a broken forest
here’s the rain going back to the sky
it’s spring
there are blossoms on the trees
and milk
Hewlett Packard Software Is Horrible
Tonight I wanted to print a mailing label for something I sold on Ebay. I didn’t have the printer driver installed for our HP6980, so I went looking for it.
I found it and installed it. It made me reboot and then did some more stuff after rebooting. But what it didn’t do, apparently, is install a printer such that I could print from applications.
So then, I went looking some more, and found that HP has a network printer wizard. Great! Downloaded and ran that, and it went off on an endless loop looking for drivers. Oh, and it mis-identified my 6980 as an ‘all in one’ printer, when in fact it is just a printer.
Finally, I tracked down the actual driver INF file in c:\program files\hewlett packard and the printer wizard was able to finish installing the printer.
But all that bullshit took me 90 minutes I’ll never get back, and I shudder to think what someone who doesn’t hack on computers for a living would do faced with all that Fail.
And to top that off, HP printer drivers install a shitload of resident programs and such, and sometimes those programs go haywire.
Why can’t they just WRITE A DRIVER that satisfies the OS requirements, and INSTALL IT SIMPLY with clear feedback to the end user about what it’s doing? They’re on the right track with their Network Printer Wizard but that software doesn’t actually work right, exactly.
HP used to be one of the premiere computer companies in the world. How the mighty have fallen! Maybe if they’d only given Carly Fiorina a half bazillion dollars to run the company into the ground instead of a round bazillion, they’d be able to hire some engineers that can write a fucking printer driver correctly.
I know what ye are agin, what’re ye fir?
It is apparently sufficient to market yourself as NOT being something.
JJ Fad Reunion
Reunions: JJ Fad Set To Get Supersonic All Over Again.
Maybe I’m old and crotchety but what really grabbed my ear back when hip hop was a new thing was that it was fun. And few tracks were as fun as “Supersonic.” In my circle of friends, “The S is for Super, The U is for Unique” regularly comes up in conversation.
So yeah, I’m sure that JJ Fad in their 40s might not be cutting edge, but I’m hoping it will be fun.
Mexican VELVET PAINTING of Original Mormon JOSEPH SMITH – eBay
Tres bizarre…
Livejournal user rape_blossom sure does know how to find them. Warning, a couple of candidates for rotten.com.
computer insanity
It’s no mystery that since I’ve had a computer at home for 25 years, and have been pursing music with the computer for at least 15 years, that I will have built up quite a collection of files.
And finally I’ve instituted a backup strategy beyond unjustified optimism — I’m using SyncToy to copy files to a backup external drive.
What I didn’t realize that beyond the 600 odd gigabytes of various things — a whole lot of mp3 and wav files, sample sets, etc — that there are almost 850,000 separate files. The initial sync — i.e. a bulk copy, in effect — took over 12 hours.
Considering that my first computer had 64k of RAM, and 2 280k floppies, this seemed insane to me, but there you have it.
Music I’m liking
SO FAR SO SO: Retrospective 1995-2005
I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, so here goes. This is a collection of unreleased songs from my back catalog. There’s all sorts of genres represented, but in choosing the tracks, I tried to pick songs that were the best example of I was doing at any given time. I haven’t dated them here, but some of them date themselves. For example, when was it a big deal to do an Amen break track? When were 90BPM hip hop instrumentals something people made a million of?
These tracks are lousy with uncleared samples; consequently if anyone actually recognizes a sample of their work and objects I’ll remove the file.
If someone takes a particular shine to a track and wants to remix it let me know. Most of these only exist as mixdowns of long-lost percursor files and sequences, but if I can provide individual sounds, I’d be happy to.
1. NYE[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/01%20NYE.mp3]
2. Morton’s Shadow (samples from Morton Subotnick “Silver Apples of the Moon” and DJ Shadow) [audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/02%20Morton%27s%20Shadow.mp3]
3. Lucas[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/03%20Lucas.mp3]
4. Noise Dub[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/04%20Noise%20Dub.mp3]
5. Grandiose (with Lucas Williams on Guitar)[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/05%20Grandiose.mp3]
6. Sweetness (samples Lush)[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/06%20Sweetness.mp3]
7. Windchime[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/07%20Windchime.mp3]
8. Monked (samples Theleonius Monk and Weather Report)[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/08%20Monked.mp3]
9. The Wrong Trousers (with Axy Jeeb)[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/09%20The%20Wrong%20Trousers.mp3]
10. Mayday[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/10%20Mayday.mp3]
11. Little Miss (samples Raymond Scott and Elaine Elias)[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/11%20little%20miss.mp3]
12. Inna (samples Inna & the Farlanders)[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/12%20Inna.mp3]
13. Hubert (samples Hubert Laws)[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/13%20Hubert.mp3]
14. Honey (samples (samples Sweet Honey In The Rock)[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/14%20Honey.mp3]
15. Gee Why[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/15%20Gee%20Why.mp3]
16. Busy Signal[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/16%20BusySignal.mp3]
17. AD Remix (based on samples from Andrew Duke)[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/17%20AD%20Remix.mp3]
18. Labor Day[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/18%20Labor%20Day.mp3]
19. Nativity (samples some crazy bible story 7″ record)[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/19%20Nativity.mp3]
20. Redux [audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/SoFarSoSo/20%20Redux.mp3]
SO FAR SO SO by Kent Williams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.cornwarning.com.