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.