I ran into Audrey's to pick up my

book and into work. It was a short shift because the flow rate was low Super called the shift early. I only lost a few hours, which is ok. It meant I had a early start to a 3 day weekend. I paid Audrey's a visit on my way home and tuned in to watch what was left of the Oiler/Sharks game closing out the last minutes of the 1st. It was 2-0 Sharks. I watched the 2nd and it was all Oilers after that. Hall got his 25th goal. Next game is Saturday night. I'd like to see Hall get 30 goals to close out the season.

If all goes well, I'll be able to get a copy of Dutune's DNS-12 for my new Ntendo 3ds XL. I hope to get something going on that next month. I'm still fiddling around with some apps with audio bus on my iPod Touch. I hope to have something up on YouTube this weekend. 

Next week, I'm Monday at the market research job, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I'm at my 8:30pm job and Friday and Saturday at my market research job and Sunday off. In about an hour, I'm about to take a malathion listen to a bit of Coast and pass out. Anyway, that's about all for now.

I'm surprised that it took

under an hour to get iTunes to help me edit my security questions. I picked up my DM1 drum machine and its pretty cooI and I also picked up another app called "Bassline" and it does some really nice acid analogue bass sounds. 

It was a beautiful pc sunny day yesterday afternoon about 3pm as Anne came out with me to my 1st job. I got my cheque and I'm ok to go in for this morning. I've got a full day. I met Anne inside the stairwell waiting for me and I handed her my pay. We were at the corner and there was my #3 bus to my charity job. I hobbled across the street and just made it. One of my colleagues was on the bus with me to work. Nice. My wife has some time off so she went to the bank then home to pay on the rent right away. I have everything I need for my taxes. I've got $20 bucks to my name for 2 weeks, but at least all the bills are paid up. I headed into the other job. I had a decent day getting 4 "sales" at the charity job. They only wanted 1 per hour anyway but then that depends on the area. Some are better then others.

This week I'm 10-6pm today and Sunday, then I'm at the charity job Monday and Tuesday 4:15pm-8:30pm. Wednesday, I'm at Robert J. Sawyer reading and book signing event at Audrey's. Thursday I'm at the charity job, Friday I'm at the market research job. I'm on the go all day. Anyway, that's all for now.

Northlands Vision 2020

is an interesting concept as they are repurposing 3 of its major spaces. The first one is renovating Rexall place. They want to include 7 sheets of ice on 2 levels for amateur sports like volley ball indoor soccer etc. Most likely they will remove some concourse and take out some seats to accomplish this. The other proposal is to add a urban festival park. Apparently Northlands is taking out the race track  that's been there for decades and wants to install a urban park where they can have midways, rodeo, summer concerts etc. The 3rd concept is refurbishment of Hall D. They want to include a 5,000 seat arena and ice surface/concert space. These projects are all fine and well, but Northlands is a non profit organization. When opening up the study for comments, the most common response I get is, who is going to pay for this? If its private industry, ok. Taxpayers, no. A lot of people are still put off by the new Rogers Place arena.

                     

I wanted to purchase a music app from the app store I noticed I had a $6 credit. Ok. So I tried purchasing an app from iTune. Then a window pops up saying I need to answer a few security questions. What? I've never had to answer any security questions before. So I cancelled that idea. After work last night I went to Shoppers across the street and bought a $15 iTunes card. I was more concerned about the numbers of the card being half torn off. When I got home the I pealed off the tape and the numbers on the back of the card were preserved. No problems. The apps store wanted to access my iPod's camera. I like this feature as it scans my iTunes card. Instant balance. Very happy. However when i went to order the app, I got the security questions again. I went to the manage security questions again and I keep getting trapped in a revolving door. I need to answer my security questions to edit the security questions. When you don't know the security questions your trapped. After so many times Apple locks you out. 

After dinner, I stayed up to try and find a solution. I gave up resigning to call the Apple store Monday. If I can't get anywhere with Apple on this, then I might have to jailbreak my iPod. I don't want to do this but Apple might be forcing me if they can't fix my problem.

I'm out of here in about 2 hours for a 8 hour shift. Its mostly dialing on answering machines etc. Most likely I'll be doing  cell phones again, uggh. At least the boss is ok with me working the other job. Its not related to what I'm doing here at all. There's no conflict of interest but at the same time there doesn't look like there is anything else on the immediate horizon, which kind of sucks. Anyway, that's about all for now. 

Whenever I do a Friday night Saturday

shift, rarely am I in bed by 1:30am. I usually go to bed about 3am. That way I can count on a better sleep. I was tired enough to want to pack it in by 1:30am and even though I got about a hour and a half power snooze, I woke up about 3am and laid in bed tossing & turning for about 3 hours. I had enough at 6am. I'm working Sunday from 10-6pm again and by the time I come home, around 7pm, I'll be wiped out. I'll most likely have another power nap. May as well since I'll miss the Eskimo game and the Oilers are wrapping up their 2 week pre season game, which I wont be able to see anyway. Since nothing else is going on I may as well, and I might go back to bed for an hour yet. 

