Saturday, February 19, 2005

My Pro Tools knowledge is improving and it's gratifying! Switching to a 7200 RPM hard drive made quite a difference in the stability of the system. Next, I need to upgrade to 1 Gb of RAM...but those 512 Mb memory sticks are pricey! Maybe I'll hold out for a sale or rebate offer...though it's a challenge to my aging eyes to fill out those *&^%$(* rebate forms! Maybe I can find a sympathetic teenager to do it for me in return for a cut of the loot. ;-)
Anyway, I posted my 3rd PT production last night. I was well into aural fatigue by the time I mixed it so there's no telling what it will sound like to me this morning;  but it was time for an "interim" mix just to see where I'm at. Give a listen. [Still needs cymbals and accents on the two and four.] I'm impressed with the much-improved bass sound I'm getting.

In the category of stupid stories, this one ranks.

Friday, February 18, 2005

And speaking of the Global Village: 

In modern thought, (if not in fact)
Nothing is that doesn't act,
So that is reckoned wisdom which
Describes the scratch but not the itch.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Ultimately, one loves one's desire, not the desired object. Fred

As many of you are aware, my Home page is www.fatima.org. And so, it was with more than a little sadness that I read this morning of the death of Sister Lucia, the last of the three Portuguese shepherd children who told of a series of apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1917.

Now, of course, there will always be skeptics..."nattering nabobs of negativism", to quote a great American...but even they had to put away their snickers when the Sun danced in the sky. The "Miracle of the Sun" as it is most often called, occurred on October 13, 1917 and is proof from Our Lady that those three kids had it right! The Virgin even left a paper trail: "The Three Secrets". I forget right now what the first and the third were but I DO remember that the second one said that Godless Russia would someday be reformed and redeemed by the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Good stuff!

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men.
Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.
But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, 
that your fasting may not be seen by men but by your Father who is in secret;
and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.   Matthew 6:1-18

And now, an update on a story you first read about here just a few days back...this time from the DKIUYTI Department: Seems this dude, Geri Klein, had figgered a way to show a girl a good time! "He invited them to engage in certain sexual acts with him -- and then they were to hang themselves naked from a beam in his house." Geri had a bit of the engineer in him as well: "He was indicating in these [Internet] chat groups to these women that he had a beam and that it would hold multiple people." Okie Dokie! I admit that it does sound like fun...irresistible even...still in all, many women were able to pass up Geri's offers...and one, at least, blew the whistle.  

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Local story here about a guy who put so much (ultimately wasted) effort (& skill) into a brazen crime...that he might as well get a straight gig...'cuz it'd be lots less work! 

Monday, February 14, 2005   Valentine's Day

Alan Keyes is a wonderfully entertaining man. I first heard him speak on the tube from the '92 (or was it the '88?) Republican National Convention where he delivered his "You have no right to do wrong!" speech. (The legality of abortion, of course, was the topic.) Alan starts at the fringe; the lunatic fringe, that is. But he's not hateful. No. Rather, he's refreshing. Like Mad Magazine. [With enemies like this, who needs friends?] He makes me feel that, at every moment, he is oh-so-aware of (not his personality but) his cartoonality and that, at any moment, he might convulse with laughter and ask his audience if they really thought he was being serious all this time! But now...come to find out that his 19 year-old daughter is "coming out"...and has been keeping a blog! Check it out! Spellbinding! Beautiful! Bless you, Maya, for your courage so born of innocence!

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Happy Birthday, Deb!

From the "ITAK" Department:

Some dude in Oregon and a buncha sallies from elsewhere had formed the "Suicide Party, 2005"...and folks were just dyin' to get in! Well...they've all been busted, thanks to Sheriff Tim Evinger ("Avenger"?), who CAN sniff out a pattern before it bites him on the ass! Says the lawman, "There seems to be a common theme that the people who are coming forward are women." Now I say this all points to the need, in our Internet culture, to Federalize laws against suicide! Just think how many we could save every year if we toughened those penalties! I mean the way it is now, in most jurisdictions, the crime is punishable by less than a year in jail and a $250 fine. Double those numbers and I'll wager we'll see half the victims! I say make it so folks can't afford to kill themselves! 

Last night I was admiring my face in a mirror. Then I put on my glasses.  :-(

What if your name was Worth Cropp? Would you change it? And what if your name wasn't Worth Cropp?

