tax return done

all done...

met emivore in jai & she came back here... she had a nap and i lay with my back to her, filing my tax return online on this here laptop...

so it's all over...

x

tax return woe

so i just did josiah's tax return, took me half an hour...

then i tried to log in to my tax return, not that i was ready to do my own one yet, just wanted to check it out...

and i found my user id in my old computer, typed it into my new computer and tried a couple of passwords... to no avail...

i must have tried wrong passwords 3 times, because when i got firefox running on my old computer, firefox who knows my password from last year, it still wouldn't let me in...

it turns out i've locked myself out for 2 hours...

fantastic...

so i've got 2 hours to find all the stuff i need to find... i did get scared, but i phoned up the tax office and very quickly got through to a nice man who explained what was going on...

i finished a whole heap of marking on thursday and i'm recording all day tomorrow with the SJP's... it doesn't stop people, it just doesn't stop...

once i've done this tax return it will be a weight off my mind...

ok... laters x

cookies google chess tax return cubase

so that was weird, google wouldn't accept my password all morning...

i was having odd thoughts about someone hacking in and changing my password...

anyway it's working now... maybe it's time i changed that password anyway...?

i gigged with the SJP's on saturday night to a lovely big crowd (including dinah, floopy, Nslider & emivore), the venue was right by a sainsburies so i popped in after the soundcheck and got some of those cookies that i love... i had them tucked behind my stool on stage while we were playing...

i ate one between sainsburies & the venue, me & emivore had one each between the two sets... so that means there are two left... and it's just possible that they are still tucked behind something on the stage @ the round midnight jazz & blues bar...

i won't lie, it is odd having both one's ex-girlfriend and one's girlfriend at the the same gig, odd for me, odd for dinah, odd for emivore...

the gig was triumphant though... a big crowd really pulls something out of us i find...

i'm currently down in brighton to help josiah with her tax return, it turns out she didn't request an activation code before this morning, something i was worried might happen and i thought she'd already done it, so they're sending it out by post and it may or may not arrive before the deadline... anyway, i'm adding up her numbers for her so she can put it in when the time comes...

i've got my own tax return looming, and that'll probably be done on saturday now, what with the moving but ever so slowly moving marking mountain that i'm still under...

and i'm a bit stuck in a game of chess i'm playing with felinity, one of those knight situations where all sorts of forks are available to her, and what do i want to safegaurd...?

oh & i'm in denial about this little computer being just a netbook... it's only a couple of decimal points below my recording computers processing speed (this is 1.6G, that one's 1.8...) and i used to run cubase on older computers...

so i've downloaded a free bit of music software called Kristal... it seems to do what it needs to, although i'm sad that i can't get my old favourite the arcdev dubb bbox working with it...

it made me decide to get hold of cubase... which i duly did last night... and it turns out this copy of the arcdev dubb box doesn't work with that either...?

cubase certainly takes up more of my computers thinking than kristal, but i know cubase (although this is cubase 5, i've been using sx3 for years) so i'm hoping i can use that... i loaded a demo song into cubase, with all the bells and whistles galore and tried to play it and my computer just laughed at me... in a very unpleasant digital distortion kind of laughing way...

ok, later x

brain working

sometimes you only have to write a problem down to solve it...

and in this case, that's what happened...

i put the DVD into my... what do i call that one now?

my music recording computer... the one i used to call my new computer...

the asus DVD has 4 & a bit Gb's on it, so i clear off the appropriate amount of room on my longboat... it's currently taking an age to copy all of those files from the DVD onto my longboat... must take the DVD drive from the older currently not working PC & put it in this one... this DVD drive is a bit rubbish...

