The Cookie Contingent have returned, saying the booth at Randall’s in the morning hadn’t done that well, but M cleaned up at the Association square dance this afternoon. Now M has installed herself in her room to watch something-or-another on PBS Kids, and L has gone back out to buy a present for M’s birthday, which is this coming Tuesday, when she’ll be nine.
The way you’re doin’ just ain’t fnord.
L and M have gone off to run Girl Scout Cookie booths all day, leaving me at home and afoot.
Guess I’ll just have to get on with ripping all those LPs in my “to-do” list . . . .
1969, and comes shortly after his “Classical Gas” period. (This album has a stripped-down re-recording of it, which I don’t like that much. It needs orchestral support.) It also contains another two parts of his five-part Dada Trilogy (“The Tomato Vendetta” and “The Exciting Accident’). Now all I have to do is find a recording of “(Whistle)Hear,” and I’ll have the whole thing.
It doesn’t look like much, but this is a second pressing of Nanci Griffith’s first album (the Featherbed release, 1982). While my luck has been in lately, I’m still not holding out a lot of hope that I’ll ever find the B. F. Deal first pressing from 1978.
Yet one more I never thought I’d get my hands on. This is Steven Fromholz’s very first album, released by ABC in 1969 and immediately relegated to obscurity by a management shakeup a few weeks later. The album’s never been re-released, and copies are both scarce and kinda pricey unless you get really lucky (and get lucky I did; this cost me $3.99 when it should have cost $35). This is the album that has the Texas Trilogy on it, covered by Lyle in 1991 on Step Inside This House.
It’s not all been incoming, either; to make room for my recent purchases, I unloaded all my Otis Redding, all my Van Morrison (just don’t like either one of ’em’s voice), a Clancy Brothers, a Harry Chapin, Free, Joe Cocker, and Jerry Lee. Gotta get rid of something to make room. Next possibility for the chopper: some, at least of Merle Haggard. I don’t like him as much as I got recordings. The Jimmie Rodgers album stays, but everything else is out there.
About 30,000 pounds of mashed fnord.
The rest of the additions to my music collection since summer.
OH, yes . . . Old Bach and Old Biggs, playing a not-quite-so-old organ. I grabbed this one for two reasons: first, I didn’t have a recording of the D minor Toccata on the organ, and second, because of King Thomas (I know I’ve told that story before, even though it’s really L’s story).
“I wish I was in Austin, in the Chili Parlor bar / Drinkin’ Mad Dog margaritas, and not carin’ where you are. . . .”
“I loved you from the get-go, and I’ll love you ’til I die / I loved you on the Spanish Steps, the day you said goodbye.”
I don’t quite know how Guy Clark, who’s been happily married to Susanna since the ’70s, can still manage to write songs of such raw, emotional love lost. But damn, can he do it.
I kinda got on a Traffic kick a while back, and picked these up as thirty years after-the-fact. Fortunately, they don’t seem to have been injured by the long wait.
Butch is . . . well, Butch. He’s by far the most prolific songwriter of the Lubbock Mafia, and the most idiosyncratic.
I missed this when it came out, for some reason. It’s a bit up-and-down, even for Lyle, but I’ll forgive a lot in an album that has Willis Alan’s “That’s Right (You’re Not from Texas) (But Texas Loves You Anyway)” on it.
If I didn’t have the evidence right here in front of me, I would have told you that it was impossible for Guy Clark to make a mediocre album . . . but this one sure is. I don’t think much of the songs, and I sure don’t think much of Rodney Crowell’s production here.
OK, this one is a rehash of material from the first several albums on RCA. That’s all right; I mostly don’t own them, so I’m as happy to have a compilation.
Bliss it was in the dawn of doo-wop dancin’. Fnord.
Diving headfirst into a clean OS reinstall on Gráinne at the Land of Færie. Nonetheless, here I am doing exactly that.
Not only am I doing that, I’m working on the surveillance camera control unit, which blew out its hard drive. (We’ve never picked up one of the Folk on camera, but one never knows, do one? And we have picked up burglars on camera before.)
