Audiophilia

Okay, so I don't even begin to qualify as an audiophile. But, I DO listen to my CDs on a carefully selected DVD player that has a really nice ADA convertor through my 1974 Pioneer Quad receiver feeding custom-voiced CMC speakers...and I'm here to say, I'm thoroughly disappointed by what my Macs do to my disc's files. I suspect that iTunes renders them into some sort of sampled Mpeg format that plays what PASSES for the real audio file. I've noticed this with friends iPods, that the music files don't sound right to me. I spent some time today A/B-ing the Macs and the player, and the difference is HUGE!

You know, sometimes I think we're too involved with making the circle ROUNDER. Having been through the battles to get to a better audio format from vinyl thru magnetic tape to optical tracks, MAYBE WE GOT IT RIGHT NOW. Now, I'm all about BACK OFF, tech-boys...this stuff sounds GREAT RIGHT NOW! I'm listening to AJA (Steely Dan) and the difference between the old-school set-up and the Mac is MORE THAN OBVIOUS!

Point in case, HOME AT LAST; the air in between the piano chords at the opening are completely lost in the iTunes version...and yet, SUPPOSEDLY, iTunes is PLAYING MY DISC!

Leave me alone; I don't care about your format changes, I'M HAPPY WITH THIS, DAMMIT!

And, in fact, it sounds WAY BETTER than the iTunes pablum you're trying to push off on me...that stuff may be good enough for the inconigscenti you're preaching to, but it will never sell to me!

A day for Random Musings

There's a part of me that hates transitions. Perhaps because I have engineered my life in such a way that most of it revolves around things I'm particularly interested in, I rarely feel stagnated, in desire or need of change. I enjoy having the somewhat non-volitional aspects of my life (the need for gainful employment, the exigencies of bill-paying and infrastructure maintenance) be rather constant and predictable. Perhaps this is the result of my tumultuous young-adult years, when minding many irons in many fires was requisite, years when I was trying to make good as a musician, and in service of that effort held many part-time jobs, rehearsed, traveled to band-jobs and tried to keep body-and-soul together all at the same time.

That was a time in my life when no minutes went unaccounted-for; when I snatched sleep and meals and showers as I could. When I ultimately decided that I was not going to continue to pursue a career in music, I found a day-job that would support my effort at higher education and enrolled in college. The next five years were, if anything, more stuffed with necessity and obligation. When I finally graduated, I decided I would forevermore make time to just sit, and think, and read. I have honored that decision all of my days since. I sleep when I want to, eat when I want to, and if I have choice in the matter, decline to attend to anything I do not choose to attend to. I accept no obligations which do not please me.

Does that make me selfish? Perhaps. I don't particularly care what others may think. I give of myself, freely, as I am moved to; I ignore obligations that others might press upon me, if they do not please me. I am the architect of my fate, the captain of my soul. And the love I give is free from expectation, the good I do is done without thought for reward, and the time I spend on myself is mine to spend as I will.

Mine is a course that may not satisfy others, but it is my course, and as I steer by my solitary star I am content.....

The school year ends tomorrow

It's been odd for me, the last few days. The teachers and most of the staff are all excited, the year is ending, most of them starting vacation (2 months worth!) and the ones that are working are mostly doing so by choice, not necessity.
I've been kind of down; I'm glad I've got summer work, I'm glad I'll be coming back to school in August, but I'm not really looking forward to going back to the call center. Now, mind you, it's easily the best phone-job I can imagine, no selling, no pressure, but still, I would so much rather be either working on the infrastructure at the school, like my compatriot, or taking the summer off like the faculty. Were it not an economic necessity, I would not work over the summer break-I think part of it might be that I dislike shifting work-roles. I've had to do that a lot over the last seven years, and even though I know this is a temporary shift, I like my role as tech-guy fixer-of-all-problems so much more than pleasant-voice-on-the-phone-soliciting-information.

