Year: 2018

So, yesterday I decided I wanted to learn how to read music. I ran across my old music books from my old guitar teacher, Joel – that’s another story. I started on the high “E” string and learned some really basic EFG stuff, then moved to the “B” string where I’m finding it difficult to mix in the BCD stuff. Yea, its only my first day but hey, I have expectations that I can warp my mind enough to learn this stuff. So I busted out the Washburn acoustic to fart around with. I just killed 45min no problem. Now I have to do my daily code builds. I hope I can get through this crap so I can go to bed at a decent hour tonight. I really want to start getting up at 5am. Want to do some early workouts in the way of stretching, tai chi, and running. Today I was scouring the net and “Reverb” app to get a few pedals. So I ordered a “Line-6, M5 synth pedal”. a “Elecro-harmonix Octavix Octave Fuzz” pedal, and a Dunlop “Cry Baby Mini Wah”. Cant wait to test drive these, it should keep me occupied for weeks. My modeling amp can do quite a few of these natively but not very well, but nothing beats the raw pedal power. Should be fun. As it turns out, my Evil Twin is a pretty good amp. It needs some TLC in the way of new tubes and some pots replaced. Later this year for that – after I get a new soldering iron. I have an old clunker that is the size of an 80’s blow drier and weighs a ton. I need something small and nimble for my projects.

-Rat

Just saying. On a completely unrelated note, the gym has been tough this week. I started doing 30min of elliptical interval training vs. instead of just 3 straight miles on the track. There is a setting called 30-30. It does 5 sets of 30sec interval runs with 30sec interval walks, and a 3min rest (walk) period between sets. It seems like its way harder from a cardio perspective although its much easier on my joints. However, I am finding that its not so gentle on my back. We shall see. On to the basement for some needed guitar practice. I feel like I’m getting a tad better. It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Lets roll JamPlay!

-Rat

This last week has been busy… Valentine’s day, Ash Wednesday, my wife’s birthday, had a weekend away with the extended family, I finally got my attached NAS drive – surface scanned and attached, I carved out an iSCSI cloud volume for ITunes, downloaded all my ITunes, started practicing my guitar in earnest, the Cyber with the new cab is really cool – lots of Strat fun, gained 2 pounds over the weekend – thanks Gibson’s! We bought a new fridge – finally (ABT Electronics is very cool). Hopefully we will cut the proverbial Comcast cable cord soon and go with DirectTVNow, Apple TV’s and a MagicJack for VOIP.

Its wonderful having Vikash at work now. I can actually have a night off or a weekend without work. I was getting burned out and angry. Not a good combination. He is now my CNC partner in crime. On Saturday morning I stopped at the local bike shop for some new inner tubes – a nice shop with nice and helpful people. I may even get a chance to get a new bike for my birthday if I start riding like I want to. I want to do 2000 miles this year on my trusty Schwinn.

-Rat

Just another day in paradise? Not really. Gotta work still. I received my stretching strap yesterday from Amazon. Need to find some exercise pads to put on the floor at home.  No time for much.  Working a ton of hours for work project.

-Rat

So, the surface test was negative. That means I can put the drive back on the USB connector on the router. I reconfigured it for the full partition of 8Tb and NTFS format. I still haven’t done any guitar this week – ugh. No motivation. Working late and sleeping in a bit except for snow blowing and putting out the garbage this morning. I’m also getting my groove back (slowly) on “Fitbrains” site. Still have to drag my speaker cab in, clean downstairs, and get my cyber on.

-Rat

The new 8Tb Seagate drive that I attached to the AC5300 – after being attached is and re-partitioned (thank you – MiniTool) is deciding to have surface and write errors. I am now doing a surface test on the drive which much to my chagrin is supposed to take almost 70hours. So this wont be done for another 3 days. I hope Seagate is as good as Western Digital in honoring their warranties.

Picked up my “as-new” Fender Mustang 4×12 cab the other day – that sucker is HEAVY. Wow, not something I expected. It didn’t come with casters so I have to get 4 of those. Can’t wait to try it out with the Cyber head.