(exactly as i wrote that, the humming sound of the rotating DVD stopped, as if to say... insult me will you? well let's see how you like not working at all eh?!!!... thankfully it was only a pause in it's business)

i'm off to the post office with the clock... when i come back it may have finished doing it's thing, it may not, but once it's all on there i'll connect the longboat to the Eee & then begin the next stage...

unless of course i decide to concentrate on the marking for a brief few hours... just to ease my worried mind...

sample tracing new laptop adventures...

here i sit, blogging when i should be taking my poor clock to the post office to send back to the science museum, but i wanted to record this moment...

last week a member @ core arts was talking to me about steely dan, 3 albums in particular... so i got hold of two of these albums - the royal scam & aja...

and today i'm listening to them both... and on aja, there's a track called peg...

so i'm listening to peg & i hear something familiar... it takes me a little while to find what it is in my mind... but then it becomes clear, there's a track on 3 feet high & rising (de la soul's 1st album) that samples the track peg...

hugely pleasing to trace that...,

ok, laptop adventures... i'm blogging on it right now... there's a wireless router waiting for me in a different post office which i'm picking up in the morning... (i think)...

it came with windows 7 starter... and several cool asus things attached to it... the way the touchpad works & an over/under clocking thing...

but windows 7 starter frustrated me, so i got hold of windows 7 home premium, and put that on this machine, all well & good...

but i didn't do it how they expected me to do it, so the groovy asus things have gone...

how do i get them back?

this machine (an asus EeePC 1005A) came with a DVD... (although not a DVD drive)... so maybe those things are on there...

also, since putting W7HP on here i think it's got a bit more glitchy... (i could be wrong), so maybe W7 starter is in fact the right thing for this machine...?

so can i go back to how it was? do i want to?

all this in amongst the marking mountain i'm still climbing...

i'll keep you posted x

more clock doom improv listening rennaisance

slept @ hers last night, came home and the clock was stuck @ 11:45 (am or pm - unclear)

so i plugged in the mains supply and it started working again, i manually put in all the balls needed to push through to 1st 12 O'clock, then the big 1 O'clock tumble,

then set the time right (1:45) then spent a few hours faffing... then i looked at the clock and only ten minutes had passed...

even with the mains supply...

so sadly, that little puppy has to packed up and returned to the science museum...

...............

in other news, i've decided to watch/listen to all the improvisations...

i just saw a couple of odd ones from the middle, i'm right now listening to the very 1st one...

it'll take awhile yes... but that's what i'm gonna do...

oh - and i bought a laptop... quite cheap, more news when it gets here...

x

clock tale hour

so, briefly...

i got home yesterday to find my beloved clock had stopped @ 11:52 am...

this threw me...

i took it apart, i gazed at it, i took out the batteries, put them back in...?

then in the night i got a head ache and it woke me up... the same kind of head ache i'd had yesterday morning on waking...

anyway, i took some ibuprofen and tried to get back to sleep, but to no avail, only when it was getting light, around 7:45 am did i slip back into sleep...

waking @ 10:30, the time i should have been starting teaching...

so i phoned in sick...

i decided to eat @ jai's and see if it made me feel any better, so i was waiting around for 12 O'clock to come and i paid some attention to the clock, in bits...

i plugged in a mains adapter and it started working... strange... the batteries surely wouldn't have run out in a week?

i set the time and left for jai's...

when i came back i decided to try the batteries and it worked also... strange..

then i realised that i'd got it working exactly 24 hours after it had stopped working... 11:52 am...

so now i'm assuming it took a day off sick, like me...

x

clock again

ok, so it's a little noisy...

i'm not sure i'll be able to sleep with it in here, (being the living room) being as the doors have to be open for balthazara to move freely between the outside world... her food... & my bed...

not that she has to have access to my bed, but i do find it comforting, if sometimes a pain... a warm, cat shaped presence curled against me on the other side of the duvet, an excited cat waking me up when she comes in from the outside...

hmm...?

of course emivore is allergic to her, so nights when she's here balthazara is kept out of the bedroom anyway...

but that's not the issue right now...

anyway, tonight i'm going to try it out, leave it on all night... we'll see how it goes... or we'll hear how...

i do love the thing... it has a certain grace, when, every minute, it's arm does one rotation, picking up a ball at the bottom and putting it at the top, also opening a gate to let some balls go through to the bottom, regulating the balls for a reason i don't yet know...

i currently love looking at it, and i love the different way it presents the time to me...

it's possible the novelty will wear off, it's possible i'll get into the habit of taking out the batteries @ night and forgetting to put them back in in the morning...

anything's possible... but i love it right now...

finsihed BSG season 3 tonight, an orgy of viewing which was partly inspired by the marking i need to get on with... a perverse nod towards getting those episodes out of my way, so i can concentrate on the marking...