*Update 8:20am I tried for that hour nape but when the lower back aches a bit its saying I've laid down long enough. The "good news" today is I get 2 paid 15 minute and 1 half hour breaks. 

I was sifting through my 250+ YouTube subscriptions earlier this morning to see what I missed. "The Sound Test Room" had a demo of a new iOS app called "FingerBeat." Such a great app for musicians and hobbyists like myself. For under $6 it's worth picking up. Time to shut this down and get ready for my commute. Anyway, that's all for now.

I'm kind of disappointed that

iGoogle has until the end of October before Google retires it November 1st. I don't like Chrome enough to have it as my go to site but I like the gadgets on my iGoogle site, like Science Shot and Trek today, and on the top there's a YouTube, Gmail and maps link. Maybe Firefox has something like iGoogle. I kind understand Google's reasoning for retiring iGoogle November 1st 2013. I suppose my alternative would be using my blog as my portal to the above sites. I'll be sad to see iGoogle go.

 I'm in the office from 6-10 this evening, so I still have a few hours left here before I leave out of here at 5pm. Then on Saturday I'm from 11am-6pm. That's a good 6.6 hours so in my half hour break I'll pop in over to Audrey's about 3pm or so and pick up a book on my special order shelf.

Last night while working on a track on Maschine, I was wondering why my music was clipping. There's a status bar where it says CPU and a volume meter. When the  status bar reads read, that means it's clipping causing static in my music. At first I thought, maybe it could be part of my routing in the audio to midi preferences. Or whatever it's called. I checked in there, and even increased the sample rate from 4100 (standard) to 4800. I still got clipping. After doing a bit of research I found that I needed a limiter. Limiter's help prevent clipping. Fortunately Maschine is so versatile that it has a limiter on its effects (FX) channel but it was recommended that the limiter be at -0.0db. Best I could dial it in was at -0.4db but I put one on Master, Groups, and Sounds. I still got the clipping. Then I figured that it's got to be my slow laptop but in checking earlier projects clipping is fine. So before bed I thought, "oh well, I'll do some more research over the weekend. Then this morning it came to me. I keep getting these pop up menu's at various times of the project that say "Sample(s) can not be found, ignore, ignore all, find cancel. I've been hitting cancel because in previous instances when this has occurred "find" points me to an empty folder on on my hard drive. So, this might tell me that these samples were just "one shot uses." I'm going to see what the forums have to say about this. But that's where I think my issue lies with clipping.

Yesterday I got into doing some more research on how to upgrade my Acer laptop. I thought, well maybe all it needs is a 2.5 hard drive (hd) upgrade. I need a internal hd running at least 7200 rpm to run the programs I use for music production. Most laptops hd's run at 5400 rpm. Not good enough for my needs. Then I looked around the Memory Express website (There's a link in my blog sidebar) and they have a few notebook hd's at 500Gb/7200 rpm. That would be a major upgrade. Basically its bring my laptop in clone my existing hard drive and install the new one copy the contents of my cloned drive back into the new hd. I'd probably need a copy of Windows 7 64bit as the copy of Windows 7 Ultimate is set at 32 bit. Including parts and labor it's about a $300 upgrade. If it doesn't work when I get my new PC in the Spring I can always use the OS and the hard drive. The upgrade will also allow a online Ram scanning service to scan to see if my system can take any more Ram. At the moment the scan won't work in a Windows 32 bit environment. Hence the Windows 7 64 bit install. I know that Windows can be reconfigured from 32 bit to 64 but it's a process that takes more time then I can give it and the earning curve is a bit steep for my skill, and patience. Best any Ram laptop upgrade can do is 16Gb Best desktop Ram is 32Gb but there are some 32Gb Ram kits that are slowly entering the market. That's x2 16 chips. I doubt my laptop's CPU would even run them little alone a 7200 rpm hd upgrade. The other thing I was thinking about getting is a 500Gb SSD upgrade, but that'd be almost as much as my laptop cost in 2009 dollars. My best option for music production is buying a desktop but that's going to be in the Spring if I get a income tax return. Then again, I might just book a appointment and get the hd install anyway just to see what if it'll work. If not then I can always reverse the procedure there at the time..

We're having a bit of a problem with our budgie bird we named "Sugar." He feathers are fluffed up and she's very quiet I don't think she's sick at all. This is called "Roosting." Sometimes birds do this to circulate heat or to keep warm.

Before I get on that train at Clareview I'm getting my Proline/6-49 ticket for this weekends games and draw for Saturday night. Saturday after work I'm going to try Burger Baron again to see if they're open and get some fries to take home. Anyway, that's all for now.