Gretchen's knees were giving her heck today, so I went out to lunch by myself. City Barbecue had dropped a coupon for a free dessert in my account, which convinced me that going there was a fine choice. I had a lovely brisket sandwich that I think had come directly out of the smoker. I had the peach cobbler packed to go and took it home to Gretchen, where we split it, which is a *much* better choice than trying to eat it by myself. :) I also picked up food from Culver's on the way home, which meant that no one had to go out and feed the kids.

I had now arrived at the stage where it was pretty much time to do some recording for the "Crosstime Bus" album or just kick myself in the head. I'm not flexible enough to kick myself in the head, so my choices were limited.

I picked up one of the Universal Audio Sphere modeling mics a while back and have used it on a few things, but I have never used it to mic an acoustic guitar and I wanted to give that a try and see what the results were like. Cleverly, I read the instruction manual before going downstairs. The target song for today was "Love at First Sight", where I had used pitch shifting to move the original vocal and guitar scratch tracks to capo 2 while leaving the drums intact. The scratch tracks had to go, starting with the guitar. I retrieved the lyric sheet from my office, along with my iPad, which I pretty much only use as a Cubase remote. Realizing this, I took the charger along with me. If I'm using the tablet in the basement, it can live in the basement. I also grabbed the guitar and took it to the basement with me. Cool! All set.

Ha! I fire up Cubase and the iPad remote software and verify that they are talking to each other. Ok, let's go to the Apollo unit and turn on the phantom power for the mic. And I need to configure a stereo input to grab channels 1 and 2 so I can route them to the mic modeler and get a stereo guitar track out. Input configured, all good.

I ducked into the recording booth and realized that *nothing* was configured correctly. A dead USB microphone had been wished onto the top of the rolling cart where the iPad was supposed to go. It left. I moved the guitar stand to the opposite side of the room, because I was planning to sit while recording, which meant I needed to pull the cart closer into the space the stand had occupied. And then there was adjusting the microphone. One of these days, I will find a mic boom that doesn't slowly sag under the weight of any microphone of size. And for this application, the mic needs to be turned 90 degrees from the normal position, because I'm using it to capture a stereo image.

While I'm in there, I put on the recording headphones and verify that I can hear playback, having remembered to turn on the headphone amp while passing through the engineering side of the booth. The headphone cord has developed an annoying short, but wiggling the cord gets everything working.

I fire up Cubase and the iPad remote software and verify that they are talking to each other. Ok, let's go to the Apollo unit and turn on the phantom power for the mic. And I need to configure a stereo input to grab channels 1 and 2 so I can route them to the mic modeler and get a stereo guitar track out. Input configured, all good.

Except that there is no signal on the input or the target stereo track. I expect some noise. I twiddle the knobs on the Apollo and nothing happens. Let's go in and play the guitar at it, because maybe I just need some reasonable volume. Nope, no signal. And I realize that the Sphere mic lights up when it is powered. This mic is dark. Grumble.

All of this is more difficult, because I need to be in two places at one time. I have not yet mastered bilocation. I want a noticeable sound source in the recording booth so I can track the signal in the engineering booth.

I have a phone. I pull it out of my pocket, set it to play "Mamma Mia" on a loop, and leave it on my chair. Back to the engineering booth I go. There is still no signal.

Ok, let me pull up the UA Console application that is used for routing things. Unlike the Apollo unit, the Console app believes there is no phantom power to the mic. Power up channel 1, power up channel 2, and -- surprise! -- the mic lights up and I have signal. Make sure the signal is routed from the input to the track and I should be in business. Time to go record!

Back to the recording booth. Close the doors, adjust the position of the sagging mic, check the tuning on the guitar, put on the headphones, press record.

There is no sound in the headphones.

What the heck? There was sound here a minute ago. I check to make sure that the short in the cord is not the culprit and convince myself that it isn't. Stop everything and go back to the engineering booth.

I have a very old silverface Apollo Firewire unit that has a Thunderbolt card installed. Somehow, the mapping that the latest version of the Console software has supplied is shifted by two positions, so that almost all of the hardware is entering in the wrong location. Hardware location Line 1 and Line 2 are mapped correctly, but Line 1 is then mapped again to Line 3, Line 2 to Line 4, and so on. I'm getting sound, because Line 1 and Line 2 have correct mappings, but the software Monitor channels that feed the headphones are not getting any signal.

