I Am a Dummy

Although I am not a dotard. Trust me on this.

So I got the new Behringer X-Touch Extender and that meant that I had to rewire the whole connection, because I had connected the original X-Touch controller using MIDI, but you can't daisy chain the extender to the original unit using MIDI. I tried the Ethernet connectivity without success and eventually decided to wire it together via USB.

Of course, I did not have the right cables. But I did have a USB extender cable that I could use to make the connection reach from the X-Touch to the computer and then I could daisy chain the extender via USB off the back of the X-Touch. No problem.

Except that it worked, well, intermittently. I finally managed to get everything working and went back upstairs, planning to do some more mixing when I had time.

(This was made more complex by having to do a massive restore to my system to get it working again after the Windows 10 Creators Update broke everything audio-related. Plugins? Ha! We don't need no stinkin' plugins. Yeah, the heck we don't.)

Time passed. Way too much time.

I come downstairs to mix today. I fire up Cubase. I discover that there's an update. Fine. Load it. Start Cubase.

Crap. The X-Touch duo wake up, but none of the controls work, although the faders will move if I move the faders on the MixConsole. This is sort of the glaring opposite of what I want to have happen.

So I mess around with this for about 45 minutes, plugging, unplugging, swearing. Nothing is helping.

And I look and I realize that there is a box sitting on the edge of the console labeled "Amazon Basics". It contains the 16 foot USB cable that I had bought to replace my jerry-rigged cable collection. Apparently, I had dropped it off down here at some time in the intervening months, but had not actually bothered to connect it.

Well, I can connect it now.

And after a power off, power on cycle, everything appears to be working.

Yes, Gretchen, apparently all things can be fixed by One More Cable (TM).

*sigh*

You know, I prefer it when my technological devices just work...

Gravity's Way of Telling You Something's Wrong

At some time after I left to take Katie to the softball game, but before Gretchen and Julie left to follow us, there was apparently a horrible noise somewhere in the house. When I got home, Gretchen mentioned this to me and asked me to look around upstairs. I did and didn't see anything obviously wrong.

Thus, it was not until Gretchen went to hang up the shirts in my closet tonight that the problem was found. The long shelf in my closet had fallen off the wall, making it nearly impossible to open the door.

We have now piled all of my shirts and the contents of the shelf elsewhere. And I need to figure out the best way to fix this, because things are pretty much an unholy mess.

*sigh*

Apparently, I have too much stuff.