Friday, Pine Needles, New Laptop, New(Old) turntable, General Weekend Gratefulness

We’ve made it to yet another Friday. The work week has finally come to an end, so rejoice and make the most of those two days off. If you have to work the weekend, my apologies.

I’m firmly in the throes of autumn clean-up at my house. It’s pine needle dropping season, so I hook up the bagger to the mower and go over the yard twice a week if necessary. If we get a windy day I’m pretty much screwed, which means it’s leaf blower and raking time. I’ve already done the latter two or three times this month. I love being surrounded by trees, I really do. I just hate cleaning up after the bastards.

Since I got the yardwork taken care of yesterday, that means the weekend is a little more open. I bought myself a new laptop this week and it arrived on Wednesday. Pretty excited about this, actually. I’ve used a Samsung Chromebook for the last 11 years. First one I got was Christmas of 2013. It was a big shift for my writing because I could then write pretty much anywhere; living room, back porch, while we were on vacation,…it made doing this writing thing quite a bit easier.

In 2019 I replaced my first one with a new one, as the old one stopped keeping much of a battery charge for more than a couple hours. And now, that one hasn’t been able to do any updates for over a year because it aged out. It still works, but it’s incredibly slow. I haven’t been able to even write via the WordPress app because it lags so bad. So my solution was the use of a Notes app via the Google store to write, then copy/paste it into WordPress. Kind of a pain, but hey it worked. I held out as long as I could and then decided on Prime Day this week to see what I could find. I asked my best friend for some advice on what was good and what to stay away from as he’s an IT guy and has built several computers for himself over the years. He actually built me a tower back in 2015 and I still have it downstairs. It works, but it’s pretty slow.

I landed on an Acer. He told me it was a decent laptop with 500 GB storage and super fast processor. Got it for a good price as well. Up to this point I was never worried about having storage on a computer because most of my storage is via my Google Drive. But I felt like this time I needed something that could replace both the Chromebook and the desktop. The disadvantage of the Chromebook is that I can’t have programs on it, which is why I’ve missed a Windows-based computer. And the disadvantage of the desktop is that I can only use it in one place in the house. Now, I’ve got both.

There’s only a couple programs I want to use on it, CD Architect for putting albums together; sequencing songs, fade ins and outs, etc…It comes in handy to finalize tracks before putting them out in the wild. There’s also a program for the analog synth I have that will help with firmware updates and overall added options I can do to the synth only through the program. I’ve had the synth for almost 10 years and never realized there was software for the damn thing. I can download it directly from Arturia’s website, so I’m excited for that as well.

I’m also excited for some of the video editing I can do within Windows that I never could with the Chromebook.

So yeah, my weekend is going to be geeking out over my new toy. I grabbed a pair of Edifier bookshelf computer speakers to use with my laptop downstairs. You can plug them in via an auxiliary cable as well as being Bluetooth speakers.

Besides the laptop I’ll be picking up a new to me turntable. It’s actually a vintage Pioneer turntable that was refurbished. I’ve always wanted a vintage TT, and a guy I’ve worked with for nearly 30 years does restorations of vintage electronics on the side. He’s been selling the turntables at our local record shop. He had a Fisher TT that he took in back in the spring that I loved, but waited too long to pull the trigger on as it sold mere hours before I asked about it. Had a beautiful wood grain base and was just stunning.

Well, he contacted me and said he had a new one that he was working on. A Pioneer turntable from the 70s with a walnut base that he was refinishing. I recently celebrated my 25th anniversary at my job, so as a gift from the company I received 5 $100 pre paid credit cards. Happy anniversary to me. So to celebrate I’m picking up that turntable as well as a copy of The Hard Quartet on vinyl.

Btw, absolutely nothing wrong with my Audio Technica TT. I’ve just wanted a vintage fully automatic TT for a long time. The AT-PL120 will eventually be set up downstairs for vinyl listening in the studio.

That’s pretty much what’s happening this weekend. How about you?