What's everyone up to right now?

[The Valkyrie]

There was a big snowstorm today. It was bad enough that it took a lot of effort to get my car out of the snow. By the time I ended work, it was bad enough that the windows were frosted and it took a while to get it to a driveable condition. Even then, while driving home, I ended up coming close to skidding out multiple times. Sometimes, the snow was thick enough that I had to floor the gas pedal just to get to less than 20 mph. And sometimes, it was slick enough that even the simple act of driving in a straight line could potentially have led to a car crash. I was going to start my Business Ethics class today, and if the snow wasn't so bad that the campus had to close down, I'd have tried to drive there, and there's a distinct possibility that I'd keep skidding and I might not have even made it to Des Plaines.

Cold, white ground stuff!

Nope!

[Jackalope]

I just received a direct deposit for my share the proceeds of the sale of the company I work for. Seriously thinking about calling in rich.

[Fireball]

I just received a direct deposit for my share the proceeds of the sale of the company I work for.  Seriously thinking about calling in rich.

The company I used to work for had some issues with the way the 401(k) was administered. Admitting to no guilt, millions of dollars were distributed. I was getting excited until I realized how many people it was spread across, and estimated that I'd get about $50. When I got the check, it was $47.61. Can't even buy a good bottle of Scotch with that kind of money!

Oh, and   on that money!

[Nakara]

So I am in need of advice.

About a month ago I went to the ER due to a bad panic attack.

At the time I was still on my probationary period for my new job, so my health indurance hadn’t kicked in. I didn’t bother buying new insurance as the deductibles were just too high.

I was there for less than a couple hours. They ran some bloodwork, a urinalysis, an EKG, and gave me some IV fluids for dehydration.

A few weeks later I get a bill for roughly $250 listing everything they did for me. I paid it and thought that was the end of things.

Nope.

I just got a call that I now owe $3,000. I won’t know the details until I get home from work but I am just reeling at this revelation.

Fuck our system.

[Rev. Rye]

Finally got around to working on the company's financial database. I spent some time filling in the balances for the 2018 statements, and significantly more time trying to get one account to square with the statements. It turns out a lot of them were just State Farm payments that failed to be included in the database.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Getting ready to head out for an MRI.

Boru

[The Valkyrie]

Not drinking!

[Angrboda]

I don't know whether I've discussed it on this forum or not, but I've got a large disk store in my computer that is within hours of going tits up.  I have the bulk of the content backed up, and plans to rescue the rest before it dies, but in the meantime, I've been busy coming up with ideas on how to repair and replace the file store.  I've had some exceptional luck in the past few days, including finding enterprise quality hard drives at only a little more each than consumer drives and lucking into a sale on a $160 external hard drive which gives me $20 off the normal price.  The latest bit of luck is as strange as it is somewhat unsettling.  I discovered there were three 2 TB green hard drives in my old file server that I knew nothing about.  In the meantime, I will have spent close to $400 repairing and upgrading the file store when I could have just swapped it with those hard drives that I didn't know I had.  I likely still would want to buy an external hard drive for $100-125, but could have easily gotten by much cheaper.  And I still can.  The hard drives can be returned for free, and the external hard drive returned for the cost of shipping, but at this point I don't really want to do that.  It makes better sense economically, but not emotionally.  That solution would last up to 5 years and be more vulnerable to data loss.  This new solution adds 4 TB of storage, better fault protection, and is based on technology I have more confidence in.  Still, that's a difference of $300.  I expect to get $300 in a tax refund in August, but I had hoped to use that to replace my bed, which has been in a woefull state for over two years.  I can probably still do that, but to be realistic, that would mean giving up ordering out for pizza more than once every few months, instead of a couple times a month.  I can certainly live with that, especially given that I've largely switched to frozen pizza instead.  But it's still a lot of money and a serious change in behavior.  I'll likely keep the new hardware, but while I still have the option, I may give returning the stuff some more thought.

[Rev. Rye]

Took a break in watching The Disappointments Room, and, well, at the very least, it lives up to its title.

Currently having dinner. Also, funny thing: I think I've found the next pedal I never thought I needed.





At this point, I think I've pretty much got everything covered in terms of pedals I want: Compressor (Orange Squeezer clone), two overdrives (Sweet Honey and Klon clones), a Leslie simulator, and a reverb.



The only thing I think I'd like to add is a little ADT. For those of us who don't know, ADT is short for Automatic double tracking. As soon as sound engineers could figure out how to overlay separate audio tracks on a single recording, artists began to figure out that recording more or less the same performance twice and laying the two on top of one another made it sound rich. The Beatles were among those artists who loved the rich sound of Double Tracking, but they hated the tedium of all those takes, so John Lennon asked Ken Townsend, an EMI engineer, to figure out a way to do double-tracking without having to do a second take. He came up with a method that involved multiple tape recorders recording close to simultaneously (one geek managed to measure the difference as being roughly 29.4 ms) that's just close enough to be noticeable, but not enough that it sounds like an echo.

How did it sound? Well, listen to literally everything they recorded between Revolver and Abbey Road. If you listen closely, it's all over the place. Some tracks have literally EVERYTHING treated with ADT (example: Within You Without You.)

I've used some chorus pedals, but they're a bit too much of their own thing, not quite clean enough for ADT, but not quite warbly in the right way to do a great Leslie. I was considering a delay pedal (although delay pedals as a whole aren't terribly intriguing to me), but once I found out about the Analogizer, with its combination of a short delay (3.5 to 65 ms) and a pretty good boost (combining a potential of 26 db gain, a master volume, and even a dry/wet mix), I think I found the best option. And it's pretty cheap. Maybe not quite enough to order one right away, but I think once I get it, this could very well be an amazing tone. At this point, the only real con I can find is that it's A) not in my hands at the moment, and B) not readily available at my local Guitar Center (or any within a 500 mile radius of my zip code.)

[The Valkyrie]

Another day of dealing with people who shouldn't be allowed in public unsupervised.

That's just the staff.