He won’t be leavin’ town ’til he can cop some fnord.
From Half Price Books and Waterloo Records (mostly from Half Price):
awRIGHT . . . Fromholz’s solo debut, released in ’76 at the height of the Progressive Country Scare.
Damn . . . if I was gonna have to have just one Stan Rogers album, this’d be the one. Almost every track on here is essential.
Classic high-style Dan Hicks. He swings!
I haven’t listened to this yet, but it has promise just because of who’s on it (i.e., most of Enya’s siblings).
Haven’t listened to this one either, but Norman Blake has been a Name for years in folk/old-time music circles.
Homer and Jethro were badly underrated for much of their career. Get past the cornball and hokum in their act, and you discover that they were both good jazz players, especially Jethro, who had a fluid, Django-influenced solo style. Fortunately Steve Goodman picked up on this, and both toured and recorded with Jethro in the years after Homer’s death.
Along with Silly Wizard (see below), the Battlefield Band provided a model for many céilídh bands then and since.
Hmm. This may not survive in my collection that long; the whole thing screams “contractual obligation album”. Annie Ross abruptly left the group in ’62 to try to beat heroin addiction, and Lambert and Hendricks had to find someone in a hurry to take her place. They found Yolande Bavan, a Sri Lankan singer/actress, and carried on for another two years, but Bavan, though talented, just wasn’t Annie Ross.
But I’m sure they meant well.
Silly Wizard wrote the book and cut the demos for a thousand céilídh bands to come after them. This is their second release.
British folk-pop, emphasis on the folk side. My main complaint about Pentangle is that Jacqui McShee had this breathy, wispy little soprano that makes the lyrics bleedin’ unintelligible, and all of John Renbourn’s and Bert Jansch’s playing put together can’t make up for that.
Folk-pop chapter the next, with two of Steeleye Span’s founders putting out a quiet, not-electric but not-quite-acoustic-either disc. Chronologically, this comes right after Hark! The Village Wait.
Recorded on Joe’s 1980 tour of the UK opening for The Clash, this album catches him rocking harder than ever, backed by a band that included both Ponty Bone and Lloyd Maines.
A bonus EP enclosed in the previous release; more live Panhandle hard rock with a faint country tinge.
Wow. Great early Guy Clark—not quite as shining as his debut, but full of solid songs, including the title track, an ode to the jillion or so good cooks you can find in the state.
Hard to find on the now-defunct Watermelon label, and even harder to find on that label in vinyl. This catches one of the best Lizard line-ups ever, with mandolin wizard Paul “Tex” Sweeney right out in front.
MA-jor grooves going on, this album. You got two hits for The 5th Dimension and one for Blood, Sweat & Tears, recorded right here at the source.
Usually cited by fans as Laura’s best album, my jury’s still out on it. This album isn’t a casual listen.
I dunno what to think about this yet. I wasn’t really expecting the Spanish In an album of covers, coming from such a naturally strong songwriter.
(The rest of what I got will have to wait for another post; this is getting too long.)
Henry has never been anything but the second prize. Fnord.
More than a year ago, I set out on a Project at the Empire: to create a server that would store drive images of all the systems in the Auric hardware lab. The systems are checked out regularly for use by Auric techs and escalations managers, both of which groups need them to try to re-create and reproduce customers’ reported issues. The point of my project was to make it possible for the lab managers to restore each system’s original software image once that system came back home, and to have a known, fixed starting point for a tech when he began to work on a system.
The project took me a bit more than a year to complete, working in hours stolen from other things (lunches worked through, time stayed after off the clock, multi-tasking). In October I called final completion to the field work, and started trying to write up the project to get my first internal Business Process Improvement certification (Empire jargon: “BPI yellow belt”), with some advice from Red Tanya. This part hasn’t gone along very far because in my current job, stealing time to write is much harder than it was to steal time to work on systems.
