Well, dear readers, one mystery has been solved. Yes, you heard it here, dear readers, one mystery has been solved and that is The Mystery of the CD Drive. It took a new senior tech (since the original guy stopped responding, which both the new guy and I found completely strange) to figure out why the CD drive wasn’t showing up on my computer. He had me try every USB port on the computer. We shut down the computer, booted up, and still nothing. He then had me do something interesting – he had me plug the phone into the computer. While it lit up when I plugged it in it didn’t show up on the computer, which it should have. I took both phone and drive to the laptop where both showed up instantly. Then it was back to the big boy computer and another test, this time hooking up one of my back-up drives. And guess what? That didn’t show up either. I put a flash drive in and that didn’t show up. And so, the mystery has been solved – while the USB ports are putting out power – the external Audioengine speakers work fine – the ports are no longer putting out data so that devices work. And there’s really nothing to be done about it, which is kind of annoying. The only thing to try, which would cost me sixty bucks, is a device you can get on Amazon – that plugs into one of the Thunderbolt 2 ports in the back, ports I’ve never used, and then there’s a little box with USB inputs. That might solve things IF the Thunderbolt 2 ports are working, but I just don’t know if I want to spend sixty bucks to find out, although with Amazon’s return policy I could probably return it without any problems. Something to think about, certainly. But it begs the question of how the computer fix-it guy got my stuff back on the computer. He got it all onto a hard drive and he had to somehow hook that up to transfer the data. So, I think I’ll call him today and see what he says. But at least we know why the CD drive didn’t work with the computer and had we sussed that out from the very start I wouldn’t have gone through all this drama, although I would have had to get a new router and modem no matter what, because clearly the Time Capsule/Machine thing wasn’t working properly. So, that was, once again, a lot of my day. And there are still some weird goings on with both Dropbox and Word. I finally found a way for the Office 365 folks to call me, which they did. Very nice fellow who answered my big question so that I could understand it – when I told him my second issue I attempted to recreate it so I could read him from the pop-up I kept getting, but wouldn’t you know, with him on the phone it was working properly. But then, just now when I went to open this here document for these here notes, it gave me some pop-up saying it couldn’t open it. Then I clicked on it again and it opened. That’s just so weird to me and just seems a little buggy to me in a way that it’s never been before. Hopefully, it will all work itself out, but the nice fellow sent me an e-mail with a link that makes it super easy to get a call back. I wish Dropbox did that, too, because now we’re having a new issue because my mastering guy unlocked a locked folder and it suddenly tried to sync 3,000 files in there and won’t sync properly. I asked him to put it back the way it was to see if that stops the sync, but if not I told him to put the two masters that I need to approve into a new folder, and then just transfer everything over to that, and take most of the old stuff in there and put it on a back-up drive so it’s not on Dropbox at all. I just want everything to work properly.
Other than that, I did watch a motion picture entitled Dr. No, the very first James Bond motion picture. I never saw it back when it first came out – sans much fanfare in a wide release as the top half of a double bill in early 1963. In fact, I can’t actually remember the first time I saw it. My first Bond was From Russia, With Love, which I thought was great – I saw it several times. And then, of course, the best of ‘em all, Goldfinger, which I saw at a sneak preview at the Village Theater in Westwood about a month before its release and what a preview that was. Dr. No was, I suppose, a decent enough first Bond film – never a favorite for many reasons, but you can see them really trying to figure out how to present him and how to make the film work. There are some middling attempts at what we’d come to know as Bond humor, there’s a comely female in Ursula Andress, and a decent but undercooked villain in Dr. No himself, played by Joseph Wiseman, with whom I’d work briefly a decade later. But from his first appearance and “Bond. James Bond.” You know that Connery is the real deal and he remains the best Bond that will ever be. It was a really low budget film, but still has some impressive Ken Adams sets, but nothing like what was to come. But where the film fails is in the musical score, which is really terrible, save for the James Bond theme – whenever that pops up all is well with the world. It’s the rest of the underscore that’s terrible and ham-fisted. That would all change with the second film and John Barry, who created the real Bond sound. I think I’ll watch all the Connery films. I’m not fond of any of the Roger Moore films, I must say.
For food, because I didn’t want to leave and miss the Office 365 call, I made Wacky Noodles – a very quick batch that just happened to come out great. I was also contacted by someone asking if they could license the musical revue I created, Pure Imagination, the songs of Newley and Bricusse. That came out of the blue as did a request to be interviewed for a BBC radio thing about Leslie Bricusse. Moments later, I found out he’d passed away at ninety. So, after eating the Wacky Noodles, I did the BBC radio thing via Zoom, just audio, and she seemed happy with it. It felt odd to do it, because I didn’t know Mr. Bricusse – never even met him – even though I knew he knew about our revue – so, I just told anecdotes about Stop the World and Roar of the Greasepaint and talked about the revue, talked about how they didn’t write music – they were hummers – and how much I loved some of Bricusse’s lyrics (no, I didn’t mention Jekyll and Hyde because it’s dreadful). It was about ten or fifteen minutes, and they’ll edit it into something. I should have a link for it at some point.
Yesterday – oh, wait, you know ALL about yesterday already, don’t you because I’ve already let the yesterday cat out of the yesterday bag. I did do a brief Gelson’s run and got two chocolate chip muffin tops, which were very good. Oh, and I upped my iCloud storage room – I had 50 gigs of space that cost ninety-nine cents a month, so I upped that to 200 gigs for $2.98 a month – I did that so that everything on my desktop would be in the cloud – all my documents and stuff.
Today, I’ll be up by eleven or thereabouts. I’ll have a chat with my mastering guy so we can fix this Dropbox silliness, and then I’m going to try and have a ME day with no stress, although I am under a huge amount of it – I just need one day where I don’t have it weighing on me. I’ll eat something, and then at some point I’ll watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow we have a rehearsal in the afternoon. Friday we finally have our pianist and depending on how the run-through goes, I’ll decide whether we do a full run again or if we just run the problem stuff, should there be problem stuff. Saturday, we do our dress rehearsal for about ten or twelve people, which we’ll now be doing here – easier all the way around. Then Sunday, it’s sound check and show. And Monday is Kerry O’Malley’s rescheduled show.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up by eleven or thereabouts, have a chat with the mastering guy, and then I’ll try to have a ME day – I’ll hopefully pick up packages, I’ll eat, and then I’ll watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s Ask BK Day, the day in which you get to ask me or any dear reader any old question you like and we get to give any old answer we like. So, let’s have loads of lovely questions and loads of lovely answers and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy that The Mystery of the CD Drive has been solved at last.