I bought Operator on a 45 RPM record back in the 70’s. I saw Jim Croce a lot on TV back then, He played a light folk-y style pop rock that was real popular at the time. I guess he was really a pretty wild fun loving guy. His tragic death in 1973 at the age of 30, deprived us of all of the songs he never was able to write.
He sings this song so effortlessly.
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One of the problems I have always had with video sites like YouTube has been that the videos occasionally stop and start over and over again in Windows. If I am watching an interesting video, that can be especially annoying.
The issue is that, usually, the video’s speed is being throttled by Windows itself. I am not sure how that is supposed to help anything, except on a business network, but it is fairly easy to fix by editing the Windows registry.
(I have never ruined my Windows registry by editing it. Especially if done correctly, nothing will go wrong. I don’t back it up before I do any editing either. I run a separate backup program and there’s always Windows System Restore. Still if you are afraid that you will screw something up. find someone more capable to make this change for you)
Here’s how to do it:
Press <Windows key> R
In the Open: text box, type regedit then press <enter>
In the left pane navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Multimedia \ SystemProfile
In the right pane double-click NetworkThrottlingIndex, which causes a dialog box to appear. In the box, you can raise or lower the value data to change the throttling effect. Change the base to decimal and you will see the default is 10. Change the decimal value to 70. Press the OK button and then close RegEdit.
Hexadecimal default is a and the recommended value is 46. I think decimal just gives you a clearer understanding of the percentage of data throttling by Windows.
My assumption is this value could be from 0 to 100. Zero would obviously be complete throttling and 100 is no throttling at all. Microsoft recommends that this not be set over 70, but experimenting shouldn’t cause any real harm. Just change it back if it doesn’t work for you. I changed my throttling to 70 and am satisfied with the performance, so far.
I was a big fan of progressive rock in the 70’s. It was mood music for hard rock fans. I think there were many levels of prog rock then, and King Crimson was on the extreme of the genre. I would guess mostly just musicians could be entertained by some of their material. I have always said that I almost killed a good party once after playing their Larks’ Tongue In Aspic album.
They had a few familiar songs and had members like Greg Lake (Emerson, Lake, and Palmer), John Wetton (Asia, UK, Uriah Heep), Bill Bruford (Yes, UK), Boz Burrell (Bad Company), Adrian Belew (Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Talking Heads), and guitarist Robert Fripp, but were never a main stream success although they have sold many records.
Fripp once said he would give up his extremely technical guitar playing skills to play with the soul of Jimi Hendrix. I ‘d take either one.
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I have always liked this song. I was listening to it a little while ago and thought I’d post it.
I wrote and recorded Bridge To Cross around 1994 about my cat, China, after she died. The message of the song was really about me not being able to do the right thing or at least having that feeling that I could’ve done better at dealing with the death of a pet. Pretty silly, huh?
I liked that cat. She was fun to play with. She was a mental case and would pee in the corner of the foyer. But I loved her just the same.
This song makes me sad, but was good therapy at the time.
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I sang all vocals and play electric guitar on a Fender Stratocaster, a Yamaha acoustic guitar, and bass on my Rickenbacker 4001, and a tambourine. I originally recorded the song on an analog Yamaha MT-1000 4 track recorder. and processed it with from the dbx encoded master tape in Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5 (?) a few years ago. I doubt if I did much to the original mix. It sounds just about like it did in 1994.
One of my favorite entertainers is radio host Stephanie Miller. I have pretty regularly listened to her radio show since its beginning in 2004. She is witty and very funny. I am the “Official Cable Guy” of The Stephanie Miller Show. Here is the best of Stephanie Miller from 2009 (so far) from her many TV talk show appearances.
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I bought a used Tommy Tutone LP in the early 1990’s just to get a recording of 867-5309/Jenny. I remember being very impressed that I had found a copy of the record in such good shape at such a low price. I also remember the clerk at the used record store in Lima, Ohio was not as impressed as I was. It was just one of those songs that I had liked a lot that I just never bought when it was new. Later I recorded my version of the song.
I occasionally recorded cover songs then that I was playing, to give myself more practice at recording in general. Sometimes I destroyed the recording after I made it, sometimes not.
The problem with this recording 867-5309/Jenny was that I recorded it in my normal fashion, for back then. I would record four tracks, mix them down to a second cassette deck (with dbx noise reduction) and then record that mix to the original tape past the point where I had recorded the first four tracks. Then I would overlay more instruments on that mix, mix it down again and keep repeating until I was done or the tape ran out. It worked pretty well, but that technique made it hard to go back once you mixed it all down.
As soon as I started to edit audio digitally, I had the notion that someday I could take the individual tracks from the tapes, arrange them to start at the same time and end up with a complete recording. I understood the physical problems involved. The tape moved at the same general speed while it played, but because of sight fluctuations in speed caused by the mechanics of the playback and recording, changing tape tension as the tape ran, and the use of another tape deck that I mixed it all down to that was also doing the very same things, my work was cut out for me.
My Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) featured the ability to stretch or compress audio in time that would fit the pitch and tempo of the base tracks. I could get the tracks close enough to start them at the same time by dragging them around, but because of minor differences in the length of the track regardless of what I did, eventually they would be playing off beat to the others, resulting in an out of sync mess.
Luckily my DAW can detect beats and line them up from one track to another. It is a wonderful tool and does a very good job of bringing it all back together, but it isn’t perfect. I still hear a few parts that it was a little “loose” with, but all things considered, it does much better than I can do by trial and error.
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I sang, and played all of the instruments. I think the guitars are an Ibanez Les Paul and a Fender Stratocaster electric. The bass was a Rickenbacker 4001. The drums sounds are from a Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine and were played on Yamaha MIDI drum pads. I originally recorded the song on my analog Yamaha MT-1000 4 track recorder. Recently I transferred it to my Fostex VF-16 digital multi-track and processed it with Cakewalk Sonar 7 Producer and Sony Sound Forge 9.
I was a big fan of the alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs in the early to mid 1990’s. I have all of their CD’s and all of singer Natalie Merchant’s solo albums as well.
I recorded this cover of The Big Parade (written by Jerome Augustyniak and Natalie Merchant) sometime around that time. It’s a song about a son being sent to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. by his mother to honor the son she lost in the war.
I recorded the song on my Yamaha MT-1000 4 track cassette recorder. It had dbx noise reduction, ran at 3.75 inches per second, and could record four tracks simultaneously, all on a chromium dioxide cassette. My mix-down technique back then involved a regular cassette deck using dbx too, but the generational noise effect made each mix-down increasingly noisy, even with the dbx. I was able to minimize the noise through computer processing on this track.
I equalized the song to enhance the lower frequencies as there wasn’t much of it in the analog mix. I originally had plans to re-process the entire mix, but that proved to be somewhat tedious work, so I abandoned it. To create this recording, I used an original mix with the percussion, bass guitar, and acoustic guitar together. It was a pretty good mix, but not much low end punch. Then I had the two electric guitars and the vocals that were separate. I did a little work on the mix, mainly with an equalizer plug-in and made the bass a little more prominent than it was.
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I sang, and played all of the instruments. I think the guitars are a Yamaha acoustic and a Fender Stratocaster electric. The bass was a Rickenbacker 4001. The drums sounds are from a Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine and were played on Yamaha MIDI drum pads. I originally recorded the song on my analog Yamaha MT-1000 4 track recorder. Recently I transferred it to my Fostex VF-16 digital multi-track and processed it with Cakewalk Sonar 7 Producer and Sony Sound Forge 9.
For a number of years I have had a program called End It All 2. What this utility does is identify processes running in the background on your computer that may be unnecessary and stops them. The reason you would want to stop them is in many cases they are just running for no reason and using up system resources that could be devoted to the application that you are using. In my case I use a multitrack recording and editing program called Sonar 7. Recording and processing audio on a computer uses a lot of system resources and having a little extra power certainly doesn’t hurt any.
Another application for End It All 2 is computer gaming. While there can be many moving objects on the screen at once while gaming, there is even more happening in computer memory and processing. The more spare RAM and CPU cycles you have can make a difference in the quality of the gaming experience. Even video playback and creation can benefit from the additional resources gained by stopping unneeded processes.
As I recall, End It All 2 was originally written around the time that Windows XP was created. I have used it on Windows 2000 and XP. It will work on Windows 98 and Windows ME as well. I recently tested End It All 2 on Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate and it seems to work OK on it too.
Being on the road most of the day, five days a week for thirty plus years allows one to see many interesting people, places, and 
things. Sometime around 1995, I was working for a wireless broadcasting company in Lima, Ohio. Heading to a trouble call in western Ohio, I was driving west on US Route 33, between St. Mary’s and Celina, Ohio just before the rest stop on the north side of the highway. It was approximately 2 PM, and the sun was shining very brightly. As I approached a farm field at a cross road on my left, I noticed something in the field, or I should say above the field. The grey colored object was not very big, but it was big enough that it shouldn’t be suspended in midair, about fifteen feet above the ground, for any reason. But it was.
My brain could just not understand what I was looking at. It was obviously something I had never seen before. I wanted to fill in this blank in my mind with something known, but I was unable to. There is just nothing I could explain about what I was looking at. I had no frame of reference and nothing was as it should have been.
There was a thing, hovering silently and steady in the middle of the air with no means of support whatsoever.
If this had been an actual emergency, you would’ve been instructed where to tune in your area for updated information. I repeat, this has been a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This has only been a test.
Alexander Fisher
