mushinnoshin

Where ya been, guy? Well, anyway good to have you back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBuG2TdgMn0

Basically, it’s 140 to 1, and he mops the floor with them all, including local favorite nitwit Marsha. Basically, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and don’t use “truthy” talking points to attack a guy who actually knows what the fuck he’s talking about.

Well I’ve been taking it slow, just doing a few things each weekend, trying to ease my way back in, not forcing it. There’s been some waiting as I’ve had to get a few things — the new midi controller, new monitors, a new stand, a new power supply. And I’ve still got a lot to do, getting the mixer routes all patched, with the effects and gates and eq and compressors and such all wired up.

But today, I turned it all on, for the first time in — what, is it 8 years? Maybe closer to 9, going on 10?

I’ve got sound from the xp-30. And when I fired her up, I found her right where I left off, sitting on my favorite dirty organ patch with the pitch shifted down an octave, wondering where I’ve been and happy to see me.

I’m gonna grab another beer and get back to my old friend.

there’s a small set of ‘em

It’s probably too soon to write much about it, but it would suck to miss the chance to make the first entry on this date (yeah I know it’s the 3rd already, but I’m sure it’s still legally the 1st until sometime tomorrow morning).

Well, I got the upstairs unpacked. Many species of disc and tape were shelved, egg-crates of cables and widgets got sorted and stacked. The porn stash was relocated. After some thought and trying out a few arrangements, I got the station layout down: racks to my left, the xp-30 to my right, and a desk in front with the juno on the workspace, the 101key in a tray below, and the studio monitors and video monitors sharing the riser in back. Though that last one may take some finagling when the lcds actually get here. The whole rig takes up about 3/4 of the room; I have the back of the desk about two feet from the far wall. I need to work on how move a little closer to center on the other axis, without blocking an inconvenient but needed closet.

When I packed this stuff up to move, I did as much as I could to leave all the woven cable snakes intact; unplug as little as possible, catch as much as possible in the power crate. Pulling it back out now, between time and tangles I’m not having much success just plugging everything right back in, *but*, by following the various cord paths, clumps, and clusters, and picking up my patterns and some clues I left, I was able to snart snapping together some memories of how it all hooked up. I did get the power crate (an egg crate that keeps together three powerstrips of plugs and wall warts and associated cabling, external pieces, etc) cleaned out and reorganized, and all the outgoing power cables re-snaked back to the rack and re-attached to their devices. And I got a good start on running the audio cables, but that’s a bit more complicated and will take a little while.

Meanwhile, I need a new machine to run things. I take the 2Ghz athlon that I was using as a dvr-pc back in the dark days before tivo, swap the 40GB hard drive for a 320 I had laying around. Got XP installed after a few tries (old xp disc didn’t want to see >137 of that drive). Installed Gina (multichannel audio card). Then I go to install the midi card, but find it uses a really old isa connector, no way to plug it into a newer machine (well, no way that’s not more expensive than just replacing the thing). Which is funny because I could have *sworn* I remembered buying a pci card to replace this isa one under similar circumstance. I must be remembering when I had to buy the isa card to replace whatever the hell it was that came before that.

So that’s where I am. I’ve got to figure out what to do about the midi controller, and finish running the audio, and then I should be ready to start turning things on.