i think the novel i'm thinking of is also partly to do with not marking...

anyway, BSG season 3 was great, although it ended with a dodgy version of all along the watch tower, but nobody's perfect...

ok bed x

my clock

yesterday, in the basic music skills class i teach @ core arts, my 1st teaching session of the new year, one of the members was singing, and we were all singing what he sang back to him, it's something i do there every week, everyone has a go @ leading (and being copied)...

anyway, this particular member has a habit of doing this a bit longer than the others (and indeed myself) and the style of the vocals (which i'd started) was a sort of singing what was happening in reality...

and he sang that tomorrow (today) the clock he'd ordered would arrive...

and i told him afterwards that i was expecting a clock to be delivered also tomorrow (today)...

anyway, i'd given up hope of it being delivered today, i'd been out doing a few chores (like picking up this years volume of proust, eating in jai shri krishna where the proprietor told me my hair was like Mr T's hair (?), foolishly cycling but not falling off in the snow)



and i was back home, in slippers & dressing gown, watching BattleStarGalactica when there was a knock on the door and it was delivered... & it's doing it's little clocky thing right now...

i love it...

i've wanted this clock for about 20 years... since it used to appear in the innovations catalogue... and then, when i was in the science museum christmas shopping i saw one... and i had to immediately stop myself from getting it for myself - reminding myself that i was shopping for other people that day...

anyway i ordered it from their website between christmas & new year (it was almost immediately on getting back to london from visiting blewbury for christmas) and it's here now...

but i've said that,

oh & look, it's about to turn 6 O'Clock...

i so love this thing...

ha ha ha... i just had to set it to 12.59 and watch it all tumble back to 1:00...

anyway here it is just turning 6:23:



x

scifi

so, ages ago i had an idea for a story, based upon my experience in the shower...

it used to make dinah laugh...

anyway, i've started working it into a novel, just working out a rough outline of the plot, more specific at the beginning and a rough direction with a couple of ending ideas, or rather at least 2 things that i know have to happen...

i've been partly inspired by bad television, such as flash forward, i really like that part of my brain that appreciates a good story and notices when bad TV separates from good story telling, and i was thinking, if i have this finely tuned storytelling nerve, can i therefore write a good story...?

and this is kind of the crux of it... i have a few ideas about the basic story, i have notions about why the characters do or have done things... but can i actually write it?

x

2010 new tune BSG good again

ok,

so i spent last night and most of today with Emivore... we walked on the heath this afternoon, cycled there from hers, lovely to know that's easy...

2 years ago today i improvised a short piece of music, 1st on the piano, then on the rhodes...

the rhodes part i repeated twice, with the original piano part coming in on the repeat...

this tune - 1st january 2008 - is one of the tunes on my myspace...

since i woke today i've been itching to get back here to do a similar thing... but my music making equipment is in disarray and i currently have 15 minutes left of this 1st of january 2010...

one of the differences between me now & me 2 years ago is that it's easier these days when things don't work out how i want them to... at least in this setting... today i don't mind letting it go, the kind of mania that used to fuel the weekly improvisations is a little eased... so there won't be a "1st january 2010"...

having said that i did just set up the juno 6 and got it going into the computer...

over the holidays (both down in seaford with emivore & in blewbury for christmas) i had my DSI mopho with me... without any kind of keyboard around me i was glad to have it... the opportunity to make music... so i made a few nutty loops & i got into the habit of it...

so the other night, (30th/31st december) i couldn't sleep, i got up and started writing down ideas about my scifi novel (more on that later) - i also got out the mopho and programmed a simple thing to keep me company while i wrote... well... simple thing has been floating around for the past couple of days and i really like it... so i'm excited about putting it down into the computer and building something out of it...

in general this is pleasing because i have about 10 different ideas in the mopho, from this last holiday season and from trips i've made before, and it'll be nice to get them all recorded into the computer and work on them (if they deserve working on)...

ok - and lastly, i'm in the middle of BattleStarGalactica season 3 and it's good again... the 1st season was great, the 2nd season lost it, this 3rd season is back on track and it makes me happy... i guess the writers strike in america was to blame for the faulty 2nd season, or am i just making that up? the timings don't necessarily match up.. anyway...

balthazara here x happy new year x