Saturday, February 12, 2005  Abe Lincoln woulda been 196 years old today if he hadn't a died at age fifty six.

A well-circulated, but evidently untrue (judging from the writings of various people who claim to know) story is that, long ago in England, people were SO afraid of being buried alive (taphephobia), that the practice evolved of tying a string to a wrist of the deceased. The string was then guided from the casket, through a pipe (providing a modicum of breathing air) and up to above the ground where it was then attached to a bell. A caretaker would always be stationed (sometimes on the "graveyard shift") so that he could hear this "dead ringer" and, presumably, call for an exhumation. Now...what brought all this to mind of a morning? This story out of North Carolina. 

Chuck Aronson sent me the following cool quote from one of my favorite writers: "As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." -H. L. Mencken 1920

Friday, February 11, 2005

My views on Pro Tools (LE Version 6.4 with Mbox, at least) are drifting negative. In the fire protection business, there's a saying that "everybody wants to be second". By that is meant that, with so much at stake (life and property), no one wants to be so "cutting edge" as to be first out with a product that turns out to have a defect that was virtually unforeseeable during preliminary analysis and early testing; a defect that, in fact, only appears under some rare confluence of events. Challenger's o-rings and Titanic's metallurgy are only two of many spectacular such examples of which history is replete.
Of course, even I am not so deranged as to compare the shortcomings of a pop-music recording program to a conflagration or deadly crash; but there IS, nevertheless, a nexus. Pro Tools is (and I believe its designers would agree) still very much a work in progress. I'll bet that in as few as five years, the product can be made bulletproof...but for now, it is full of "bugs", has indecipherable documentation and useless or misleading error messages. On SOME computer systems it probably runs flawlessly. But on many others (judging from some user forums I've been monitoring) it either doesn't run at all or it doesn't run reliably.
Gee, I know this is boring to someone who has never tried to run Pro Tools, but it reminds me strongly of what the personal computer situation was as recently as ten years ago. Windows '95, despite its becoming an unprecedented commercial success, was, in SO many ways, a disaster! It was "vulnerable" to myriad crashes, mostly on account of its incompatibility with numerous hardware components. I mean, Windows '95 designers could not possibly make allowances for every video card, sound card or modem which might be operating off of "some motherboard" with "some chipset" somewhere! They could not control what hardware people might use to run their software so they had to design for a circumscribed group of components or they would never be able to bring the product to market in any time frame that made economic sense. [Now...some folks might argue that they (at Microsoft) didn't do such a wonderful job of designing even for the hardware they DID make allowances for...but I won't chime in.]  I think they got to where they simply HAD to put the product on the market...or go bankrupt tweaking it! They also knew that, only by distributing this product (known to be flawed), would they ever (from customer feedback and complaints) gather enough information to design a progressively more flexible and "invulnerable" piece of software. 
So...what I'm saying is that, for now, Pro Tools is a kind of "Windows '95 thing"...in a niche market.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

My big sister in Florida is taking a creative writing class and has graciously consented to my posting a most interesting piece concerning the day (some fifty-four years ago) that my father was killed. Give it a read...please. 

Happy Birthday, Bernie!

Wednesday, February 9, 2005  Big quake in LA thirty four years ago today.

While intending no disrespect to Robert, I DO speculate as to the hardships he must have known...being "Bob Blow" for eighty five years! Hey, I actually know a guy named "Bob Boom" (hi Bob!). But Bah-Boom! brings smiles, not snickers! 
"'Mr. Low?', did you say?" "No, Robert Blow." "Oh!"

Tuesday, February 8, 2005

Yesterday was a special day for me. I got to unclog a drain. Now I coulda called a plumber...but no...and it wasn't the money...it's that if I did, then I'd have to talk to him...and probably not only to him, but also to his secretary! And she might even say, "How are you?"  To which I'd say, "Ah, could be worse...maybe not much worse." To which she'd say, "Ha ha. It could always be worse." To which I would gracefully (not graciously) mumble, "Yeah...", with a snort, effectively bringing an end to this obligatory yet perfunctory repartee. 
So it's a drain that serves two bathroom sinks...back-to-back through the wall. Any job or fix-it project is thrilling if you get to buy a new tool just for it! So last night, it couldn't get any better 'cuz  I scored when I got to buy a tool that's "cheap at twice the price" (as the saying goes). Made by Ridgid, a company (that makes great tools) probably best known for its calendars on the walls at machine shops. Well...they used to be on the walls...back in the good old days...when some people still had a sense of humor! What's that song? Git yer biscuits in the oven and yer buns in the bed. This woman's liberation is a goin' to yer head!