*sigh* I need to keep focused on the fact that the bills are going to get paid!

And, if things go as predicted, one way or the other I'll probably get to either work in the school next summer, or take the break off. Gotta keep countin' them blessings.

The Buttermilk Launch and the end of a year...

So of course, after going nearly insane over a week and half, we came to the final virtual space station mission. All I can say about the Wednesday launch is, we had to set up in virtually no time due to a library space scheduling conference but, having "solved" all the power-outage issues Tuesday I was very confident the launch would go without a hitch, at the last minute. WRONG! One of the student computers REFUSED to log on, even though it was running under exactly the same conditions as the computers that had no problems. Again, I worked furiously trying to get the thing logged onto the website, and, without boring you with the details, finally succeeded through sheer arcane network trickery.
Thursday was, actually, the first day in the series that we had adequate time to get everything up and running, had no scheduling conflicts, and had no power-outages.

It was the Buttermilk launch. At the end of the mission, I spoke briefly with the mission Commander, who had been on the other end of the line Tuesday and remembered our problems; I thanked her for her patience and she remarked "you know, usually when these things don't come right up the folks on the other end just start throwing their hands up. We were impressed by how hard you guys worked to get the mission running, even with reduced time. You guys did a great job." That was all the praise I really needed.

And now the school year is winding down...I'm totally sad about that. Glad as I am to have summer work, I will miss going to school each morning and wait with greatest enthusiasm getting back into the saddle in August. Hopefully that will change soon; there is so much I would like to do over the summer, but my compatriot Pat will have to do those chores without me....for now.

Any launch you can walk away from...

(being the completion of Bandwidth Battles in the service of the State)

Last Friday, having determined that bandwidth issues were conflicting our attempts to launch the virtual space mission at school, we scheduled an early test of the full system, before the state-mandated tests would again choke the datastream.

And, that test failed. AAARRRGGGHHH I was losing my mind, again two phones to the head and trying to navigate tests on the system, this time my partner was there to keep hacking on the Skype connection while I started running speedtests-we quickly determined that there was still something severely limiting our upload bandwidth. I dashed up to the headend room and jacked into the first switch out of the server-THEN I got decent download speeds but STILL had next to nothing upload. We called the school's network administrators and, lo and behold, found out we were getting terrible bandwidth on the upload from our ISP-they were already working on it, but our Friday test was dead in the water. We were going to have to go naked into the breach Monday morning.

Monday morning I ran a speed test at 6:40 a.m. and got better-than-nominal down and upload speeds. Things were starting to look better, but we weren't going to be able to really test the connections until 1/2 hour before launch--I had my hands a bit full anyway, since we'd decided to move the whole mission up to the library, closer to the headend room, where we could count on the best connectivity in the building. I still had to create and implement a layout for the 5 flight control teams and assure there would be no issues with that. Got that done and awaited the 10 a.m. test.

As we started the test, got the Skype connection up but immediately started dropping the call again. I got the University tech on the line and we started hacking away again; several tests into the problem-solving we were able to determine a key port was being restricted by the network firewall and filters. Pat got the net admins on the line and got that fixed and voila, I got the student machines onto the website and fully operational. Still having Skype problems, though. And the clock was ticking, ticking, ticking...we finally persuaded the net admin to blow our Skype computer's I.P. past the firewall completely--NOT SOMETHING I WOULD DO OTHERWISE, I ASSURE YOU! but THAT did the trick! We got Mission Control up and linked right as the kids were walking in to start their mission.

And after that, the mission flew smooth as buttermilk. It's a really cool e-mission, taking the kids from launch to docking and then SURPRISE! a solar flare erupts and the lesson starts-you guys have to work the problem and save the ISS crew from deadly radiation from a solar flare! And the kids got right into the spirit of the thing, manning their posts, working the math, working the problem. It was totally cool, totally worth all the effort.

Now, if the next three missions just launch a bit smoother......