Even without the documentation, though, the lab managers were happily using the Ghost server (named from the software imaging product we use, Norton Ghost) to reimage systems every day. And everything was fine, until our departmental equipment manager managed to scrounge a larger and more powerful server for the lab’s use. And this meant everything on the server had to be migrated, and I was the only one available with the knowledge to do it.
All of this doing around coincided with a huge upsurge in my regular workload, and for weeks I couldn’t find time to see about the server ’cos the time wasn’t there. One day I tried just physically migrating the drives where the images live into the new server, but Ghost couldn’t find them.
So there things sat until today, a quiet day when my regular workload was completely caught up for the first time in MONTHS, and I declared this to be Ghost Server Migration Day. I rummaged around in the Symantec online knowledge base and found the articles that told how you really went about migrating Ghost from one machine to another, and dove in.
It wasn’t straightforward, but it’s rare anything is, when you do it the first time—and this was my first time. Eventually, after a lot of flailing around with drive controllers and too-short cabling, and some bad language for good measure, I got all the drives back into the original server and started following the directions I had.
This part, once I followed the directions and had Ghost’s database backed up, went very smoothly. I moved over the drives, moved over the extra cards (the SAS controller and a secondary NIC), connected everything, started the new server, and ran the restore routine. And as soon as that was through—hey, here’s Norton finding my database of two-hundred-and-some systems! And it can see where the images are stored! And everything is associating correctly!
So the Shanghai Ghost server is once more live. I’m still not completely out of the woods, ’cos I haven’t yet written the batch file to copy the new server’s public encryption key onto each of the clients, but that’s a relatively small part. The heavy lifting is done, and there’s a Ghost (server) in Shanghai again.
Strawberry apricot pie. Fnord.
The bread machine does quite a nice job of mixing and kneading the dough for dinner rolls. My first batch ever just came out of the oven, and they make ham rolls fit for Esme Weatherwax and Gytha Ogg.
My bigger portable hard drive, the 250GB one that’s got all my jukebox-for-work music on it, is failing and has to be sent in for replacement. Fortunately, this is covered by warranty so I’m not out $125, but it’s still vexatious that I have to mail the drive to a depot in McAllen, of all places, and then wait for them to send me a new one.
I discovered all this last night when I went to convert the 250GB drive to being my home-network backup host, moving the music to my older 100GB external drive to carry with me. (Other people have portative organs; I have a portative hard drive.) The big drive started throwing several kinds of I/O and read errors as I began moving the music around, and a fast diagnostic run said ”O HAI ur drive is made of FAIL DST long test. Replace (y/n)?” So I called Seagate customer service this morning, got an RMA number, and now I gotta scare up a suitable box to send it to McAllen.
Meantime, I’m salvaging as much as I can from the big drive (rather a lot of it, actually) and then I’ll re-rip what didn’t make the transfer, from the original CDs. I don’t have any downloaded music at all, so even if the bigger drive dies completely before I get the transfers done, I haven’t lost anything really significant.
(And for you music geeks? I’m moving the .WMA files from volume WURLITZER to volume ROCK-OLA.)
In other musical news, I’ve finally worked out a method to rip my 78s to CD without having to beg or buy a turntable that still goes to 78. Credit where it’s due, N5RED was the one who told me the answer months ago, but I dismissed his solution as too difficult. Turned out it wasn’t really too difficult, but it did have to wait until I stumbled across an audio editing package that would allow me to alter both the speed and pitch of a recording.
So the final solution became: record the 78s at 45, which sounds lugubrious while you’re doing it, then run the recording through WavePad at 173.3% (the mathematical ratio of 45 to 78), then feed the intermediate file through an audio spectral noise reduction filter to get rid of the surface hiss. The actual file processing takes only a couple of minutes, and the final recording quality is startlingly good.
I’ll do the creams. Fnord.
Pommeroy’s Vin Trés Ordinary-plus-grenadine-plus-Topo Chico-over-ice equals a very acceptable wine cooler.
Get your Badge!