Monday, February 7, 2005

When I'm feeling depressed, what I really need to hear is how that depression predisposes me to a host of other ailments! And that's just what ole Dr. Sanjay Gupta has been telling CNN viewers all weekend. How can I use that news...before he tells me that all the worrying I do (about how shi**y I feel) only makes matters worse!?!

Confused by computer jargon? Yer knot a loan, so clear things up by checking out what was sent to me this morning by a busy former co-worker: 

Sunday, February 6, 2005  Today be the 54th anniversary of the death of my father in a commuter train wreck.

To make truly respectable pie crust requires patience. I take two sifted cups of all-purpose flour and I add in 1/3 cup of Crisco and 1/3 cup of butter and then I judiciously add water as I work the flour and the Crisco and the butter together with a "pastry blender". Like I say, if you want serious, edible crust, ya can't hurry. It takes me about an hour to get the mix to where I can roll it up in a ball and then split it in two. By then my hand hurts from working the mix with the blender. I don't use both halves right then on the pie I'm making that day. Half of it goes into a zip-loc bag and into the "ice box". (My kids think that last term is cute and, indeed, it comes from a day maybe even slightly before my time, when a great big burly fella (the "iceman") would arrive with a large block of ice (held by big huge tongs) and put that block into a compartment in your, yup, ice box!) When it melted, that's when ya knew ya needed another one!

I use homemade crust only for the bottom of my pies. The reason mostly is that to use homemade crust for both the top and bottom is just too much work and if my standards called for homemade crust top & bottom, then I'd probably find a reason not to bake as many pies as I do. So, for the top, I just use one a them thar pre-made store-bought crusts. For a top crust, they're passable...not great...but for a bottom crust...well, you might as well not even bake a pie! Incidentally, I think the aforementioned observations explain why really good pies from a bakery usually cost more than most people are willing to pay. I'm not sure I've ever found a store pie worth eating which cost less than $15! But even at $30, who could make a living making pies by hand? I'm guessing that, although means have been found to machine-mix what's inside a pie so that somebody will eat it, no one has yet invented a way to make truly, respectable, serious and edible pie crust other than by hand.

I bake at least three apple pies per per month and I'm getting good at it! I use Granny Smith apples. They can be cheap if you buy 'em by the ten-pound bag. It takes four or five of these apples to make one pie. I start with 16 ounces of apple cider and then I add about three tablespoons of corn starch and a cup of brown sugar...a teaspoon a vanilla...a couple drops a almond extract...a couple or three tablespoons a cinnamon. Gotta heat all this kinda slowly till it thickens and then you add the apples after they've been cored and cut up small. It all looks like this in the pot.

Once the homemade crust is rolled with a roller between two pieces of wax paper (I try not to touch the dough 'cuz my hands are, often as not, greasy from all the stupid car work I do), I carefully place it in the Pyrex pie dish and then trim it and bunch it up at the edges. Then I pour the cut-up apple mix in the dish with the dough and level it out before covering it with a store-bought crust. Now...the reason I cover the edges with aluminum foil is to keep them from getting brown too fast (and then burned) in the oven into which I put the pie, pre-heated to 400 degrees for twenty minutes. At twenty minutes, I remove the pie and remove the foil and then I coat the whole top crust with melted butter...using a small paint brush. This is an important step. Not only does it keep the top crust from burning, it also greatly improves the otherwise-not-so-great flavor of the store-bought top crust.  Then I put the buttered half-baked pie back into the oven (this time at only 350 degrees) for another twenty minutes. By then, the filling is bubbling over...but only slightly...and the crust is seriously browning...but not "blackening".

I take the pie out of the oven and let it stand, covered in foil, to cool at room temperature. It takes maybe four hours for the pie to cool this way and then I put it, still covered in foil, into the ice box overnight. I don't slice into it until the next day...usually after my walk (or run) and with my first cup of coffee. It's important to slowly cool and then refrigerate the finished pie 'cuz when you slice out a piece, you want that piece to come away clean within the crust!

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