Systematic suspension of disbelief explained

I've been asked by some friends to explain what I mean by this; it's basically pretty simple-one practices "turning off" any critical thinking while examining a curious belief or puzzling event, one attempts to resist our innate tendency to reach for explanations based on what we believe we know, and merely accept the information being presented as though it is literally true, regardless of what we might otherwise think. We "suspend" our tendency to disbelieve. Concurrently, we do not particularly believe, but merely take in, uncritically, the relation. It's sort of the polarity of exercising critical thinking in a skeptic's fashion.

Now, why would one want to do this? Well, for starters, the notion is grounded in a taoist understanding of balance and polarity; might there not be some benefit to stretch the mind and imagination in the opposite manner we normally employ them? In SSD, we are exercising that part of our mind that is rarely employed. Too, we are dispassionately considering that, perhaps, there's something in the previously unconsidered that we might want to examine more closely, uncontaminated by our habitual understandings. And, ultimately, I find it fun.

Now, here's a link to an important skeptic site:

http://skeptoid.com/episode_guide.php


Brian Dunning does a yeoman job critically assessing pop phenomena and ephemera; I don't always agree with him (in fact, somewhat rarely) but in the service of SSD, it's only right to employ the same discipline to skeptics that we apply to "true-believers". In fact, it's downright enjoyable to systematically suspend disbelief in disbelieving-it turns the whole thing into a delightful Ourouborean twisted knot of what-do-I-think-and-why-do-I-think-it? And, dispassionately examing our beliefs and disbeliefs reveals amazing things about ourselves to ourselves.

Robert Anton Wilson promoted a more-active SSD, wherein the practicioner would actively believe the previously disbelieved or unconsidered. And while that's a worthy exercize (his spelling), I find that a bit taxing-I seem to get more out of merely suspending any belief or disbelief by thinking, "who can really say? Isn't Universe far too huge for me to totally apprehend? Maybe this view is right?" And then, that little bit of my mind that stands outside of all of this, gets to go tee-hee-hee. And, ultimately, I come away from it all knowing a bit more about what I, at the end of the day, really do believe.

Lila's Story...in part.

I had been bereft of cat for about two years when my then-girlfriend and I moved into an old farmhouse. We'd only been in the house a few weeks when she discovered that we had field mice coming in. "You've got to put out traps!" she implored. "No, we need to get a cat," I replied. At the time, she was not a "cat-person", but, in her defense, she was pretty much carrying her father's attitude about cats-"they're sneaky, they're aloof, they're a lot of trouble."

I'd had cats since I was 12 years old-in fact, I was the reason my family ever had cats at all. So I insisted to her, "if we rely on traps, we'll be setting them all fall and winter; if we get a cat, that'll be the end of the mice!" She relented, and I set about finding my kitty. Now, it's true, some cats are sneaky and aloof, but my experience has borne out that a cat's personality very much reflects the way it was nurtured when young. I'd learned from experience, that if I was going to be happy with a cat, I needed to get her young and pliable; after about a year, that cat's core personality is set, and then there's only so much you can do to moderate it's behavior.

My search began in the area we lived in, but after several weeks I began to despair of finding my kitty. The search was complicated by the fact that my last cat had been the best to date-smart, sweet, loving, funny, energetic, friendly-a perfect feline companion. I will have to tell her story some other time, but for now, let's say she set the bar pretty high. And I admit I get a little Zen-mystical about something like selecting a cat-I knew, in my heart, that I would know her when I saw her. My then-girlfriend was getting impatient; "are you ever going to bring home a cat!?" It was getting late in October, and the mice were getting pretty bold. I had some time off work coming up, so I took a day and drove the 90 minutes to the place I knew I would be likely to find my cat-Open Door Animal Sanctuary in House Springs, MO. Back when I'd been a newspaper reporter and lived down there, I'd covered the opening of the sanctuary and I've been a supporter ever since. And there's a cute story about Open Door, and my then-girlfriend, but that must come later.

