malada

tRump announced an agreement with Greenland and murmurings of approval were heard from Europe..  
  
Yeah, count me skeptical.  

Either real adults actually wrote it and Donnie Little Hands had nothing to do with it, or Don-Don will change the whole thing at the last minute and screw it up.  

I don't know the details but details matter.  Put the agreement under a microscope.  Take your time.  

Once again we're in an energy (oil) crisis.  

I remember my my first in the 1970s.  Back them there was a push for renewables:solar, wind, biofuels, conservation  Butt in the 50 years since  we've made  only fitful progress weaning away from fossil (Middle Eastern) fuels.  Our cars and transportation isn't that much more efficient and data centers threaten to gulp more electricity for AI slop,  Although we're now 'friendly' with countries who were once once adversaries like Saudi Arabia - with friends like those, who needs enemies?  They're involved in a proxy war which threatens even more supply lines and their army can't seem to fight it's way out of a paper bag.  The Saudi's are asking for American forces now which means American soldiers on the ground.  They're just fine with nice clean jet fighters, oh nice clean hands no blood on Saudi hands... they want someone else to do the dirty work.  

I'm just tired of my wallet and my life being ruled by religious zealots of various stripes.   

I'm rambling a bit.  It's 5 in the morning and I've barely slept so.... meh.  

It was a normal day shift in television Master Control at our local PBS station.  I was slinging tapes: one inch reel to reel video and 3/4 inch U-matic cassette, running tape breaks off u-matic tape with voice overs done off cart machines live, switching live from tape to satellite and back again.  I think it was TeleStar 4 at the time.  It was the kids block: Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood,, Clifford the Big Red Dog, The Puzzle Place... good stuff!

Digital TV was just being worked on.  WNET Channel 13 in NY had a brand new digital transmitter and antenna in the North Tower, at the time and their chief engineer was on site that day. 

Along with individual tape machine monitors I had a preview monitor, an off the air monitor, and a big TV (20 inch maybe?) connected to our local cable company to check our cable signal.  At one of my too-many coffee breaks I heard one of the radio people (we had our local NPR station down the hall)) mention planes striking the Twin Towers in NYC. 

I went back into TV Master and switched the cable feed to CNN.  

I learned later that there was a lot of discussions both locally and nationally about finding a news feed - most likely off of satellite - to put to air.  It was decided to stay a safe harbor and remain with the regular children's programing.  It was the right decision.  In a time of disaster we were a safe harbor for the youngest of us all. 

I watched live as the North Tower's antenna fell inward like a knife.  PBS lost some of its own that day.   
  
The United States had the world's attention right then and there.... and we made a mess of it.  True, we needed to find those responsible and bring them to justice but we turned into chest thumping militaristic bullies.  Our leadership lead us into pointless wars and conflicts,encouraged fascism at home and turned us into a pariah on the world stage.  Bin Laden wanted to destroy the United States - it just took 25 years for that to happen. 

I don't claim to be a real musician but I fiddle around with music from time to time.  I've been using the LIinx distro Ubuntu Studio because it has *everything* for audio, video and media creation in Linux.  Sometimes... it has too much.  

The program I tried was the Digital Audio Workstation Ardour.  This DAW is fully featured, flexible and powerful.  I tried it a few years ago.  but I didn't care for the interface and had way too many features.   I stuck with Audacity because that's all I needed.  

Recently I wanted to do a little multi track recording and opened up the newest version of Ardour  The interface had been updated but the configuration didn't see any of my audio inputs.  After fiddling with it for a while I decided to go deeper into the system and check the system audio configuration.  And..... spent the next two hours trying to recover my audio devices. 

Ardour - and Ubuntu Studio - wants a to be configured with a a tool called pipewire.  This allows the user to set up virtual patch bays, digital signal processors, software synthesizers and all sorts of audio goodies within the computer.  You just need to know how to configure and set all that up.  I don't.  I don't need all that stuff.  I'm not an audio professional or a programming guru.  I just need basic ins and outs and effect plugins that work within the DAW programs. 

Audacity does have limited multi track capability and it sees all my audio ins and outs.  It will do for the moment.  There is a cross platform DAW called Reaper which has a Linux port and is very inexpensive.  I might look into it.  

,Eventually I'll customize  Linux Mint distro for media use as I really don't need all the programs that come with Ubuntu Studio.  

The only upside to our present administration is that all the Nazis, scumbags, grifters, pedophiles and other low lives have been exposed and identified and they can be gotten rid of. 

Hopefully, soon.
 

The latest diagnosis of my skin disorder is DRESS syndrome.  

It's basically drug hypersensitivity syndrome that seems to be common with anti-convulsive medications.  At this stage it's not going to kill me or make me seriously (more) ill but I'm in a great deal of pain.  The rash has spread into my toes.  It's unreal and painful.  I can barely use my hands as it's spread into my fingers and palms.  

I'm on heavy steroids .and pain meds while I switch to a different .anti-convulsive med.  

I just hope this clears up and I can grow my fucking hair back.  

NASA and Katalyst Space have abandoned an ambitious attempt to boost the Swift observatory into a higher orbit and postpone its fiery return to Earth.

2 out of 3 reaction motors in the satellite failed soon after lift off making fine control of the satellite impossible. 

So there will be no lift for the Swift observatory and it will soon burn up in the atmosphere.,  The two good things about this is that got decades out of a Swift mission was slated to last 2 years and that the attempted rescue  was made.  The rescue was a rush job but the attempt was made..  So next time  we'll have data to work with.

...and a bit on the strong side.  Since I'm trying to back off on the pure sugar stuff (cookies, cakes, pies) I wanted to cut down on the amount of sugar in my coffee.  Most artificial ,sweeteners are poisonous to me, I found Stevia which is a natural low calories sweetener.  A teaspoon is equal to two teaspoons of sugar.  Unfortunately it leaves a metallic aftertaste.  So I've been using half Stevia and half brown sugar and brewing my  coffee stronger. 

It works well enough. 
  

Most the the guitars I learned on were nylon stringed "classical" guitars.  You usually find them a lot because they were cheaper than a steel stringed acoustic guitars.  (Which leads to girls shrugging their shoulders and learning a few chords and boys stripping out the nylons for steel strings which will destroy the instrument.)  The nylon strings are easier to play and are thicker so are more forgiving.  

Now I practice on a steel stringed acoustic and I'm using an electronic tuner to keep it accurate.  My ears are bad and I have a hard time trusting them.  So I find myself constantly checking the tuning.  Yet, even when it's in tune I kept hearing something off.  It wasn't until I started sowly strumming each chord slowly that I realiv3ed my fingers weren't placed properly and I was muting some of the strings.  Changing my hand position helped... excepted with the dreaded bar chords. 

With a bar chord the pointer finger is pressed hard against all 6 strings and the rest of the fingers form the body of the chord.  This makes lots of chords possible with just a few changes in the fingerings.  But I couldn't get a proper bar.  With the thicker nylon strings I could, but not with the thinner and harder to play steel strings. 

I'll keep working on it but for the time being I'm refusing to play the full chord.  By refusing the bar I can get a partial chord with the top strings and not playing the test.  This gives me a meater sounds since I'm basically playing power chords.  So my folks songs sounds sort of heavy metal.