bottle wall backlit

bottle wall backlit

hi… yeah, i know… i’ve been kinda quiet since Valentine’s Day…. at least on asynchronology. it’s been an interesting year, to say the least. i’ve been transmitting lots of 140-char fragments via Twitter, which i will soon have linked to this shiny new WordPress-enabled blogomine. anyway, here i be, and thanks for checking in. pardon our appearance while i ride the WP learning curve a little. i don’t like spending lots of time in front of a glowing screen trying to out-clever the rest of the world, but i will devote an hour or two a day to getting this all set up in a way that makes it easy to smear my personality onto the great tabula rasa of ones and zeros for your entertainment…

in the news: today i awoke at 5am, caffeinated myself vigorously and, for a change, got a great number of things done. i enacted a radical ghetto repair on a very nice Martin DM guitar which had heretofore resisted professional treatment: JB-Weld applied to a long lateral crack in the soundboard, just to put a stop to the spread. it seems to have lost a touch of its angelic penumbra of overtones, but the epoxy is not yet cured to full stiffness. i let the blue smoke out of an old, barely used Black & Decker 750W inverter and will have to wait a while before Walter (the Transit Antenna bus buried at a slant in back) will have AC power once again. i put a defective Line 6 Pod X3 on the bench and got it to at least partially work again (tech support from that company is nil, buyer beware – no schematics, nothing. [NOTE: when i called tech support in Los Angeles later, they were actually very helpful and sent me a replacement phototransistor/IRLED pair free of charge – thanks! – c 2009.12.07.1449]) and i got around to some minor plumbing additions and corrections on my thus far non-functional hot shower project. i seem to have narrowed the problem down to the Bosch 1600 itself – a defective regulator or “brain.” one final test with a U-tube manometer (to be constructed tomorrow) will tell the truth once and for all.