When I arrived I was surprised and gladdened by how much it had grown. I went to the desk and explained my purpose, and the gal I talked to asked if I knew what kind of cat I wanted. She was a bit abashed as I reeled off my list: "American Shorthair, tortoise-shell, female, preferably the runt of the litter." "Female torty shorthair runt," she noted. "Well, we've got a torty litter that's just barely old-enough to adopt, if you don't mind a really young cat." I just smiled.
She led me back, through room after room of spacious and clean cages; every room also had a play-area, for prospective adoptees to check out the kittens in a homey enviroment. Open Door has always been a class-act. Finally, we came to the last room, with the youngest litters. She walked me over to a spacious cage with about 6 torty kittens; as we approached the cage, all the kittens surged to the front, mewing for attention, patting at the screens-all but one. There, huddled off to one side, was the tiniest one, mostly black but with a painted foot and a tan streak down her nose. She looked up as I stood there and the look in her eyes said, "Are you just looking, or are you buying?" Then she turned her head away. I turned to the gal with me and said, "there's my cat. Right there." She sort of glanced at the more boisterous kittens and then looked back at me. "Well, let's take her out and let you hold her." She barely filled my hand, but, held close to my chest, after a moment, she leaned her head against me, still not purring, and looked into my eyes.

"Yeah, this is my kitty," I told the gal. And the little kitty pushed her head into my chest, and started to purr.

As we started the long drive home, she crouched in the perforated box, she began to mew, plaintive and uncertain. I talked and sang to her, and started trying out names; her adoption papers showed the folks who'd brought the litter had named her "Mud", and the sanctuary people had christened her "Margaret". Of course, neither of those could possibly do. But, being Zen-mystical weird and all, I wanted her input on her name, so I tried different notions I had, calling them softly, singing them to her; when I said, "is your name Lila?" she suddenly mewed more loudly, and as I started singing that name, she started mewing in reply. I'd picked that possible name because I'd just finished reading Robert Pirsig's book Lila and I liked the fundamental question posed, "Does Lila have Quality?" Okay, Lila it would be.

And what a Lila she has been, and is. For almost seventeen years now my constant companion, my closest friend and dearest love; if any of what's about to follow is off-putting to anyone, let me state now and emphatically, I don't care. If you have never known the love of a pet, I pity you. If you have never known the love of a loving cat, I pity you that as well. Lila's devotion has been a constant source of comfort and joy to me; at times in my life when I've been alone and far-removed from my family and friends, heartbroken and desperately sad, she has always been there. No matter how lonely I ever was, I was never too alone to bear, as long as she was with me. She figures preeminently in all my plans and actions; I have passed on dwellings otherwise ideal, because NO CATS ALLOWED. I declined a relationship with an otherwise wonderful girl because she was allergic to cats, and was offended that I suggested she take allergenic treatments just so I could have that cat. In the darkest moments of my most fractious years she was the perpetually-blossoming flower that told me Life still had joy in it.

I can wax eloquent for days about her, and feline pets in general, but I must not try to pack too much into a single post. I will write more about her, and her predecessors, and many others, in other posts. But I should perhaps include the ex-girlfriend Open Door story. Terri, having never been a cat-person, was converted by the charms of Lila. When we separated, I was very clear that the little kitty had to come with me, and she understood and agreed; there was a bond there she would not try to break. But she missed having a kitty, and not long after our parting asked me about getting one of her own. Of course, I directed her to Open Door. She, her new boyfriend, and his 4 year old daughter drove down to find a cat; when Terri walked into the converted house that was the cattery, she exclaimed, "My God, it's Kitty City!"

And when Terri's mother visited a few weeks later, she asked the little girl where they'd gotten their new kitten. With the solemnity of a four-year-old, the little girl replied, "Oh, she comes from Kitty City."

