Whew.

We now return you to regular blogging.

Well, when I say "regular", of course I mean "slightly more frequent than recently". But you get the idea.

Out of the way since the last post: one trip to The Nation's Capital™, which was fine except that a) my sinuses were stuffed up, as they usually are when I fly, and b) I never sleep well in hotels. But I met some interesting people.

Here's possibly the Most Useless Picture Ever™ , taken using the built-in camera on this Sony Vaio laptop, out of the hotel window which overlooks one of the most boring parts of Ottawa:

Also out of the way: one 27-page report for A Certain Federal Ministry™, final draft completed and off to my Partner In Crime™ on this one for edits. Slightly late, but no worries. I should have done it in November, though. Or at least most of it. The hiring that I alluded to in the last post, however, is not yet completed... and if you're wondering, Mr. XXX job post is not getting an interview.

So, report out of the way means more sleep and less staying up late fiddling around on the laptop, which I unfortunately have to do sitting up straight at the kitchen table rather than in bed or on a comfy couch, both of which play havoc with my lower back. And a recent adjustment to the bedtime routine of the Junior Ricardipi has resulted in an earlier bedtime for the Senior Ricardipi, which also helps the sleep situation. All is much better.

Now, if I could just do something about the quality of my blog posts...

HR has been notified, part II

Another one from the job applicant file:

To Whom it will be:

This letter is to express my interest in discussing the XXX position posted on the Internet Job broad.

This raises a few thoughts in my mind:

1. Whom be I?
2. Why does this person think I'm advertising for an XXX-rated position?
3. The internet is broad enough, if not particularly deep.

Sigh.

Playing footy in Cali, allegedly

Getting back to some recent news that made a minor splash for a day or two, Soccer television a while ago was nattering on about David Beckham going to the Los Angeles Galaxy. Does anybody care? Not me. They could sign Beckham, Pele, a young Beckenbauer, the entire 1982 Italian national team, a squadron of trained elephants and a disgruntled octopus fully decked out in Nike gear and Gola boots, and I still wouldn't watch U.S. Soccer. But I'm a curmudgeon.

And, of course, I clearly have no clue what I'm talking about, since I prefer to follow the fortunes of the somewhat-less-than-mighty Torquay United. Last time I bothered to look, which was admittedly several weeks ago, they were winless in 17 straight league matches. And scraping the bottom of Coca-Cola League Two or whatever it's called this week, staring down the barrel of the relegation cannon.

So take whatever I say about Beckham playing in L.A. with a grain of salt. I could be wrong. Maybe it'll all be a monstrous success. But I doubt it.

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In other news, I just got Shanghaid into volunteered for going to The Nation's Capital™ next Monday for a one-day symposium on bioethics. Interesting topic. But seriously now... Ottawa in February? Brrrrr.

Hawk

Again. The pictures are getting a bit better than before, but it was still a long way off. It's looking well-fed though, sleek and fat on tasty, tasty dove. Here's one of the previous pictures now that I spent some time fixing the original horrible colour balance:

Oh, my bleeding ears...

For those of you still recovering from the sonic assault that was the subject of the last post, I present something a little gentler:

When Dreaming - 128 kbps mp3 (5.3 Mbytes), file hosted courtesy of Rik as usual.

A floaty, ambient thing featuring electric piano from a Yamaha TX7, whooshy pads and lightweight percussion from a Korg 05R/W, and leads and bass from the mighty Sequential Circuits Split-8, with sonic sauce from a slightly broken Alesis Midiverb II and the usual software massaging.

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In other news, following Scaryduck's bombshell that he's not going to update it any more, Pengor, Penguin of Doom has been deleted from my sidebar. Scary's explanation, "because I can't be arsed", seems perfectly reasonable to me. The real estate freed up over there will be replaced by... um... well, nothing for the time being.

Speaking of which, I wonder what ever happened to Voltan?

Lower down on the sidebar, I've added links to all of the 'serious' music files, more for my convenience than anyone else's. Click away, if you like.

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By the way... who the heck is reading my blog from a location in or near Churchill, Manitoba? Just wondering - stay anonymous if you wish. But there's a great big blob on my Clustrmap from somewhere near there.

And Rock and Roll shall rule the Earth

Once upon a time, and a very, very long time ago it was too, there existed a band. It was called the Strychnine Mangoes, and it was the Most Terrible Band That Never Was™. I should know, I was in it.

The ridiculous name, by the way, was not generated by the Band Automatic Name Generator, but by real honest-to-goodness teenagers. Both of us.

The core line-up included this joker on keyboards, drum machines, vocals, sporadic bass, acoustic guitar, harmonica, ukelele (once), and bongos (also once), and this guy on electric, acoustic and bass guitar, vocals and occasional drum machines. This guy occasionally played bass and sang, and every now and then vocals were also provided by none other than the future Mrs. Ricardipus, although she probably doesn't like to be reminded of that very often.

With a modicum of talent, enthusiasm to burn, and a fan base of absolutely nobody, we were going nowhere at all. And not even fast. But fast enough, it must be said, to produce two classic recordings, "Live #!?%$# In The Blue Room" and "Greatest Hits", each on glorious chrome cassette tape and available in a limited edition of two copies. One each, you see.

Highlights included covers of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, Patience by Guns 'N Roses, various Eric Clapton and Cream tunes, Assault and Battery by Hawkwind, and a few blues standards. We both liked Blue Öyster Cult and Jethro Tull, but we couldn't figure out the songs, which in retrospect seems like a blessing. There were also a reasonable number of originals, none of which will ever see the light of day. You can thank me for this later, although it must be said that the ukelele part on Firezone kicked some serious butt.

