(no subject)

[dwenius]

• Bolted a bookshelf to the wall in the basement and set up two more smaller bookshelves next to it, then unpacked the last 8 boxes of reference, criticism, poetry, plays, and music-related books to populate them.


• Read the same 12 books to Calvin twice, sang songs, and took a long walk around the neighborhood. During this walk, we passed by the house of one of Nina's schoolmates, who has carpooled with Nina maybe 4 times? And Calvin stops, starts to cross the street towards the house, saying "Bobby? Bobby HUG! Bobby HUGGGG!" Um, scary smart. No bike rides this weekend, and very little random opening/closing of the garage door.


• Hung a medicine cabinet and emptied two bags of medicine-cabinet-y things into it. Put together an earthquake-zone ready mounting strategy, then centered the cabinet on the wall with L33T level, power tool, and yardstick skillz. Only realized after it was done that "centered on wall" != "centered on the sink and light fixture." Doh. Decided to live with it after assessing the possibility of successfully getting the right hand side mounting screw actually, you know, screwed, if I were to center the cabinet over the sink.


• Hung three towel racks. Thanks to the magic of power tools, the MBR is DONE.


• (Mostly) recovered from my wounds. Jaw still sore, hip still sore, but headaches are gone.


• Watched Nina and her friend Bori perform a duet at their ballet recital, which featured their own choreography and no one else's. As an added bonus, they used David Grisman's arrangement of the Beatles' _Because_ as the music. The whole thing ruled.


• Unpacked and assembled the music studio synth workstation thing desk, mixer desk, and both rolling 19" racks. Unpacked everything non-musical from the basement and put it into storage, then moved all the actual music gear, still boxed, out of the way to begin the Feng Shui exercise that is my current studio design process whenever I have a new room. I have learned, LEARNED I say. The process is as follows:

1. Primary orientation; speakers pointing into the house, not sideways at neighbors, arranged so stereo is preserved whether facing the mixer or the controller keyboard, speakers on long wall to minimize side reflections, rear wall covered with bookshelves to absorb some freqs and reflect others irregularly. Don't know if I will need bass traps in this room or not, but the big window and tile floor suggests yes. Pondering.


2. Guitar amp also pointing into the house; "guitar corner" needs room to move, stomp cables, set up mic, etc. plus be close enough to the recorder to pull a wired remote.


3. Arrange other studio furniture around the central chair. Place some gear in racks; no screws, no cables. Assess ergonomics. All sound generators close to controller synth? All FX within easy reach of mixer/recorder? All frobbable knobs below shoulder height? Set-and-forget gear above shoulder height? Obvious cable-free path between command center chair and guitar area? If not, go to step one.


4. Power cables. Wherever possible, bunched in one parallel group, arranged so they cross any nearby audio cable at a right angle. If at all possible, stacked to a single outlet to eliminate any chance of a ground loop. The current pile ought to fit on one circuit if I turn them on one rack at a time, most of this stuff pulls 500 mA at most while it is running.


5. Audio cables. Controller has cables on the left, saving 3 feet on that side, patchbays can cut cable lengths in half, all the usual tricks. Every time I go to buy studio cables, it's $200. EVERY TIME. The cables I have now held everything together in the last room, they will work again. I think.


6. Midi goes last. Midi patchbay should go in the place where a hub/spoke config has roughly equal lengths between all gear, no matter which is the master controller. If something only needs clock, pull it from an unused THRU port in a nearby piece of gear.


7. Turn everything on, play for one week.


8. Go to step one :)

Comments

[eac.livejournal.com]

Wow. I'm tired just looking at this, and I've got no excuse.

[gen9.livejournal.com]

This past weekend I flew to Las Vegas to visit a girlfriend:

1. Went shopping and bought clothes on sale that I don't need
2. Watched the fake rainstorm inside the Aladdin hotel
3. Drank hard lemonade and bbq
4. Went on a laughably horrible and lame Haunted Vegas tour
5. Sat in a private pool with a fountain and in the sun
6. More shopping (what can I say, we're girls) and bought 2 pairs of cheap flip flops and then took a nap
7. Drank more hard lemonade
8. Saw a great outdoor jazz concert by and took a gondalla ride on Lake Las Vegas - the gondalla was steered by Artuno the opera singing Albanian who speaks Italian - Tom and Parik met us at the concert and helped us finish the case of hard lemonade we had brought with us
9. I walked around in 2 fountains that one is not supposed to walk around in and met a cute little girl named Desiree who was 6 or 7 years old and insisted I keep walking around in the fountains because she thought it was funny
10. Played some slot machines (I won 42 cents on the penny slots and lost $10 on the nickel slots)
11. Went to the Gospel Brunch at the House of Blues (highly recommmend)
12. Went on the Manhatten Express roller coaster at the NY NY hotel
13. Ate at Dairy Queen on the way to the airport

Your list clearly beats my list since you were actually productive and I was thoroughly slothful.

[crisper.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we had a small medicine cabinet adventure the other day, but it ultimately sorted out okay.

With power tools.

[canetoad.livejournal.com]

Well, you see, I took cda's advice and found a cheap, generic medicine cabinet at Target. Got it home, Paul assembled it... it had little wimpy (cheap, generic) mounting latches on the back and instructions to go to your own hardware store to purchase screws.

One look at it made me snort derisively. "L-brackets and molly bolts, babe, and take those ridiculous hook things off the back." My love concurred. Their idea of mounting hardware would have caused it to sway in a mild breeze, never mind the force of -- just possibly! -- opening and shutting the door.

Hope your adventure was as much fun. :)