Ho Hum

Gosh, I just listened to the "Nazi Mamma" song I posted last week and it sure is a piece of crap.

And, why do I put important things where they will be hard to find?

And a good example of how a song needs to be listened to by "fresh" ears, because after working on one for 12 hours straight it is easy to become steeped in it so you are no longer really listening to it, at least not with fresh ears.

You might be struggling to fit a guitar solo over a certain section, when you should have sat back and listened from the beginning to determine if there should even be a guitar solo there, type of thing...


But, recordings that don't kill you, only make you stronger as a composer.

It is the musicians who give up after delivering of themselves something that sounds like crap who fall by the wayside.

High Latency!!

And so, undaunted, I just moved on the the next thing, and lo and behold, after I installed (yet another!) audio application which is kind of a looping sequencer of the type that allows rappers and others, whose main "skill" is in the utilization of such software, to compose in a hurry and "drop" new dope tracks left and right, I obtained another clue in the universe...

The program has a setup menu through which you can choose which audio system to use. The choices (Pulse, ALSA and Jack, for you geeks) were given, with the warning of "High latency!" being appended to the Pulse Audio choice.
This is the driver that I have been using for my Audacity projects.

And, I have been suspicious all along that latency issues have been taking some of the swing out of my music. It sounds good when I am playing it, but then when I play it back, the timing is off just a hair.
So, now I go off to investigate how to connect one of the other two choices to Audacity.

Plus, there is another "flavor" of Linux, besides the Ubuntu that I use, which is optimized for use as a digital audio workstation, referred to as, lo and behold: "low latency" Linux.

I really feel like the ostrich that pulls its head out of the sand every once in a while and looks around.

The Wi-Fi Fiasco

I am still getting a "failure to connect to network" when trying to access my next door neighbor's wi-fi. I think he is the type who avoids conflict and may have somehow shut me off.

It was a good month or so of having "unlimited" Internet access.

I think it might have been a mistake to install the Tor Web browser, as I did, and mess around with it. That required that I go into Firefox and tweek the settings in the "don't touch anything here unless you really know what you are doing" section of the preferences.

I changed the port that I was listening through and I shut off the acceptance of certain media (by running Adobe Flash, for instance, you are advertising your bank account number to the world, for [exaggerated] example.

If any of these changes caused any sort of glitch on Wayne's computer, he may have just decided that it would be easier for him to troubleshoot the problem by first simplifying things by rebooting his router and then maybe setting it up so that the connection could not be shared.

And, I think he is the type who wouldn't tell me if he did so. Probably thought that I would just give up on trying to connect after a day or three of trying everything under the sun and reading all kinds of reddits and forums on the topic of "failed to connect to network."

I can't be upset with a guy who let me get a whole month or so of Internet, even though I could have saved a lot of trouble had he just told me that he decided to run only his computer off the router.

I'm pretty sure that he took Harold, my cat somewhere to have him fixed. This would have been around the time that Harold was gone for a while and came back very skittish and with the corner of one of his ears lopped off (a marking used to denote cats that have been thus "fixed").

He also, I am pretty sure, treated Harold with one of those flea treatments that last for something like a whole year and cost abut $120. I remember him saying once that he had bought it for his own cat, and then remarked about how the only difference between the products labeled as being for kittens and small cats and the ones for big cats was the size of the bottle, and not the price. He told me that he had just went ahead and bought the big size for the same money. This might have been a hint to me that he would have some left over in order to treat Harold but, not being a skeezer, I didn't try to skeeze any off him. It's $120 per treatment, after all.

But Harold just suddenly started to come in from outside with not one flea on him, and I haven't seen a flea since, not one. And, it's been almost a year now.

I also was informed by Google that someone had logged into my Google account from "near the UK" on the same Sunday night when I was using the Tor Browser. This could have been cause by the "peer to peer" nature of the Tor Browser which uses the computers of people on the network to relay requests, without the individual computers knowing where they came from nor where they are going.
So, for now, I am back to using the 2 gigs of data allotted to me by the government phone, which the Assurance Wireless website tells me I have used about one third of at this point.
Ho hum, a blog post about mundane day to day problems, done when I should have been practicing the Mel Bay material.