St. Compulsory's Day, Redux

Yes, I'm still burning off comp time. However, I had some useful things to do with this 1/2-day off; I went to the agency and filled out my paperwork for my summer temp job! Huzzah! I've got a job!

I feel like Harvey Pekar, when, in American Splendor, he awakes from a troubled dream with a start, exclaiming "I've got a job! I've got a job!" So when I left school I went to the agency office and filled out the same forms I've filled out again and again and again; then, I went to another location and peed in a cup. (No worries there; I've been a very good boy!) Kinda sad that this has become so much the paradigm-I've been in that place where, due to a relatively innocent indiscretion, I had to worry about whether I would pass that test. And while I understand employers don't want the indemnity of having meth-heads or junkies on their staffs, I think it's pretty sad when decent folks can't get a job because they took a puff off a joint at a barbecue. And that really happens-you don't have to be a regular user to get contaminated enough for rejection. Sad, sad.

So now we're back home and happily frustrating the kitty by having a laptop in the lap. Having written about American Splendor, I think I might drag it back out for a watch. Tomorrow we run a full-bore test for the rescheduled virtual space mission-I'll be in school early to set that up-then it'll be another 1/2-day. Hope to get to work on some video projects, maybe play some guitar, and fire up the grill! I think it's time to grill some chicken....

Bandwidth battles in the service of the state

So this morning started with a lot of excitement for me-I was supporting a virtual mission control working a virtual mission to the International Space Station for a science class. What this entailed was running a video-conference and four laptops serving the various mission control teams interacting with the presenters at a college in the east. Unfortunately, up until two days ago I was only involved with prepping the student laptops-then my tech associate and I found out the state has mandatory end-of-course testing that had to be completed in the same timeframe. This required prepping two of the computer labs to run the proprietary state browser and support the testing of approximately 200 students. The test would take about 50 minutes, and would run in the same timeframe over the same days as the virtual mission. Pat, my associate, shouldered that burden while I assumed his duties on the mission.

I'd spent some time planning the instrumentation for the mission, and was in early to lay everything out and secure the cable runs, etc, the way we'd planned a few weeks ago when we did our live-test of the video conference. The first swing at the test revealed some issues, but the second attempt ran smooth as silk and I was pretty confident, even though I hadn't manned the vid-con end of things in either test.

Can you see where this is headed? About 1/2 hour before the mission was to begin, I dialed up the Skype connection for the video-audio link; that's where the problems started! After a couple of attempts, I called the tech at the university-we started trouble-shooting and got everything working; I had the student stations up and sitting on the log-in page-everything looked okay. Then we started losing the vid-con call. We kept reestablishing the connection and I could see and hear them, but they could only SEE me-no audio. We started chewing into the 1/2 hour prep-time pad before mission start troubleshooting that-Robert, the university tech and I, worked both ends with increasing urgency, until we finally had a survivable link and full connectivity-the flight director came online and we started trying to get the student teams logged in-and more problems! We ironed out the mission profile and password issues, everything looked good, but the laptops seemed to be barely getting the data from the website. Robert looked things over on his end and could see that we were connected but the throughput was running slower than molasses! At one point I had Robert on my cell in one ear, and one of our district's network gurus on the classroom phone in the other!

Suddenly, both Robert and Nathan figured it out-we were getting almost no bandwidth! The sixty or so computers up in the labs, running the state-mandated browser to conduct the state-mandated tests, were sucking up all the bandwidth-we had to abort the mission. There was nothing we could do. I'd just spent about 40 minutes with my brain working at max speed, scrambling desperately, thinking there was something I was doing wrong, something I'd overlooked--but it was out of my hands the whole time.

There's nothing for it-the tests are mandated. We're rescheduling the mission to run next week; at least I know a lot more, now. And the kids actually appreciated the lesson we got-sometimes things go wrong, and you have to abort the mission, back up, figure out what went wrong, and come back for the next attempt. All in all, I think it might've been a pretty good lesson.

