Up On The Computer

• Laptop Picked Up
• Help From Matthew

Yesterday afternoon, I took the free "teal" bus to downtown, where I got the package with the laptop, a guitar strap and 16 bucks in it.

I was totally psyched about the 16 bucks and the fact that it meant that I could spend time plugging in the laptop somewhere and seeing what was on it, rather than having to go busk, on a Wednesday night, at that.

This is what my music will soon look like...

I got back to the church where Howard was already asleep in the foyer (as it was after 9 p.m.) and went into the sanctuary, or whatever they call the place with the altar and all the pew, plus a piano and several electrical outlets.

I was unable to bring it up in "Command Prompt" mode, which is what I am familiar with, from back in the 90's with all the Linux programming that I was studying back then, but managed to find an excellent text editor and wrote my first little blurb and saved it.

I plan upon finding, here at the LSU library, a book on Ubuntu Linux, and going through it, to see if I will be able to do UNIX programming for fun.

Matthew The Musician

Then, this morning I came to this library, where there was a guy playing a nylon string guitar in the "quad," which is a generally square shaped courtyard which sits right in front of the Middleton Library.

I started to talk to him about music, and it turns out that he is a classical musician, who went to UL (University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and studied music there.

His playing was excellent. He uses a lot of dissonance and unorthodox techniques. 

I played a little for him on my guitar which is missing the G string. He seemed to like the song that I had composed for "guitar minus G string," called "My Favorite Mule."

Matthew The Technician

He then happened to mention that he records music, using Audacity, a program which comes with Linux based computers, or can be downloaded for free onto them.

I happened to mention that, at the very moment, inside the library was a laptop which I had just gotten, which had Audacity on it, but that I hadn't been able to do much with it yet.

Matthew then accompanied me back into the library, where, after sitting at my laptop for about 15 minutes, was able to get the Audacity program to record, using the built in microphone, and then showed me how to save the result as an mp3, so that it can be posted on a blog.

He also connected the "hidden" wireless card and found a signal, but it was the LSU signal and was password protected. He said that I shouldn't have that same problem at Starbucks, or other places.

He wasn't able to bring up the command prompt, but assured me that "its on there, somewhere..."