Nanowrimo update

Well the first thing I should say is that they seem to have gotten their server problems under control. Why it took as long as it did is beyond me, but at least they didn’t just throw up their hands and say, ‘live with it’. The site is responsive and not at all frustrating now. [...]

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Hewlett Packard Customer Support, part 2

Well, I finally have gotten sick enough of lugging around a 22" LCD monitor just so I can use my laptop, so I went back to HP’s online tech support chat and they’re going to send me a fedex box in 2-3 days so I can send the laptop it in for repair. Timeframe: 7-9 business days [...]

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Hewlett Packard Customer Support….

…rules. That’s right. Go figure. A few days ago the screen on my laptop computer darkened. First the left side of the screen went considerably darker than the right, and then after a while it went altogether dark. If you turned off all the lights in the room and jiggled the power cable you could barely [...]

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The Week In Review

…got myself a new tool for the studio… a Korg Padkontrol.   Got it used, a price I couldn’t pass up ($104 delivered.) Here’s a demo video. Didn’t come with the software but I don’t need a bunch of demo versions anyway. Works great. Now all I need is a used snare stand to use [...]

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… And the Verdict is:

It’s a go for tomorrow. There were a couple little issues that I think can be dealt with by some tweaking of the OS and making sure some extraneous nonsense is turned off. I just packed up everything (except the laptop itself, on which I will be watching a DVD here in a bit as [...]

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Testing the New HP Laptop for Recording

So, now that I have the laptop all tricked out, I’ve installed Sonar Producer 7 (x64), which is the recording/mixing application I use, and patched it to the latest build. The purpose? To run the following test: hooking it up to the Motu 828mkii, creating a 16-track 48khz/24bit project, and recording a half hour of [...]

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Loading the new Laptop

So, the first thing one does when one buys a new turnkey computer (i.e., one that somebody else built, loaded an OS on, and configured for you) like this laptop is, one un-installs all the bloatware and ‘trial versions’ that came on it. Second thing one does, if one knows how, is optimize the OS [...]

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I spoke too soon

Yeah, the laptop is entirely dead. It was running on batteries. It won’t charge back up; something in the power plug area is broken as well. That tears it. It’s too old and there’s too much wrong with it to have it repaired, so…. I have to buy a new one. Or, I get to buy a [...]

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The Good News Is…

Yet again, the continental congress has voted in favor of independence. Yay. The bad news is, at intermission, I dropped my laptop (that I’m typing on now) down the ladder from the raised pit orchestra platform and onto the concrete floor. About 5 feet total. As I’m typing on it you will have discerned that [...]

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Oh Frabjuous Joy, one more ‘gain.

The back story: The DVD burner on my laptop quit. It wouldn’t seek, spin, read, burn, or do dishes. All it would do was the little light would blink and it would slow down the boot cycle by, oh, about a zillion times. This is the second time this laptop has had the drive die. Now, I like [...]

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