And I am sooo looking forward to getting right next time!

Paper, power, and the politics of The Office

Just caught up with the latest season of The Office; as a 23-year veteran of the envelope business, I've been enjoying this show on a somewhat rarified level. As you might guess, the paper, envelope, and printing industries are closely linked, and it's been a delight to see how accurately the writers on The Office portray the paper-biz dynamics. Of course, most of the jokes translate to nearly any business office, but there are some funny dynamics to the paper business that outsiders probably don't get, and yet the writers seem to capture them very insightfully.

I was a bit disappointed when I first started watching The Office, as I have about 120 pages of a novel set in an envelope factory and office (write what you know!) and my story was a very absurdist treatment, a lot of buffoonish characterizations and ridiculous situations, and the same sample chapters which recieved so much dismissal by the agencies I sent them to read now like Office episodes. The most consistent observation I got in my rejection letters was "we doubt the reading public will be interested in the minutae of your setting."

Guess I should've been writing spec scripts.

Particularly telling is the story arc of "The Michael Scott Paper Co."-the companies selling paper, by and large, are not subsidiaries of the companies making paper-they are merely distributors. I've always felt funny about that, that a company could be founded on the principle of merely distributing the products of actual producers. When my envelope career was brought to an end, I had offers from paper distributors but I could not bring myself to move into distribution-I enjoyed being involved in manufacturing, but I had no interest in a career wherein I was purely a middle-man. I've wondered if Ricky Gervais picked paper-distribution for his setting partly because it is such a "non-industry".

I could go on and on about the minutae of paper and printing; the decades I spent with it have front-loaded me with information that's a bit alarming when I really start revisiting it. I sort-of wish I could reclaim all that brain-space, but, oh well. I have to say, I'm pretty glad to be done with it all.

By the way, look for the brass eagles in the background of The Office-those were give-aways from National Envelope, my old company. First time I saw one I about bust a gut!

as suggested by Bet...

TAKE THE DAY OFF!!

IT'S NOT A SUGGESTION!

Happy St. Compulsory's Day

....from your anal-retentive friends in Payroll

Happy St. Compulsory's Day!

So I have to take the day off from work. Over the school year, I have earned about 13-1/2 hours of "comp" time: the school district won't pay overtime, instead you are awarded "comp" time for hours worked outside of your normal schedule. As a computer "assistant", I'm classed like a teacher's assistant, so my normal schedule obtains only when students are in class; ergo, I cannot cash in comp time for unpaid school holidays or the like-I can only use them to be out from work when I would otherwise BE at work.

Sounds a bit crazy? It gets better-due to the way the district budgets for things like "assistants", they don't like to pay out accumulated comp time at the end of the year. It becomes Payroll's mandate to hound those with accumulated comp time to take time off from their regularly scheduled hours and so use the comp time accrued-WHETHER YOU WANT TO TAKE THAT TIME OFF OR NOT! In fact, they get so pissy about it I finally decided to use my time, just to get them off my back. Hence, I officially declare this "St. Compulsory's Day". Henceforth, a yearly holiday I will be forced to honor if I don't want to be harassed by Payroll.

The truth is, I'd much rather be at work; assistants are not paid very much, get only 30 hours per week, lots of unpaid days off (teacher work days, nearly the entire Holiday break and Spring Break, etc) and I'm staring down the barrel of two months unpaid summer leave. I can't file for unemployment (it's part of my contract-I have a job, I'm just "on leave") and this economy has made finding summer employment a difficult if not impossible mission. I could really use that comp-time money; and, true, they'd HAVE to pay it out if I don't use it, but that would earn me the enmity of Payroll (for tweaking their budget) and those are some folks I don't much want to irk.

