Bill Roper's Journal

Back to the studio again and just about to start recording. We'll see how much I get done.

A note about the new computer. The previous computer, which is still on the network and which needs to keep its unique name, is "Thunderbolt", although the Thunderbolt card that prompted the name has been removed.

The *new* computer is named "Cei-u".

If you know why, you will know exactly why that is appropriate.

The new machine is up and running and producing sound from Cubase. I *think* that I've loaded all of the plugins that I should have on the box, although the list seems shorter than before. That may be because I haven't loaded a few plugins that I never use that I picked up as freebies. And that is just as well.

The old box has had the CMOS beaten into submission again and a new battery is now installed. I removed the Thunderbolt and Firewire cards and have it sitting in one corner of the studio, powered up and waiting to see if I need to use Remote Desktop to go find anything on it.

But the studio is up and running again. And that makes me very happy.

And very relieved.

For a variety of reasons, I was later getting down to the studio to start recording than I'd hoped. I fired up the Apollo unit, woke up the computer, and discovered that they were not talking to each other. Again.

I unplugged and replugged the Thunderbolt cable with no improvement. I rebooted the computer. Same story.

I can't get work done with the machine behaving this way. It was now time to go to my backup plan and build a new computer. Today.

I went to the Micro Center website and threw together a configuration based on the research that I did last weekend. It has twice as much storage and RAM as the current machine, because it didn't cost that much more. I wanted the same case that I had for the old machine, but Micro Center doesn't carry Antec cases and the soonest that I could get one of the Silent series cases here from either Amazon or Newegg was about two weeks which was not any help for the time frame that I'm looking at, so I grabbed a Fractal Design case and am hoping that it is reasonably quiet, given the minimum number of moving parts. If not, I can always cannibalize an old case and move things around, but that was not going to be today's project.

The one thing that I couldn't get was a CD-R drive, but I *can* get one of those from Amazon to show up here tomorrow. I placed the order and tore out for Micro Center so I could get the parts and get back home tonight.

It took about two hours (and a modicum of swearing and dropped screws), but the machine is now assembled, save for the optical drive which can easily be popped in tomorrow.

And then we'll fire it up and see how it works. Which will be tomorrow evening's project.

I am going to buy the old machine from Dodeka for whatever it is worth and use that to help defray the cost of the new box. Gretchen is going to need a new desktop to replace the one that is ten plus years old (the previous studio computer) and which will absolutely, positively never run Windows 11. This machine is wretched overkill for what she'll do with it, but that's ok. :)

Just for those observing, the total cost of this build will be well less than half of the cost of some of the fancy pre-built recording computers that I could buy. And it has a fancy gaming motherboard, because that got me the right combination of ports on the back.

The best thing about it is that I can have it tomorrow.

I hope...

We have been trying for a couple of weeks to catch the raccoon who has broken into our attic. Two separate traps on the roof did not help, so the animal control service removed those and replaced them with a single trap that blocked the entrance/exit that the raccoon had been using. When the raccoon came out last night, she went straight into the trap where she could be collected today.

Sadly, this was a lactating female raccoon, indicating a high chance of babies in the attic. We have not yet heard from the babies, who ought to be annoyed that Mama Raccoon did not come back last night, but this isn't dispositive. The guy from the service looked in the high attic today and did not find anything. He will look around again tomorrow. The trap remains in place to prevent anyone else from entering and to catch anything else that might be trying to leave.

Meanwhile, Julie's desktop computer which I cleaned all of the dust out of about a month ago started making more noise again and reportedly had a mild funny smell about it. I determined that the likely cause was the power supply, given where Julie had localized the noise to. I figured that I would be blowing out dust again at a minimum, so I went on Amazon and ordered an air gun that is designed to blow dust out of computers.

It is good that I mentioned this to Gretchen, as she had ordered one of these for me for my birthday. Happily, I was able to cancel my order. I *did* decide to order some case fans, because they are cheap and potentially useful. And then I thought it over and decided that the right thing to do is to replace the power supply.

