one monkey typing

So it went like this...

The new baby gate arrived this morning. I dropped the old baby gate off at UPS over lunch and it is on its way back to Amazon. After work, I decided that I would see if I could quickly install the new gate and it turned out that I *could*, having figured out all of the problematic parts with the previous gate. The gate is now installed on the stairs and should, I think, prevent Calvin from coming upstairs. It does not *seem* to prevent Gretchen from coming upstairs, although it doesn't make the whole process any more pleasant. And Julie needs to see how to operate the gate so that she does not tear it down accidentally. I have called Julie and suggested a demonstration, which she has declined. I worry about this.

Meanwhile, the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter card for the Apollo 8 unit that I bought arrived from Sweetwater. It had come via USPS and the notice said that it was in the mailbox. This seemed unlikely and it was, as all of the mail had been left on the porch, because that box had no hope of fitting in the mailbox. I brought everything in and it was now time for dinner.

We have been keeping Calvin on an extra-long leash to keep him in the family room when he is not in his kennel, but after dinner, I decided we should let him roam free on the first floor and determine whether the new baby gate would keep him off the second floor. This cost us one wooden cooking spoon that had been used for dinner and which Calvin found while counter surfing. Ruby took it from Calvin and it died while I tried to take it away from Ruby without breaking it.

And then a little while later, Calvin went and laid an enormous load in the middle of the living room where he has been previously guilty of doing so. Great.

By now, I am *really* unhappy. I head back into the living room to turn on the lights and clean up the mess.

And I trip on Julie's suitcase, which is still sitting in the passage between the hallway and the living room where it has been for over a week since Windycon. I had been thinking that this stupid thing really needed to go upstairs. I had thought correctly.

Trips to the floor: one.

Swearing and shouting ensued, because I was unhappy with pretty much everyone in the house at this point, including myself. Happily, I don't seem have done any major damage to anything, so I was able to pull myself up on the stairs, get up, and clean up the pile of poop. In multiple trips to the toilet, but no more trips to the floor.

I had thought to drag Calvin to the living room and rub his nose in it, but he was having none of this, so I exiled him to his kennel. Then when I was done cleaning things up, I dragged the kennel full of Calvin to the living room, where he will remain until morning in exile there.

And then Gretchen and I finished watching our TV show. After that, I went to the basement to install the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter into the Apollo 8 unit. This is easier when the unit has not already been installed into the rack so that it can only be accessed from the floor.

Trips to the floor: two, but with more planning this time.

Taking the card out requires a lot of playing with a teeny, tiny Allen wrench (which I only dropped once). Then I discovered I couldn't lever it out with my fingernails, but I got Julie to come in and hand me the bit of metal that had once covered a expansion card slot in the back of a computer. That tool did the job nicely. The new card was installed, the screws put back in, the Thunderbolt cable that needed to go to the computer which I had carefully identified and rerouted was plugged into the Apollo 8, and -- as long as I was on the floor already -- I moved the rest of the cables on the assumption that this was all going to work.

I levered myself off the floor, walked through the procedure for registering the used Apollo 8 unit to my account, and all of that worked. Now, the only thing that needed to be done was to use the new, short Thunderbolt cable to connect the Apollo 8 unit to the Apollo Silver unit.

I called Julie to do this, because it has to be done underneath the console. She plugged the cable in and went back to her computer.

The Apollo Silver unit and the Satellite refused to pop up on the list of devices.

Ok, there is no reason this shouldn't be working, unless Julie has somehow plugged the cable in incorrectly. This means that I will need to inspect the cable install.

Trips to the floor: three. Once more with feeling.

Thunderbolt cables are finicky beasts and it turns out that Julie had twisted the Thunderbolt cable so that the lighting bolt was face up on the Apollo 8 and face down on the Apollo Silver. In her defense, I hadn't removed the cable wrap from the new cable and that was the way that it *wanted* to be plugged in. It was just wrong.

I unwrapped the cable, plugged it in correctly, and stuck my head out from under the console. Three devices were now present in the display. Yay!

I crawled back up into my chair, fiddled with things a bit more, discovered that all of my plugins were now recognized, and declared victory. I fired up Cubase, pulled up a recent project, and hit the playback button.

Everything sounded good. Very good. Probably better than before, which is what one should expect from the newer unit with the better converters.

So this project was a success.

I am going to go take some Aleve now.

I was recording some scratch tracks yesterday up in my office and I have come to sing the praises of inexpensive gear, because the things you can do with inexpensive gear nowadays are pretty impressive.

Now, you need to have a computer and a DAW to run on it. You can get free DAWs, like Audacity. You can get cheap DAWs like Reaper ($60 for the personal license). Personally, I use Cubase and if I'm recommending a version of Cubase, I recommend Cubase Artist, because the must-have feature is lanes (or comping), which makes it easy to assemble a clean take from multiple takes that all contain flaws, but where you managed to do the right thing at least *once* for every note that you recorded. Other sufficiently good DAWs will have a similar feature (and I note that Reaper seems to have added this in version 7, so good for them!), but this is such a time saver that I wouldn't use a DAW without it. (I also note that the commercial Reaper license is $225, while Cubase Artist is $329 when not discounted, so...)

You need a microphone to record with. I recorded my scratch tracks using an old AKG C1000s, which is my favorite Swiss Army Knife of a mic, because it does a lot of things well enough and it isn't very expensive. Well, the brand-new version is apparently $324. When I bought mine, it was $100. And you can still buy a used one for less than $100 if you shop around.

