A long time, I know...this is what happens when you try to blog and your computer doesn't.
See, I was obviously not meant to blog the last few days. I tried at least four times and ended up being foiled by a plethora of reasons from crashing blogging programs to distractions to a cut-and-paste action which went arwy.
Of course, if you are reading this now then obviously I have ended this stream of blogging bad luck. We can but hope...
I also feel I should warn you that today's blog uses embedded media. Don't worry - I haven't used the "AUTOPLAY" tag. (I think anyone who uses that should be shot at birth...) Anyway - if you're on a dial-up connection you should be aware that the rest of the blog has about 5 MB of audio and video in it. Click at your own risk... I hate blogging when I haven't for a while. The problem lies in what I write down and what I leave out. See, this week has been quite busy. I haven't had my usual headless chicken moment as organisation is finally living here. It took a while to get here, but finally, after the close-shave with the trash bags I think it has decided to stay. Office Tidy? Check. Filing system on its way to being fantastic? Check (At least for the most part). Students all doing well? Check. Girlfriend as wonderful as ever? Check.
So you see, life is organised. And, as a consequence (yes - I started a sentance with "And"... I'm terrible) my stress levels seem to have dropped substantially. Admittedly I have also changed the way I plan. Gone are the compleltly unrealistic daily goals and in their place are more acchievable tasks. I have never (and probably never will) been able to remove the loom in Hebe; practice for three hours; teach four students; do all the laundry; re-organise the closet and make ten reeds all in one day. Let's just say that I think I'm finally realising where my own limits lie. If I know I can only do three tasks I should only set the goal of three taks. Simple isn't it? I know, I know I preach to my students the upmost importance of planning and the need to be good to onesself when setting a daily target, but I really don't take notice of myself when I'm planning for myself. It had to change. It has changed. The question now is wether I can keep it up.
'Merikate is off next week. M$ have sent home all the contracted employees all around the world for a week while they lick it tries to make up for a budget deficeit. It means that she gets a whole week home to catch up with some work for FLS, the business she helped found in the US before moving over here. I think her father has some important ammendments to the programming that she needs to attend to. That, combined with some programming she's doing for both herself and my professional sites means that I'll probably not actually spend much time chilling with her. The good thing though is that she'll be in the same building - which means more snuggle potential. Working so very far away every day takes it out of us both. Even if she's working hard I can at least lean over and kiss her now and then. It'll be nice sharing the house office with her. The last time we both worked from home was over a year ago, and then we didn't even have a decent office to work in; Now we have two decent desks to sit at; two decent chairs to sit on and two decent computers to use.
The only thing we haven't solved with the office yet is the question over additional equipment. At the moment we have an old G3 sitting in above our other two PCs acting as a scanner server. The scanner we have is an old SCSI one. It was free, but it's huge. If either of us want to scan something in we have to fire up the G3 in OS 9.1 then scan the image in (a process which takes anything up to five minutes), before then transferring the image via Ethernet to either the G5 of the Athlon for processing. The long and short of this is that the amount of space we are using in the office is increased by this arrangement. It is made worse when you think we have a laserwriter and a photocopier at the moment taking up extra space. Look, why don't you look for yourself?
Yeah. A bit of a bad video... sorry about that.Anyway, back to the office problem. We have a few options:1) Freecycle laserprinter (naff) and photocopier (very much in need of repair) along with the G3 (Which I'll miss) and the scanner (not sure anyone would even want it). Buy an all-in-one Epson RX640 which prints CDs. (Very important since our current R300 printer does this and it's made a big difference to my "impact" as a professional for new clients). 2) Do the same as 1) but get an HP all-in-one. We saw one yesterday which had a document feeder - much more photocopier like - but which had a built-in fax machine and ethernet connection. This in turn means that we're not having to go through someone else's machine to print (Currently the R300 is served from my mac).3) Get a really high-end scanner (at the moment this looks like an Epson one with built-in scan to copy function). We know that the printer we have is top notch and that the fax machine I have is okay when it comes to sending faxes (even if the answerphone part is naff). Part of me is worried about the quality of an all in one. Perhaps it'd be better to get really good kit in the form of dedicated units and have it last. Of course, if you all have any suggestions I would love to hear them. Option 2 has the advantage of me being able to pass our R300 to my sister who, as it happens, needs a new printer.
I did warn you this was going to be a long one didn't I?
So - onto the music. This week I managed to resurrect my CT-670. It rocks. It really does. It's PCM (pulse-code-modulation) unit is pure late 80s/early 90s. in fact, it has the same kind of design elements as our Honda. Here, have a look:
This piece of kit is still impressive... It has three MIDI ports (giving that all-important THRU port) and can handle up to four channels of MIDI at any one time. Okay, so it's no DX-7 but it's still a capable retro keyboard. My only bugbear with it back in the 90s (and today) is that the thing won't let you edit the tones if you're in MIDI mode. In standard stand-alone mode you can have hours of entertainment with the envelope parameters but in MIDI mode you're stuck with the patches CASIO gave you. I know ... I'm sad... but it's good to see the old thing working again - I think there's a loose connection inside on the power socket so I shall at some point take the unit apart and fix it properly. For the time being though you can get to hear it in all its glory.Here's some of the more silly patches that you get as standard with the unit:
