Bill Roper's Journal

K and I got several errands done today, including lunch at Olive Garden. The junior Midkiffs are arriving tomorrow for a visit, along with the junior Roman. Jen won't join us tomorrow, because her dad could be doing better, so we will continue to play that by ear. In the meantime, I have purchased a blender on a run to Sam's Club, so we are equipped for Kade's broken jaw.

I have misplaced the receipt for my new guitar (which the insurance agent would like to have for our file) and have spent a moderate amount of time trying to turn it up in the bedroom and the office. So far, no luck, but I have gotten rid of a *lot* of dead paper from the file drawer for electronics and appliances that we no longer own.

The one ancient receipt that I haven't gotten rid of is the invoice for my very first IBM PC from 1983. I ended up dropping a bit more than $7000 on that once I had it fully kitted out. It makes me feel better about what I spend on computers nowadays. :)

But this behemoth had a third-party 10 MB hard drive, a whopping 640 KB of RAM, and an 8087 math coprocessor. It *didn't* have a color graphics card, as they could not be found at that time for love or money in Chicago. I ended up buying six of them from an IBM store in Houston when I was visiting my relatives over Christmas that year...

I went upstairs to do some light cleaning and putting things away. Part of this was making a box of dead electronics to go to recycling. As I was tossing things into that box, I found my old laptop that I had given to K and that she had given back to me well before she left for college. The power brick was with it, so I figured I'd plug it in and see what shape it was in.

Happily, it powered up and took a charge, so that was a good start. But it turns out this laptop is just a wee bit too old to be upgraded to Windows 11 and with only 8 GB of RAM and no further expansion capabilities, probably not worth fighting to upgrade. It is, however, a perfectly fine machine for certain purposes.

So I have installed Linux Mint on it, which is my first time doing this. (I have Zorin OS on a much older laptop that I mostly haven't touched in years. I looked at Zorin first and decided that Mint would be a better choice.)

The install was easy, although I had to use a different tool than the one they had suggested to make the bootable USB stick for the install. Happily, Rufus works for this.

And now, everything is up and running and I'm able to access the Internet and even post updates.

Like this one. :)

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.

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. :)

I had expected to be tired after Windycon, so I arranged to take Monday off. This was clearly the case, because both Gretchen and I managed to keep falling asleep during the second half of Tracker last night as we were watching it on the DVR. Well, the good news is that it was recorded, so we were able to watch it tonight and understand who the heck this character was who had popped up by the end of the episode.

The other reason for taking Monday off was that I *also* had Tuesday off for Veterans' Day and connecting everything together for one long session of getting things done seemed like a good idea. I have many things to get done.

The first was catching up on the convention laundry. I popped that into the washer before heading out for lunch and a couple of stops to grab stuff for dinner. When I finally got home, it was nearly time for Gretchen to go pick up Julie from school, so the right order of business was to put the load of wash in the dryer, fire up the studio computer, and install the new version of Cubase and the various plugins that I had picked up from Universal Audio with the latest upgrade.

This is easier when the computer fires up. After a bit of messing around, I realized that it wasn't just the computer being stubborn. It was everything plugged into the particular power strip I was poking at, which was apparently dead, dead, dead.

(Now thinking about it, it's just possible that the GFCI had triggered on that outlet, but thinking about it some more, there are two power strips plugged into that outlet and I'm pretty sure the other was still delivering power, based on what lights I saw on the assorted bits of equipment. These power strips / surge protectors are about as old as the studio, so having one fail isn't a great surprise.)

Anyway, I ordered a new power strip / surge protector that should be here tomorrow and will then start trying to figure out which plug needs to come out of the wall, because all of the cords are running under the console. In the meantime, I figured that I would unplug and remove the old Focusrite Octopre unit that's going to be replaced by the used Apollo 8 unit that I bought from Jeff Bohnhoff. Unplugging was easy, getting back up off the floor less so, getting the unit to slide *up* and out of the rackmount was simply not happening without a second person there.

Before dinner, Julie was down in the basement and was good enough to push the unit up so I could extract it. Then it was finally time to *open* Jeff's unit, which had been sitting in its package for weeks. That was easy enough. The unit looks to be in excellent condition and has now been installed into the rack. Assuming that the new surge protector arrives tomorrow, I'll get it plugged in and wired up.

And maybe I'll install Cubase 15...

I'm prepping things to get ready for OVFF. I don't expect any major problems, but it's good to keep knocking off tasks, especially because work wants me down in the Loop next Tuesday and Wednesday.

One of the things that I did was to buy a new watch. My Seiko Kinetic was over 20 years old and the battery died months ago. I have missed having a watch. You'd think it would be easy enough to get that battery replaced, but it's a unique design for that watch and the entire watch has to be disassembled to get at it, because it was originally a capacitor that went many years between failures. Then Seiko "improved it" by switching to a lithium rechargeable battery. But since you don't know how long the battery has been sitting on the shelf, you don't know how long it's going to last. The second-to-last replacement lasted a year, which is ludicrous. The current replacement lasted maybe three years. And Seiko has abandoned the whole line.

So I have a new watch now. It is a Citizen Eco-Drive that looks very much like my old watch. The only problem is that I need to get a link put in the band to make it just a bit looser. The nearest watch shop that can do this repair is closed on Monday.

Did I mention that Tuesday and Wednesday I am supposed to be in the Loop?

But it's nice having a watch again. :)

A friend is coming by later this week to work on my pinball machine and (with any luck) get it working again after six years of lying fallow. He asked if I had a soldering iron.

Well, I *have* a soldering iron. *Finding* the soldering iron is another matter altogether.

Tonight, I ransacked the laundry room where the tool shelf sits, hunting for my soldering iron.

I didn't find it. But on the floor, I found an old Archer soldering iron, still attached to its card. I'm going to assume that it works. But there was no solder to be found there.

I went to look in the studio. I threw away several cable envelopes that should have departed a while ago and eventually discovered a spool of solder.

But still no soldering iron. Why the solder was there and the soldering iron wasn't bothers me.

Not enough to keep looking though.

In other news, the low tire pressure light on my dash went off on the way home from the baseball game on Thursday night. This led to my looking for a reasonable place to put air in your tires, which is rather more of a problem than it used to be.

Last night, I gave up and ordered a battery-powered air compressor.

Today, my tires are full.

And I have an air compressor for the next time this happens.

I am starting to add more and more categories to my Square inventory. The advantage of this is two fold:

First, if anyone asks what CDs I have by a particular person, I can pull up their category.

Second, when I am trying to place reorders, if I have put them in a category by the person that I get them from, then I can get a quick list of everything that I might need from them.

I have a *whole* lot more categorization to do, but I am making progress.

Slowly.

The dog training lesson was canceled tonight (sadly, because the instructor was sick, which is a shame in general and more of a shame because she seems to be a really nice person). This gave me the opportunity to shoot down to the studio and touch up the mixes.

I then gave them the *briefest* of possible reviews while on the way out and back to pick up Chinese food for dinner. Two of the mixes are failures and need to be touched up again, but I know in which directions. The other 21 mixes have not failed yet. :)

Tomorrow, I will listen to the whole thing in more detail. And we'll see how many other mixes fail.

I recorded replacement vocals for two of the three tracks for "Amy & Me" tonight, leaving one to go. Yay, me!

Recording the final track won't happen tomorrow night, because the priority mission is taking Calvin the Dog to his first puppy obedience training lesson. I have my fingers crossed, recognizing that no miracle will happen in one lesson. Right now, I just need the puppy to stop terrorizing my younger child...

One of the other things I did this evening was to remove the X-Touch Extender that refused to power up at all when I was in the studio on Monday and replace it with an open-box X-Touch Extender that arrived today. Happily, it has powered up correctly and is doing the things that a working piece of gear does.

I am still not sure what part inside the older piece of gear went wonky, but it is surely not something that I have time to look into right now, because I have an album to finish. :)