Then you need to get that microphone's signal into your computer, which means you want an audio interface. My current favorite inexpensive interface is the Universal Audio Volt 2, which is selling for $179. This gets you *two* microphone or line inputs, which is a lot more flexible than one, even if I only used one for my scratch tracks. And the second microphone input only costs you $40, because the Volt 1 is $139. And it comes with a stack of very nice plugins from Universal Audio plus a copy of their Luna recording software. Unfortunately, the comping feature in Luna is not nearly as nice as the one in Cubase.

There are a lot of other nice audio interfaces available with similar capabilities at similar prices, but this is *my* lecture and I like my Volt, so I'll just continue.

I have become very, very fond of the Universal Audio plugin library. Happily, you can *rent* access to it, which is much cheaper than buying it -- although you can also buy huge bundles of plugins for cheap now for much less than I paid for them. And so I recorded one track with both guitar and voice through that AKG C1000s and the Volt 2 into Cubase, then massaged it with nothing except the Universal Audio plugins, plus the Maximizer that comes with Cubase, and got my scratch tracks done and sounding pretty good in short order.

One of my hobby horses is the "Democratization of Technology", where things that were ungodly expensive and hard to do get easier and cheaper to do as advanced tech gets pushed down to prices that lower-end users can afford. And this is a fine example of that, because recording technology is remarkably cheap nowadays.

Figuring out how to use it? That's the hard part. :)

And if you want to see what one of these scratch tracks sounds like, here's one that I posted last year that used the same setup. Wind and Water

Things I learned today, some of which I should have already known.

1) Before buying a new power strip, check to see if the GFCI that it is plugged into needs to be reset. If you bought the new power strip anyway, do this before unboxing and unwrapping it. (I will find a use for the new power strip some time.)

2) It appears that a Universal Audio Apollo unit with a Thunderbolt 2 interface card in it will not work on a Windows 11 system equipped with Thunderbolt 4, no matter what the very nice Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter thinks. This can be fixed by buying and installing a Thunderbolt 3 interface card in the Apollo system.

3) If you move the Monitor plugs back from the new Apollo unit to the old one, but don't move the ones that are attached to Line 1 and Line 2 *and* you have managed to set up your old Apollo system so that you are actually monitoring through Line 1 and Line 2 no matter what Cubase thinks is happening, you will not get any sound out through the speakers. This is fixed by getting back down underneath the console and moving the other pair of wires.

Things that I already knew:

1) I hate getting up off the ground after rewiring underneath the console.

Ah, well. Another learning experience. I'll be back on the ground installing the new interface card when it arrives. And then we'll see how everything works. :)

Today is garbage day, so the trash cans needed to be removed from the side of the garage where I park. Also, the weather didn't suck, which meant that this was a splendid time to unload the van and get all of the Dodeka boxes back onto their shelf. Accordingly, I parked in the driveway after lunch.

I moved the brooms that sit in front of the bookshelf where the gridwall sits and looked at the bottom shelf. There were two boxes of ancient peel-and-stick vinyl tile that had come to the house with us. It struck me that no one in the world really wanted that tile. So I tossed it in the trash, which is now *much* heavier. Then I started looking at other things on the shelf to see what I could dispose of.

Do I *really* need a large box full of Chicon V reimbursement forms? I think not! Or credit card slips for a imprinter? Heck, no!

I did find some things that might be useful that we had forgotten that we had, like some craft boxes designed to be painted that Gretchen had purchased at one time or another and that I am sure that the kids will want to get their hands on. And things that were less useful, but still interesting, like a World War II bayonet.

And finally, there was the bag that contained the rest of my coin collection, removed from the albums that it had once occupied and placed into rolls -- if it wasn't in coin sleeves. The odd coins were mostly in sleeves. A two cent piece, three cent nickel and silver pieces, a half dime, various other very old coins -- although I didn't find the Flying Eagle cent that I thought that I had bought at one time or another. But it's possible that had lurked just out of my price range, much like the St. Gaudens $20 gold piece that I could have purchased for $45 way back when.

It's nice to have found it. Some time, I need to show the kids what Dad used to do for fun.

Coin collecting was a lot *more* fun when you could collect coins from circulation. Sadly, that's pretty much an obsolete practice unless you want to collect a lot of clad coins.

Which I suppose is a valid hobby.

Still. :)

The new power strip arrived late enough that I didn't mess with it today. It will probably become Saturday's project, because tomorrow it's back to work. Work is going to be happy to see me. :)

The new CD flip racks also arrived. They look good and will, I hope, be durable enough to survive in our environment. They'll ride in the book box with the old flip racks and the three or four remaining copies of Roberta Rogow's Rec-Room Rhymes that make up the last of our songbook inventory. Paper, alas, has fallen out of fashion in our digital age.

In the meantime, I have written the checks for all but one of the CD purchases that came by mail. In the last case, I'm waiting for an amount and an address which I hope to have soon.

Sales at Windycon ended up being ok, largely due to having sold a bunch of the new "Amy & Me" album. Yay! Clearly, I need to do more albums with Amy... :)

Today was the final day for Windycon 51. As nearly as I can tell, everything went well. And I had a really fine time at the filk last night.

The news from Closing Ceremonies is that we are moving to a new hotel next year, the Hyatt Regency O'Hare over in Rosemont. Along with this move in space, we are moving in time, as next year's convention will be on the second weekend of *October*, October 9-11, 2026. Windycon was in October many years ago and is back in October again.

Whee!

Things have gone well so far. Opening Ceremonies were fun and Tim did a great job as Toastmaster.

Time to go to bed now. :)

The committee and guest banquet was tonight, so I headed down to the Windycon hotel. We sorted out a few small things and now I'm at home, the minivan is mostly packed, and tomorrow I will head back to the hotel.

Gretchen will follow as soon as school lets out.

Go team!