Of course, going forward, the plan is to just not work "overtime", but some things can't be helped-providing support for Parent-Teacher conference nights, even alternating with my superior, will net me a day or two's worth of comp time. I'm hoping I might get reclassed eventually to 12 month 40 hours as a computer specialist; a strong case can be made that a school of our size should have TWO full-time techs, but school districts make changes like that on a sort of geological time scale, so who knows how long I will be in my current conditions?

Anyway, Happy St. Compulsory's Day, everyone! Guess I'll spend the day blogging and webbing-gonna be rainy all day.

All shagged out after a long squawk...

Got a happy little training day at work-an Apple seminar on the tech aspects of iLife '09. Now, folks who know me know I've been on a bunch of different platforms over the years. My first computer was a TI-99-4a, then I went to Amigas, then onto an AS-400 running RPG programs and J.D. Edwards cadcam software, and concurrently getting into PCs running Win 95, 98SE, and ultimately XP, and finally getting into the educational paradigm and finding myself in a world of Macs. When I finally got exposed to Macs again, I had not touched one since the days of OS7; currently, I support machines running 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5. The differences between iterations of OSX are sometimes as profound as the differences between Win98SE and XP, so it's like having a foot in each of three different games, and now some of the PCs are migrating to Vista.

Happy, Happy, Joy Joy. Ultimately, I keep my sanity by remembering that they are all just platforms. Some run this software, some run that. Some running a particular software look and act like this, while their kin, running a later OS, look like that, within the same software. Thankfully, I'm not really expected to be a software guru for every package; while I sometimes encounter disappointment when I can't provide an instant-answer to a software question, I feel like the staff I support understand that mission one for me is making sure the machine itself works, talks to the network and peripherals, and is CAPABLE of running the software. After all, THEY use the apps everyday-I do not.

Still, my zeitgeist is, if I don't know the answer, I will try to help YOU find it. I maintain this posture with staff, faculty and students. The cool thing is, the students seem to respond to it best. I think it gives them a feeling of competency, when the tech guy says "I don't know-let's see if WE can figure it out." And often, it IS a collaborative effort that achieves the solution, and now we have BOTH learned something useful.

These are some of the reasons I love my job.

Reliving the Glory Days....

Wow. I'm so glad my cohort Pat talked me into performing at the school's variety show today. We talked about it early in the year, but as the time got short I wasn't confident about my voice and was fully intending to back out; Pat suggested we do an instrumental, "Hideaway" (Freddie King, but pretty much the Eric Clapton version) and I agreed. We had another teacher playing drums ( a working musician) and another on 2nd guitar. Pretty minimal rehearsals-I wasn't feeling very comfortable. I mean, I worked as a professional for years, but I really like being rehearsed, and we only had a couple of sessions, and those were pretty short.

Then, at the 11th hour, we got drafted into another "teacher band"....I had about four days with the song on disc, and we never really had a full-participant rehearsal.

Too, I agonized about what rig to play. I mean, I have 5 guitars that could've served, and wasn't sure about which of several amps to play. I ultimately decided to keep it as simple as I could, playing my most robust amp but ditching the sophisticated modeling unit and just used a chorus pedal for the "teacher" band, and my old standby 1974 Big Muff for "Hideaway".

I shouldn't have worried. The old confidence rose to the challenge, and the old instincts kicked in fully. We got to play "Hideaway" twice, and both times, the robust, reactive and totally responsive Muff, and the hardtail Strat, and the '67 Showman amp came through and just completely inspired me! I was like a spring-lamb, I couldn't help but dance and show and just be the same old me I had always been on stage. Even on the "teacher" band song (also played twice), clean and jangly with just the chorus and turned down enough so I could just really spank the chimey chords, came off great. I had soooooo much fun!

But I really don't want to start playing out again...it's soooooo tiring to drag the gear around, and even though it's the Non-Performer personality that gets nervous, the Performer personality gets so keyed-up that afterwards I experience a kind of let-down that makes me feel just drained.

Still, good times!