OS 9 lives!

Finally, a January update- yay!

Healthwise, everything is going okay. My skin condition has proven to be temporary, as the anti-fungal cream seemed to work pretty good and actually cleared it up after a few days.

I head to Cleveland this weekend for my usual "you're fine, come back in six months or if something changes and you get sicker" visit. It's a round of tests in the morning involving drinking lots of that yucky liquid beverages, a CAT scan, followed by a meeting with the transplant coordinator and then the doktor himself.

Later that week I'll go for a routine colon visit locally, which means I'm most likely going to get scheduled for my usual colonoscopy, possibly sometime in early February. Yippie!

My system was acting up last week, a usual situation for me that means I was staying up until 3 or 4 am going to the bathroom on a regular basis. Such episodes only last a few days in a row and then not all that often, but it's pointless for me to go to bed as I just wake up every thirty minutes. I find that tougher than just staying up.

My hockey playing is still going strong. In fact, I actually skated out as a forward for one game for the first time ever. On my second shift, we scored three times and I got two assists. I finished with 0 goals, 2 assists and a +3. Not bad for never played before and using almost all borrowed equipment, eh? Add my assist I got while in goal a few weeks ago and I'm around 10th in team scoring for the year.

As it's been a while, so I should mention I had a good holiday season. Loads of cards from many friends, and Santa was nice to me.

For New Year's resolutions, I decided to learn much more about my musical toys than I do. For example, I want to be a wiz at Digital Performer in areas like sound editing, recording, pitch correction, etc. Having a great resource like Darcy who is willing to sing almost anything in her range helps. I've started this year by recording Traffic's Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys with me on piano and Darcy on vox. When it gets close to presentable, perhaps I'll post a few seconds of it on the website here.

Around New Year's Day I picked up a used master keyboard controller, the Roland A-90 (with expansion card) from the 1990's. Weighted keys really makes a big difference when playing, and in fact I don't see myself playing the other keyboards all that often as I can control everything from that single keyboard. Having four MIDI outs sure helps.

One thing I did this past weekend was install Mac OS 9 (really!) as I wanted a patch manager/editor/librarian for my hardware synth patches. I bought the old SoundDiver in my OS 9/iMac days that worked okay, but since moving to OS X I have not used it in years. Instead of buying another program for another $150 or so, I thought I'd see if I could get OS 9 working on my G5 PowerMac. Sure enough, there were some technical hurdles, but thanks to some clever freeware and demo software, it seems to be working just fine. The downside, other than running Classic mode, is that the program will ask for the original CD at random intervals as a method of copy protection. I really hate that...