made it clear to me that I cannot get the fingerpicked section to time out correctly when I'm using a pick. This means that I am going to have to record a separate guitar track for the beginning and end of the song and patch it in around the picked section in the middle. I can do this, of course.

It's just another learning experience. :)

But I really like the song, so it will be worth it.

billroper

It is clearly time for me to take some vacation days. Most everyone else is at work. :)

We use Gradle for our builds and to automate a number of tasks. One of those tasks is fetching the project files for JDeveloper from our Artifactory, which has the advantage of keeping developers who are less familiar with how things *ought* to work from accidentally checking in changes. Unfortunately, this gave me a problem over the last few days, because I am working on a big, ugly merge. I had loaded the JDeveloper files for the combined project, but the merge had left me with a ton of compile errors and JDeveloper was doing its little trick of "I can't see this perfectly good code over here" during the compile, even after I fixed things.

I decided that the right thing to do was to switch to the JDeveloper files that just look at my group's source code, get that fixed, and then go back to the integrated project. It was a great idea.

Except that Gradle would insist on compiling the code on the branch before it would let me download the JDeveloper files. That would fail (which was not a surprise; it was why I was trying to get the JDev files downloaded) and when that failed the process was done and the JDeveloper files were not downloaded.

Swearing ensued. Asking the build team for a fix ensued, but our U.S. guy is on vacation in India and the rest of the build team is in India as well and didn't seem to grasp the problem. I eventually sent one guy a screenshot of the directory listing showing that I did not actually *have* the JDeveloper files on my machine in this directory. This didn't get me a solution to the problem, but it made me feel better.

I figured I would take most of today off if I didn't get a solution. And I didn't. I answered some emails, went out for a nice lunch with Gretchen, came home, and went upstairs to take care of a few things.

And then I started researching Gradle, because I really know very little about it.

I figured out that what I needed to do was to tell Gradle to pretty please, don't run a compile when running this particular task. I still haven't figured out how to put this in the build.gradle file, but I did figure out how to get the files downloaded by changing my command line options. To wit:

"gradlew loadJDevFiles -x compileJava"

And look! I got my files.

I sent an email with the solution and went off to spend the rest of the day in the studio, because I deserve a vacation.

Starting now. :)

(More about the studio later...)

billroper

The new machine is up and running and producing sound from Cubase. I *think* that I've loaded all of the plugins that I should have on the box, although the list seems shorter than before. That may be because I haven't loaded a few plugins that I never use that I picked up as freebies. And that is just as well.

The old box has had the CMOS beaten into submission again and a new battery is now installed. I removed the Thunderbolt and Firewire cards and have it sitting in one corner of the studio, powered up and waiting to see if I need to use Remote Desktop to go find anything on it.

But the studio is up and running again. And that makes me very happy.

And very relieved.

billroper

The optical drive arrived today on schedule. It only took a few minutes to get it installed, the new computer buttoned up, and then I was able to take it to the basement.

It took a while to work through the Windows 11 install, because it kept wanting drivers that needed to be downloaded and there was no computer here to do it with, the old machine having been disconnected. Eventually, I got bright enough to bring my laptop to the basement for the driver downloads which allowed me to stop going up to the second floor. :)

Anyway, the good news is that I got the Universal Audio software installed and it promptly detected the Apollo interface on the other end of the Thunderbolt cable. I am now in the process of reinstalling all of the other software that makes things run down here.

And then there is the copying of the audio files. I had intended to bring them across from the old machine, but I think the BIOS battery there has given up the ghost, so it is not going to be booting up until I replace that, hook it back up to a monitor and keyboard, and fix those problems. But everything is backed up to the NAS in the office, so I am now entering the second quarter of a projected twelve hours of copying files down.

Whee!

But I should be able to get things up and running again tomorrow -- depending on how much software still needs to be installed. :)

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RenFaire Sunday

One More Step

Midkiffs!

Shopping Trip

Mattress Installation

Tired

Progress Report

Day Off

The Stereo Bus Goes Round and Round

Once More, With Feeling

Meanwhile, Back in the Studio

It Must Be Time For a Vacation

It Lives!

Reassembling the World

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April 2023

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