There was also a short-lived punk spin-off called Strychnine Headache, the highlight of which was a re-working of the Robert Johnson blues classic Rambling On My Mind, entitled Ramblin' To Hell. This featured me playing electric guitar over a speed-thrashing drum machine riff, and if you ever do shuffle off this mortal coil and ramble your own way down to Hell, I expect that this song will be what's on the soundtrack, for your listening amusement, over and over, forever.

However, today's subject is a recording presented here by popular demand (ok, one person asked for it, a long time ago, in the comments box of somebody else's blog, until I mentioned it a few days ago, when regular Ricardiblog reader Wonderferret also dialed in a request). It's a cover of Cream's Sunshine Of Your Love, featuring the core line-up of Syl on electric guitar and bass, and Ricardipus on bongos. One of the two is singing, but unfortunately the liner notes have been lost and it is therefore impossible to determine who. Shame really.

Audio path: Fostex 160 four-track cassette to chrome cassette to laptop for noise reduction and other massaging to mp3 to Rik's web space and thus to you, by way of a link from here. Hi Fidelity, all the way, but fortunately not Hi Infidelity, which was something different, although more or less contemporaneous, give or take a few years.

Click below, and don't say I didn't warn you. There are many reasons I was never a rock star, and this is most definitely at least one of them.

(Bongo) Sunshine Of Your Love - 128 kbps mp3 (3.3 Mbytes), hosted courtesy Rikaitch.

Life imitates blog

Remember this statement about cleaning vomit off bedsheets? No sooner posted than it happens again. Fortunately, it seems to have been a 24-hour thing, and Junior Ricardipus #2 is on the mend, poor little bunny. And Mrs. Ricardipus did the laundry this time.

In other news:

1. The hawk was back, but no photos this time I'm afraid. It flew off in a hurry, claws full of victim and leaving behind a pile of suspiciously dove-like feathers and a bloodstain on the snow. The score is thus now hawks 3, doves 0.

2. Snowy weather means few sports cars on the road these days. The best I can muster for you recently is a Porsche 924 Turbo, the slightly-beefed-up version of the ugliest, crappiest, lowest-performance piece of Volkswagen-inspired junk they ever built. And that's including the 914, which at least has the advantages of being mid-engined (and thus better handling), and kind of cute, in an endearingly ugly way.

A new definition of pain, part III

Another salvo in the technology-vs.-Ricardipus saga... so, standard disclaimers apply. The following post is likely to be a) overly technical, b) rant-ish, and c) long-winded. So now's your chance to bail out and go and read something more interesting. I suggest WikiWrit, the Holy Book Anyone Can Edit. Start with Genesis and go from there. You could fix up my lame start on the Book of Gibberish if you feel like it.

Right, on to the pain. To recap: in the last episode, we learned that, in my ongoing quest to haul a bunch of old music off cassette, minidisc and other less savoury audio formats (stereo hi-fi VHS, anyone?), I bought a little digital audio interface from M-Audio.

Then we learned that I just couldn't get the thing installed. At all.

Having fiddled with it for two consecutive weekends, and considering both some timely advice from Rik, and the speedy but ultimately unhelpful response from M-Audio's tech support (yes, they did respond by 10:00 Monday morning), I finally resigned myself to returning it to Saved By Technology, a fabulous store tucked away in a strange little corner of Toronto, in more or less equal proximity to a) the YMCA, and b) a vacant lot. The first time I ever visited, it was full of sales associates and customers, all rushing around at a frenetic pace, with the P.A. system a-paging away: "Dave, line three! Jan, line two! Mom, line one!"

Yes, it turned out that someone's mother was hanging out among the synthesizers, audio interfaces, totally-tooled-up digital audio workstation Macs, and heaps of other drool-worthy musical gear.

My trip back with the audio box was a bit (ok, a lot) less frantic... very calm in fact. And the good folks listened to my problems, plugged it in to their computer and promptly got it to work with no trouble whatsoever. A few words of wisdom, and I was on my way. And of course, as soon as I tried installing it again, it worked perfectly. After going through the evil Windows "New Hardware Installation" dialogue box a couple of times. Argh.

Anyway, the net result is now a positive adjustment in the way I do things...

Old method:
1. Record audio from portable Minidisc to ancient computer via noisy analogue connection.
2. Edit and noise-reduce audio in painfully slow way, one song at a time since that's all the hard disk space left. Go for lunch while this is happening.
3. Move song off old computer onto painfully slow Zip disk.
4. Haul Zip disk and Zip drive to Sleek And Intelligent computer™, install Zip drive, copy song to computer, encode to mp3, copy mp3 to USB key.
5. Haul USB key to laptop, copy file onto laptop.

See? Easy. And barely takes all day.

New method:
1. Record audio from stereo component Minidisc to laptop via clean 'n shiny digital connection.
2. Edit audio at blazingly high speeds - 40 minute noise reduction now takes about 40 seconds.
3. With all extra available time, cook 12-course banquet for lunch.

Done.

Life is now much less irritating, and I thank Heidi and the good folks at Saved By Technology for helping out. Wonderful place, less pretentious than Big Music Store Downtown, less full of useless suit-wearing sales people than Other Big Music Store Downtown That Has Suburban Location, less full of guitar heroes than Big Music Warehouse On Edge Of Suburbia.

So now, among other things, I have digitized the now-legendary cover of Sunshine Of Your Love, featuring yours truly on the bongos. One day, you may even get to hear it. But that day, my friends, is not today. You'll thank me later.

You know you're a parent if:

In lieu of a real post, and recognizing Alicat's comment last time as #14, I bring you another one of these:

15. You have done three loads of laundry in a single night, each consisting entirely of bedclothes, pyjamas and vomit.

We'll return to regular blog posts soon, I promise.*




*Promise not valid in all jurisdictions. Including this one.