Dave Short

I never update this thing. What can I say? I’m lazy.

Today was one of those days that make me question my direction in life. I’m a Computer Science major. Working with computers is my job, my path in education, my hobby, and eventually will be my career.

So why am I so easily pissed off by them?

The story: I was planning on going over to Chris Rose’s house to trade some local band CDs, check out his studio, etc. I have a punk CD I recorded last year, but I remixed some songs a few months ago. All I have that was ready to go on CD was the old mixes. I thought, hell, I can rebounce the unmixed files, remaster them, and be done in a few hours, right?

Wrong!

First, GarageBand apparently decided that it needed to fix the timing of the vocal tracks on some songs. Which is great, except they were already on time. So I listened to a song, heard it was off, and double-checked. The timeline showed that it was on time. “Whatever”, I said, and pushed the track forward by ear so the words were once again in time to the music.

It only got worse from there.

I use Pro Tools Free with free RTAS for mastering. But it’s only available with Mac OS 9. Luckily, my Dad has about 20 old Macs, and one’s a second-gen iMac. I started mastering, then realized that I was putting everything in mono. This was about 7:30pm, and my target time for getting over to Chris’s was about 5:00pm. It was only after another hour of mastering that I realized that I had no way to get the newly mastered songs off the computer. This particular iMac had broken FireWire. I had to burn a CD of the files just to get them on there in the first place. I tried two USB flash drives — no dice. They’re probably NTFS, while OS 9 demands FAT32. The thing didn’t see my iPod in disk mode, either. Blehhhh.

Then, as I was mastering the last song, the damn thing crashed. I rebooted, and got nothing on the screen. That was my ‘fuggit’ moment. I’d had enough. I burned CDs of the old stuff, and was off.

Chris’s studio setup was nice. The man got a Mac and some nice equipment. I’m jealous ;-). If I ever bought that much stuff, I think it would upset Carrie quite a bit. Right, too — I need to get a car, first.

Then I got on MySpace. I’ve hated it from the start, but finally got on there so I could keep up-to-date on Killing the Hare, the last of the ‘old skool’ Bitterroot Valley punk rock bands.