Superbowl Sunday today, a reminder of a couple of years ago when I got some shitty infection from the gym and woke up with “Bell’s-palsey”. Anyway, go Patriot’s! or Go Eagles!

-Rat

So I get my new Asus AC5300 Tri-band router set up, and the broadcast footprint doesn’t seem as large as it should be. Now, it could be my location. But from what everyone says, it should be larger that what it is – I have expectations. I will admit I like the USB 3.0 and 4 gigabit ports. I attached a Thermaltake BlackX external hard drive docking station with a 8Tb Seagate 7200rpm drive. However, I can’t seem to get it partitioned greater than 2Tb, I think I may need to go to Linux to do that, or a buddy was mentioning https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2581408/windows-support-for-hard-disks-that-are-larger-than-2-tb So, I guess there is a way to do it with Windows. On that same track of thought, the other day, I set up my 2 cloud storage devices – one large, one small. The large one is a WD EX4100 with and a RAID 5, 12Tb Volume. So, it no sooner boots then one of the drives get an unrecoverable SMART failure. I have to go to the WD site to find it is out of warranty – missed it by 6 days. Had to order a replacement – doh! The same bud noticed that I can set up VPN on my new router, so after my cloud and disk issues, that is the next hurdle. Too much like work – ugh. Update: I purchased a Fender Mustang 4×12 speaker enclosure and am waiting for it to be delivered to my local Guitar Center. On a related note, I am finding it difficult to find time to practice. There are not enough hours in the day.

-Rat

The past couple of days, I received two guitar amps. One amp, a Fender Cyber Twin, head is an 130watt American modeling tube amp head and the second is a portable VOX European digital modeling amp. One thing I noticed is that I don’t have any cabinet or speakers to plug the Fender into. I am chomping at the bit to see what both amps do as far as modeling my Fender Evil Twin amp. Do they do it justice? Do they sound better? Is there something radically wrong with the Twin? I don’t know, I’m not impressed with the Twin. Its loud alright, signal to noise ratio isn’t what I would expect. I hear white noise from it beginning when I turn it on. I thought I could borrow the speakers from it for the Cyber but there are no inputs that I can see. Now, I’m trying to figure out if whether or not I want a 4×12 or a 2×12 cabinet. Do I really need a 400W cab for the basement? For a studio? For the future? Yes, but not for the basement. It will get harder later on to justify a 4×12. Get it while the getting is good. Still wrestling with my Cloud issues – ugh.

-Rat

So, I finally put up the TV wall mount in the basement, mounted the TV, installed BOTH NAS drives, and I am now wondering what the hell what to do with everything. They make something called iTunes server which sounds like exactly what I want. However, there is nothing associated with it – what the hell? I have a boat load of old music I had on CD and converted it all to iTunes. I want to share music between all my apple and windows devices. You can create a virtual drive mapping that will save all the iTunes files to a common location. Unfortunately, this only works for Windows. I have Plex which does everything except iTunes. I have done some searching and it appears that the real question is “What is the point of an iTunes server?” So it appears that I need to purchase a cheap Mac and have iTunes running all the time to have a central repository for iTunes for BOTH Windows and Apple products. Don’t know which Cloud platform I’m going to put that on. Also, still need to grab a digital passport for some router amusement. I spoke with one of my work cohorts today and it looks like I found a home for an old USB wireless antenna. Ha! The junk drawer came in handy! Tonight, I need to pick up a new heater and work on the basement. Now, I just need to clean up stuff, put in the DVD player and I’ll be in business. I’m getting there…

-Rat

So, yesterday I set up my Clouds and added them to the network. I am still wrestling with the new router, and integrating it with the network in the basement. It’s being a PITA. Not used to not knowing. Also, all the cool apps with utilizing the router include USB connections for which only USB 3.0 are worth it. I think I am going to get a 4Gb WD passport that used USB 3.0. What else can I do? I am beginning to put all my pix on the internal cloud. Next, need to look at larger drives. Only have a RAID 5, 4 drives of 4Gb which only nets 12Gb – lame.

-Rat