I remap *all* of the channels on the Console. I *save* the mappings as a preset. I hope this works. In the meantime, I found another set of headphones in the engineering booth, plugged them into the headphone amp, and once I had mapped the Monitor channels correctly in the Console and *then* made sure that everything was mapped correctly in Cubase, I had sound in the headphones again.

Rah.

Unplug the headphones in the engineering booth. Go back to the recording booth, close the doors, fix the sagging mic, check the tuning on the guitar, put on the headphones, and let's hit record. There is sound!

I blow the count in, but there's sound.

After a little while, I have multiple copies of the guitar track, at least one of which is pretty satisfactory, along with two backup tracks to use to fix any glitches.

It would be a good idea to replace the pitch-shifted vocal, which sounds terrible, because it was a scratch vocal and the pitch shifting has done nothing to improve the sound quality. Back to the engineering booth I go to create another stereo track, but I'll use a *different* modeling program here so that I end up with a mono signal that I can plug a number of different types of mic into and see what they sound like. Piece of cake.

Back to the recording booth. Close the doors and now I need to raise the mic so that I can sing standing up and also turn the mic 90 degrees so that it's in the correct orientation *and* convince the whole assemblage not to fall over. This last just requires some minor boom adjustment. Then I put the pop screen back up and now I'm ready to try recording a vocal track.

About a verse in, I realize that I have left the lyric sheet nowhere near where I can read it. Do not underestimate my ability to farble my own lyrics under pressure.

Let's move the music stand so that I can read the lyrics. That's better. I do several takes to give myself choices, but the last one is, I think, pretty good so I can go play with it now. Mucking around with tracks and plugins follows.

I will listen to this more critically at a later date, but it's progress.

A learning experience. That's what we call it.

I packed everything up and went upstairs where I grilled some steaks for Father's Day dinner while Gretchen prepared baked potatoes and sweet corn. Dinner included the kids and was remarkably silly.

And that's a good way to end the day. :)

I have a ludicrous number of things that I need to get done this weekend. Many of them are laundry.

But I also plan to do some recording, so I have hunted down the iPad which I use as a remote control in the studio and have now plugged it in to charge. It was sitting turned off at 82% charge, which is not terrible, but could be better. :)

Sometimes you get an idea for a song and it just doesn't work out the way you planned.

In this case, I was contemplating the fellow who was trying to use modern AI technology to create an on-line replica of his parents simply because he wanted to talk to them so badly. I had a verse. I didn't like it. At all, the longer I considered it.

Yesterday morning while lying in bed at oh-dark-thirty or thereabouts, I got the chorus. And a couple of verses. And random bits to build the rest of the song out of.

Today, I have the whole song. It is not *anything* like the song that I set out to write.

Overall, I think that's a good thing.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

It is amazing how deleting roughly 150,000 lines of obsolete code will improve the quality of your code base.

Both cars are finally parked in the garage again. It has been a bit more than nine years since a pallet of books for ISFiC Press needed to be stored in the garage, which meant that one of the cars had to stay in the driveway. It is remarkably hard to get a pallet of books to go away once it arrives.

Gretchen parked in the driveway during a variety of miserable weather for most of that time. Winter, of course, is the worst with snow and ice. It was very good of her. We replaced her van in December 2023 and the new van, being a PHEV, took the space in the garage so it could be charged.

I did not like parking in the driveway. I think I liked frost less than I liked snow.

At various times in the intervening nine years, we attempted to clear out the garage. We finally got the books moved out to the storage locker, which made it possible. But at one point, I decided that I needed to clear the mass of boxes that had been stored in the library as we had the kitchen remodeled out to the garage so I could get the library back. Then *more* boxes got stored in the library. Oops. Now I had set back the garage cleaning *and* still didn't get the library back.

Eventually, the boxes in the library were dispatched once and for all, along with the boxes that had gone to the garage. There was hope! Except that we had tossed a variety of things into the garage in the interim, because it got them out of the way. This was true. Inconvenient when trying to clean the garage, but true.

When it looked like we were going to fix the fence ourselves, I bought the lumber in preparation for this and stored it in (chorus) *the garage*. Then we hired someone to fix the fence, but I now had all of this perfectly good lumber occupying too much of the garage. Gretchen noted several times that we could not clean out the garage successfully with all of that lumber out there. Gretchen was (as usual) correct.

