hey, we spent some time a little earlier setting up my maxxed out windows 98 pc, on a psb-f from 1998 that  i got for christmas in 1999. i've had to swap out everything except the board, power supply and case, but it still runs.

i have a 64-bit pc in a box that i haven't built yet and really need to soon....

...but, i fully expect that this 32-bit machine will last another 10 years, at least.

so, i'm pretty sure about the known good gb of ram in the suspected bad slot - that's been stable.

i'm going to try a second gb of suspected good ram in parallel, to close off the first two slots.

this board can take 8 gb of ram, but it's running a 32-bit os (and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future), so i put 4x1 gb sticks of gold-plated ocz in there, but i built it in 2007, so it's getting a little bit old.

i've had to rescue it several times, and i've put a bd-r in it and swapped a few things around, but i've only ever had to replace one of the four hard drives in the machine over the last fourteen years. that's it. so, let's hope the ram is fine, after all.

i tend to like the stuff that's less pompous, and more focused on songwriting, in whatever abstraction - or more psychedelic. so, i like genesis, crimson, floyd - although i actually prefer oldfield, or tangerine dream, to the bulk of it.

i tend not to like the geekier or more randian stuff, like rush or elp or zeppelin.

and, when you bring the macho poseurism or show-offism that is more indicative of metal than prog in, i just tune out altogether. so, i just can't get into stuff like dream theatre or slayer for that reason, although the major problem with later dream theatre is less that it's too metal and more that the singer just ruins it. there's a short time window of dream theatre stuff that i've found instrumental japanese imports of, that i can actually get into.

so, i made fun of him for listening to hair metal, too. i didn't just take that shit.

i think i got him a little into tortoise, which is the kind of thing he ought to have liked, although he seemed to prefer mcentire's work with the sea and cake, and i know he enjoyed tool when given the opportunity to, as well.

but, i never saw him play. not even once. rather, it was myself that ended up playing these kits that were always sitting around...

where did i learn about sound recording?

i have taken a handful of courses both in high school and at carleton, but i don't think it helped much, and both were after i'd been recording for years. the actual truth is that my dad was a useful resource, here.

i actually wish he'd have written some kind of biography, so i could order his own life a little better; i wasn't born yet when he was in his early 20s, and he seemed to view that period of his life as something to take a bit of a step away from. but, what i was able to piece together is that he spent some time in the late 70s as a drummer and sound engineer, mostly dealing with local metal bands in and around ottawa.

now, he was a prog guy - his drum heroes were like terry bozio, bill bruford, phil collins, neil peart, that kind of thing. he was a big mike portnoy fan later in life. and, he had this kind of zappaesque disdain for punk rock as overly simplistic, although i think i was able to help him understand a little later on that the point of punk was political rather than musical. it was actually on his suggestion that i check out the dead kennedys, after i brought home a new offspring record, at the age of 13 - although he then made fun of me for listening to it.

i think this fundamentally warped his concept of punk rock for life:

...and he would constantly reference it in making fun of me for recording by myself, something that shows up here and there, tongue-in-cheek, if you look for it.

but, he wasn't exactly an expert or a working musician, either - he often insisted on owning a drum kit, but i never saw him actually play it, so i can't offer any kind of informed opinion about what he could actually do on it. i saw him noodle around on a bass a few times, and it was clear to me (as a seasoned guitarist, even at age 15) that he had no idea what he was doing. but, he fancied himself a drummer in his mind, anyways - and those were the musicians he followed, drummers in prog bands. 

but, it was enough to get me started, and that's really the most important thing, right? my concepts about microphones, about room acoustics, about equalization, about recording gear and even about guitar effects are rooted primarily in questions i asked in my mid to early teens, and while i know today that he was actually even flat out wrong about a number of things, that starting point was really invaluable.

......but, only up to a point.

i'm not a digital native, but i'm the very last gen xer and i had a computer with (dial-up) internet access in my bedroom before i turned 17. so, i'm not a digital native, i had a learning curve, but i'm just about at the end of the cusp of it - there are no doubt even people my age that would consider themselves digital natives. so, i was able to take these basic things i learned from my dad, and this glossary of language i understood, and just yahoo search it. this was before google, actually.

i toyed with going to school to be a sound engineer, and in hindsight i sort of wish i did, but my dad's apprehension about that period in his own life meant he wasn't going to pay for it, and the student loan system in ontario wouldn't cover it. these were expensive programs, too - $10,000/yr on base tuition, compared to around $1,500/yr at the local university (this was still the late 90s). so, i ended up stumbling through a math degree, instead, just due to the realities around me...

i don't think i'd have ended up working in a studio, though. i fundamentally can't deal with other people, and it sort of doesn't matter what my education is or might have been - i would have run up against this same brick wall of social awkwardness, regardless. it took me a long time to kind of figure that out. i would have enjoyed it a lot more, though, and i would have no doubt walked down a very different path and had a very different journey, even if i ended up in the same place, in the end. and, we're all dead, in the long run.

but, as a path, that's not something that was available to me, due to finances and the sort of societal perspective that it's not a vocation of much actual value. i was born poor and raised poor and found myself middle class due to marriages in my middle to late teens; regardless of where i started, the government will send poor kids to school to be doctors or lawyers or professors, but they won't send them to school to be sound engineers. you need substantive capital to invest up front if you really want to do that, and it just wasn't available to me.

so, i often sound like i have a fancy sound design degree, but i actually don't - what i actually have is a math degree, although i studied physics for a while, i took a handful of sound design courses and i went deep into the computer science and law programs, too. it's more that i grew up around gear, and learned about it by actually using it, and by asking functional questions, as a child does, to my dad, who owned the bulk of it.

alright, so we've got up until the end of july done, now. i need to eat.

this is intended to be a dirty run through, remember.