Patience

One thing that I feel the need to pray for a lot of is patience. I am very, very impatient. This is why the Amazon sales ranks are dangerous for me. I obsessively click on the item and then keep refreshing it. I watch it go up higher and higher until someone buys a copy. Then it drops.

However, I need to be patient because given the nature of how my book is starting out, it will take time for it to start moving. The first buyers have to receive their copies, read them, and then be in a venue where they'd actually talk about it. That is a bit of time.

My impatience, of course, stems from my desperation to find a solution for that little student loan problem hanging over my head. But I have faith that the Lord will provide either the means to take care of it or the time for the means to come.

But that requires patience... And I think I've covered that.

Status

So there's a thing starting at church that I find at least interesting, and one part of it suggests (I almost said involves, but only I get so involved in such a thing) blogging or keeping a journal of some kind. Well, as it's been a little while since I've updated this one, I figured it couldn't hurt to see what happens. I do find it interesting to go back through what I've written on here and as long as Google doesn't go under, it'll hold up for a little while. Besides, I've never gotten a comment from anyone on this blog since I started it except from the Queen, so I honestly doubt anyone reads it.

The church deal is called Soul Revolution, and apart from the intermediary worksheets and socializational stuff, the backbone has to do with realigning yourself with God's will. If you have ever read this, I'm not sure if I've ever come across as particularly religious, but the truth of that matter is that I'm really quite dedicated to what God wants me to do. I just have to admit that I am not 100% sure what that is. So the idea of an exercise that aligns my will to God's is attractive to me.

To begin with, I figured it would be a good idea to state where I am at the moment. Where you are is always a good place to start so you know if anything changes. I also need to work out the sort of "twitter" function of this blog so I can text or email to it if I feel so inclined.

To begin with, my family life is good. The Queen and princesses treat me well. While the Queen did babysit our nephew for a few weeks, Darth and Padme had the opportunity to place him in a preschool that is rather hoity-toity in Claremore, so good for them. The Princesses are all in school, though Sassy Pants is only half a day at the moment in Pre-K. If any part of my life were stable and good, it's the home life.

My job is all right. It is a good place to work, and it puts food on the table. I am very much fulfilling the ideal of working to eat, but I do enough on the side that I could be a full time worker in my spare time (which I'll get into later). But the company I give forty hours a week to is good, stable, and will serve as our source of income until something better comes along.

Financially, we're mostly there. The majority of the bills are paid on time every month thanks to a running budget schedule I created last November when things got really scary when the overtime was taken away. I have two outstanding items: one is a cell phone bill that is currently maintained by The Engineer. I really want to take that on, and I actually planned to if not for the other, more serious consideration: The Queen's student loan. This latter one is kinda scary. You see, it's as big and bloated as a tick that's been living on a dog's back for a month. We've had it on a deferment status for years because the Queen has no income. Well, they've drawn the line on it and now we owe $364 a month on it, and have since January (which we learned was going to take permanently a few months after that). It's official default date is currently October if it isn't paid on. Out of $364, I've managed to pay $200. And if something significant doesn't happen, I can only scrounge another $100 before the October due date. That's the scary one. It sucks because everything else is caught up and current. Any questions a to what my number one prayer consideration is?

And now, for everything else. My dreams. I dream of being a writer, and to that end, I've had some moderate successes, but only under my own power. I have a movie that I shot last October now in the final throes of post-production. You better believe I'm happy about that. It's going to end up being ok, probably, though I'm probably stuck in the bias of staring at it too long. I'm going to pop it on Createspace, make it available to buy on Amazon, if anyone is so inclined, and then register it on IMDB, which was the point to begin with. The bigger hope with it is for it to lead onto bigger and better things. I don't expect it to be the end-all of the movie world.

I've written a book. A novel that is, but isn't, about vampires. It's currently for sale on Amazon, also self-published through Createspace. If anyone does actually read this blog who doesn't know about this, then I don't mind telling you, but personal advertising wasn't the aim here. I hope that it does well, and it has many sequels that I'm going to write. My real hope with this one is that word of mouth is generated, and it sells at least well enough to take care of that student loan problem. If you really think about it, that's a tall order, but I believe that if that is its purpose, then God can make it happen. It's sold 10 copies so far just for people that know me. On Amazon, it has bounced from being at a sales rank of over 500,000 down to 57,000, which surprised me. Of course, now it's back at over 500,000 because the rush, I think, has worn off by those who will buy it just because they know me, and now everyone else is waiting to see if it's worth it.