I dug up specs for Julie's system and went on line at Micro Center and ordered a slightly larger (and semi-modular!) power supply. Mission BBQ had been good enough to send me an email offering me a free sandwich for my birthday, so I went down there and had dinner (sans Gretchen, whose stomach is bothering her) and from there to Micro Center, where I picked up the new power supply and headed home by way of Culver's so that I could pick up some dinner for everyone else. Sadly, they were out of the soup that Gretchen had hoped to get and the alternatives seemed like bad ideas.

When I got home, Julie brought her computer upstairs and I opened it up. At this point, Gretchen suggested that it was a good time to give me my birthday present. And this made sense, because there was a lot of dust. The gun blew it out in a giant puff or two.

I got the old power supply out. The new power supply went in, mostly easily, and only required three connections to be made. None of the modular cables were required right now, so they can be saved for later projects.

And when Julie took the computer downstairs and plugged it in, it powered up and was blissfully quiet. :)

Windows 11 stubbornly wants to store all of my default folders (Documents, Downloads, etc.) in the OneDrive folder. I want them under my users directory.

I am gradually winning this battle, but I want to strangle someone at Microsoft.

Today was mostly spent trying to get the new work laptop configured. This would have been easier if any of the instructions on line had been updated. As it was, I made a small mistake and ended up falling down a rabbit hole of mismatched documentation.

Ah, well. Tech support got back to me after 10 PM tonight (*sheesh*) and the problem is now sorted out, I think. At least things *seem* to be working.

I expect to spend a lot of time in the studio this weekend. After we got the trash out tonight, I excused myself to go downstairs and install the new software that I'll be wanting to use. That's happening now, I hope.

And, if not, I'll try again. :)

Gretchen sent me upstairs early while she stayed downstairs to watch the Dancing With the Stars finale. This gave me time to do all the things that I didn't do this afternoon, including paying the bills and recording some scratch tracks.

The scratch track recording turned out to be really, really simple once I brought the laptop upstairs. I plugged the Focusrite Scarlett Solo into the laptop, dropped the stand for the mic into the desk mount, connected everything together, pulled up the lyric sheets on the computer in front of me and sang. It doesn't get a whole lot simpler than that.

(Ok, it *could* get simpler, but it certainly doesn't get any simpler without spending money. And I have spent enough money this week, because aside from buying myself a new computer, I started buying Christmas presents for the rest of the family. My credit card is *smoking*...)

The case for the new computer arrived today instead of the originally anticipated Friday. It's been sitting in Hodgkins since Monday morning, so I can only guess that they got tired of looking at it. :)

Since all of the parts were now here, I decided to start assembling the computer this evening. This is always a new adventure, even when working with parts similar to ones you've used before, but everything is now wired up with the exception of the reset switch and the hard disk light, which is going to require a pair of tweezers to get the connectors in place. Asus motherboards used to come with a "Q-connector", which would allow you to wire these finicky parts to a single connector and then ram the whole assemblage into place, but that is apparently no longer the plan. And a shame it is too.

Tomorrow, I will get the last of those connectors in place, put the sides back on, and then haul it upstairs and connect it to the KVM switch so that I can boot it up and start loading BIOS updates and OS. And then a *lot* of software.

We'll see how this goes.

There are times when the right thing to do for the moment is nothing. I think this is one of them.

Having installed the TPM 2.0 module on my nine year old motherboard, I *could* try to walk around the CPU restriction to upgrade the machine to Windows 11. But Windows 10 is supported until October of next year, so there's no great *rush* to be doing that. And there are other things that I could be doing with my time (*cough* mixing *cough*) rather than messing with a system that's currently stable.

I had considered putting together a new system over Christmas break. But while putting the system together isn't that hard, getting all of the software installed is a small nightmare. And do I really need to be spending nearly $2000 when Intel is still getting their act together on the new generation of CPUs? Maybe not the best choice I could make.

So the right answer is "Do not mess with it." This is usually the right answer, but doesn't scratch my itch to get something *done*. Mind you, given the recent outlays for dryer, fence, phone, and TV, you would think *enough* things were *done*, but apparently not.

There is only one thing to do.

I need to buy a guitar. That's it...