About a month ago, I found myself with some time to kill and Gretchen's van was not in the garage. I *found* places to tuck all the lumber where it was out of the way. I now have a partially cedar-lined garage with all the pickets that are tucked away in between the studs. But the lumber was out of the way, so Gretchen's precondition was satisfied.

Over the last three weekends, we have (with varying numbers of kids) spent some time out in the garage. Two huge boxes full of unread Chicago Tribunes went into the recycling bin over successive weekends. I saved enough to use as charcoal starter for some indefinite period of time. Shelves were rearranged and boxes shoehorned onto them. Broken things were disposed of. Useful things were either kept or boxed up for Goodwill. The back of Gretchen's van is *very* full with three outgrown bicycles that will be leaving tomorrow.

Thursday, I put out the pallet that had once held up Mount McGuire and the old Oriental rug that the mice had gotten to for the garbage collection. Happily, they took both. The garbage bin and recycling bin were *very* full.

Today, I decided to finish it up. I went out and collected the donations for the girls' softball league that will be picked up tomorrow: two helmets, two sets of cleats, my lineup board from the season when I was a head coach, and a batting tee. The last of the stuff for Goodwill went into the car. Things were tucked into corners.

Then I went in and got the remaining magnetic hooks, attached them to the big metal shelves that hold up my tool bag and the small sound system, and draped the cord for the charging plug for Gretchen's van over them so that she wouldn't drive across it trying to get in. I swept things into a pile, then recruited K to help me bag the mess for the trash.

And the floor was empty.

I rolled the trash cans and the dolly off onto the grass for the moment and pulled my car out of the driveway, parking it on the street. I had already gotten the key to Gretchen's van, so I backed it out of the garage, got a running start, and pulled it into the freshly cleared space where it fit nicely. There was even space to plug it into the charger.

I put the dolly and the cans back into their space on my side of the garage. Then I went across the circle, got my car, and pulled it in.

There was much rejoicing.

There are still a great many cleaning projects to finish up around the house, but this one, at least, is finally finished.

Before going into a marathon debugging session to try to find yesterday's problem, I figured that I would do some more code inspection first. I took a look at serialization for the involved classes just to make sure that there wasn't anything weird there. There wasn't.

Ok, let's try this. This branch works. That branch doesn't. Our source code is in Git. Let's get the complete list of all of the files that have differences between the two branches. It's a longish list, but it just requires a lot of clicking, swearing, and the use of some of my favorite not-available-on-Linux software, Tortoise Git.

And eventually, the problem was found in the most likely spot, which was the routine that was failing. In order to get the unit tests to run correctly, I had commented out what appeared to be an unnecessary line of code. Unfortunately, the unit tests ran much better without that line of code, but the actual software would object strenuously to its absence when a model conversion was needed. This is sort of the classic case of winning the battle and losing the war.

I have restored the commented-out line of code and life is now much better.

I will figure out how to fix the unit tests in a better way at a later date. :)

I have a ludicrous number of musical influences. Of course, I have been listening to music for a very long time. :) And I learned by listening to the Beatles (especially McCartney), and Paul Simon (with and without Garfunkel), and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and America, and Jimmy Buffett, and many, many others. And for someone who is almost completely unable to sing a harmony, I find my melodies weaving all sorts of harmonies inside of the chords that I play. That makes me happy.

One of the lesser-known bands that was an influence in my music was Mason Proffit. I would never have heard of them, but one of my college roommates owned one of their albums. Through the miracle of cassette tape, I shortly had my own bootleg. Many years later (and much like Jimmy Buffett paying the mini-mart back), I bought their CD, so I am now an honest man.

And one of my favorite songs of theirs was "Two Hangmen", which might have gotten more airplay if not for the extraordinary length of repetition of the last lines of the song, over and over for more than two minutes. Maybe there was a radio version. I hope so, because really, that was excessive.

But somewhere down at the core of it, "Two Hangmen" is a song about disinformation, about spreading messages that the government doesn't approve of, and consequences. And that makes it a song that still feels true to me today.

Maybe I will sing it at a filk some time.

But without the two minutes of repetition. :)

And here's the song.