I have a musical that I helped with osme years ago, and the preview album for it is also on Amazon. On the music front, I have plans for several recordings, and we'll see how those go. Planwise, I also want to shoot another movie as well as write more novels. So, I just keep going.

Finally, I am in the writing process of a "Creature Feature" script for a guy in Kentucky. He plans on shooting in December or so, and I'm kind of interested to see how he does with it. I finished the first draft last week, and he's already sent me back some feedback on it for me to incorporate while I correct all my typos.

So that's me. I'm a guy with a great family, a dream of writing, and a monkey of a financial problem. I want to track what goes on with this whole 60-60 experiment deal and see what of these items changes, if any. I may discover something completely new as we move along, but above all, I just want to hear God's voice through this. Really, that has been my one wish. I just want to know what I'm supposed to do.

(Lack Of) Progress

So between me and the Engineer, we'd been trying to solve a little problem that cropped up while trying to record some movie music. For years now, I've been using a Yamaha SY85 sequencer to sequence the instrumental parts of my music since it uses samples to output sound and sounds really good. Well, for some reason, the sound outputs went out on this thing a few weeks ago, and now, only the MIDI outputs work. That's bad, but also good. The fact that we still have the MIDI outputs means there's hope for retrieving the volume of music I have recorded on this thing and have saved on a half dozen 3.5" floppy disks that only work in this device. I searched for an emulator, but no dice.

So, he and I turned to the programs that he has available on his Mac: Ableton Live, CuBase, and Garage Band. He got the MIDI signals, but the best we could do is record the input on ONE of them as a single combined track. That won't work. I came up with some ideas for his later, but let me finish this. We couldn't figure out how to get either CuBase or Garage Band to record the MIDI input in its entirety.

So I worked with it using some demos of Finale 2007 and Cakewalk SONAR Producer 7. Sonar did record it, but all on one track, and when I played it back, it didn't contain all the notes. I tried Finale, and it did the same thing. But with Finale, when I tried to run all the tracks (I am outputting as many as 8 at once), it wouldn't scribe anything. When I ran one at a time, it did work, but it wouldn't do all the notes, just like Cakewalk. I was flummoxed and frustrated after fooling with this for 8 hours on a Saturday.

What I wished for more than anything was the program that did work. Back in 1999, I was using an old computer that run Windows 98, and had a program that not only captured all the notes, but did it in one pass and separated it all into the separate tracks. I knew I had done this using an old version of Cakewalk, and I had another program called Midisoft Recording Session, written for Windows 3.1 and 95, as well. I dug through the garage for Midisoft and found me one broken CD. Dang it. I knew my old computer had Cakewalk on an 80 Gb drive I'd put on there just to store stuff, and at present, the boot drive had a broken version of Windows XP.

My solution was to reinstall Windows 98 on the boot drive, and see what I could gleen from the storage drive. Or that was the plan. I popped the original restore disk for this computer into the CD ROM. It gave me all the warning about it formatting the hard drive and and all info lost, yadda-yadda-yadda. Well, I'd done this before, and it always popped the OS on this 6Gb hard drive that I'd been abusing ever since I got my XP machine. So when the re-install was done, I watched it run a check disk and tell me...I have 78,000,000 Mb available. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Yeah, it wiped my 80Gb hard drive. In a move completely contrary to the machine's BIOS setup, it arbitraily decided that C: was now the 80Gb hard drive instead of the drive marked as its primary master drive, the 6Gb. Never in the life of this computer has the 6Gb been anything other than the primary master, but sure as it was done, it booted onto that broken XP drive. I had to dismantle the computer, move the jumper to the 80Gb to designate it as the master, redo the BIOS to detect it in a new capacity and ignore the 6Gb. I figured the info was gone, so I had to move forward. I was very, very angry, but there was nothing I could do at that point. I knew I should have disconnected the drive first, but no, I just let it run.

Anyway, I got it hooked back up and found Midisoft Recording Session online. Yeah, someone actually had a copy of the installation program stored online. The Internet is awesome. You can find anything. I installed it, hooked up my sequencer using the old cable that came with Midisoft to begin with, and pressed play. Before my eyes, every note on every track was actively scribed into the program. With two clicks, I separated the completed sequence onto 7 separate tracks.

So in the end, I lost a bunch of ideas and script versions as well as the first version of these files I had created and a mysterious version of Cakewalk that I haven't found yet that has a picture of Van Gogh's Scream for a stop button, but I was able to start pulling all those sequences of 15 years worth of music off that sequencer into a usable file format. I have mixed feelings about what all happened, but I'm very happy with the end result. Now, I just need the time to do it.