People Wot I Read

I am getting one of my blood pressure meds at Jewel/Osco, because when I initially started getting it, the cheapest way for me to obtain it was from their pharmacy via GoodRx. This is no longer true, as the med is now on my formulary for my health insurance, but it's convenient to have a good reason to go to Jewel once a month and buy the things that I can't find elsewhere easily. And the automatic text when it was time for a refill worked splendidly.

Except then they started calling *and* texting, with multiple phone calls for the same prescription, all of which was entirely too much of a good thing. So I set out to cancel the phone calls. Apparently, I canceled everything, which I finally realized when I was staring at one pill remaining and no sign of a refill anywhere. Oops.

I have managed to turn text messaging back on and got my prescription refilled today, so I have my pill for tomorrow. Yay, me! And as long as I was at Jewel, I picked up most of the things that I will need for the weekend. The remaining items can be picked up at Sam's Club tomorrow and possibly at Mariano's depending on how things work out.

And then the refrigerator will be *very* full of brisket...

I had to get up early today for a meeting which would have been fine. The two phone calls apparently looking for a fax machine that arrived before my alarm was scheduled were *not* fine.

But the meeting went well and broke up early enough that I was able to grab a haircut before the rush, then lunch, and then a trip to Sam's Club to pick up some staples. And I even got work done.

So it was all good.

It will be better when I get some sleep. :)

I took a day off from studio work today, because I went to the Cubs vs. Cards game down at Wrigley, which was scheduled to start at 5:10 and was only delayed by an hour. But all of that meant that there really wasn't time to get down there, even to record a single vocal track.

Recording is back on the schedule for tomorrow, along with work, where I hope to make some good progress.

Back to the studio again and just about to start recording. We'll see how much I get done.

A note about the new computer. The previous computer, which is still on the network and which needs to keep its unique name, is "Thunderbolt", although the Thunderbolt card that prompted the name has been removed.

The *new* computer is named "Cei-u".

If you know why, you will know exactly why that is appropriate.

It is clearly time for me to take some vacation days. Most everyone else is at work. :)

We use Gradle for our builds and to automate a number of tasks. One of those tasks is fetching the project files for JDeveloper from our Artifactory, which has the advantage of keeping developers who are less familiar with how things *ought* to work from accidentally checking in changes. Unfortunately, this gave me a problem over the last few days, because I am working on a big, ugly merge. I had loaded the JDeveloper files for the combined project, but the merge had left me with a ton of compile errors and JDeveloper was doing its little trick of "I can't see this perfectly good code over here" during the compile, even after I fixed things.

I decided that the right thing to do was to switch to the JDeveloper files that just look at my group's source code, get that fixed, and then go back to the integrated project. It was a great idea.

Except that Gradle would insist on compiling the code on the branch before it would let me download the JDeveloper files. That would fail (which was not a surprise; it was why I was trying to get the JDev files downloaded) and when that failed the process was done and the JDeveloper files were not downloaded.

Swearing ensued. Asking the build team for a fix ensued, but our U.S. guy is on vacation in India and the rest of the build team is in India as well and didn't seem to grasp the problem. I eventually sent one guy a screenshot of the directory listing showing that I did not actually *have* the JDeveloper files on my machine in this directory. This didn't get me a solution to the problem, but it made me feel better.

I figured I would take most of today off if I didn't get a solution. And I didn't. I answered some emails, went out for a nice lunch with Gretchen, came home, and went upstairs to take care of a few things.

And then I started researching Gradle, because I really know very little about it.

I figured out that what I needed to do was to tell Gradle to pretty please, don't run a compile when running this particular task. I still haven't figured out how to put this in the build.gradle file, but I did figure out how to get the files downloaded by changing my command line options. To wit:

"gradlew loadJDevFiles -x compileJava"

And look! I got my files.

I sent an email with the solution and went off to spend the rest of the day in the studio, because I deserve a vacation.

Starting now. :)

(More about the studio later...)

The new machine is up and running and producing sound from Cubase. I *think* that I've loaded all of the plugins that I should have on the box, although the list seems shorter than before. That may be because I haven't loaded a few plugins that I never use that I picked up as freebies. And that is just as well.

The old box has had the CMOS beaten into submission again and a new battery is now installed. I removed the Thunderbolt and Firewire cards and have it sitting in one corner of the studio, powered up and waiting to see if I need to use Remote Desktop to go find anything on it.

But the studio is up and running again. And that makes me very happy.

And very relieved.

I am not thrilled by troubleshooting. I am even less thrilled when the trouble shoots back.

You may recall the incident a few weeks ago where I installed a BIOS upgrade on my studio computer and killed my Thunderbolt port which is highly necessary to being able to do recording. Eventually, I managed to roll back the BIOS "upgrade", get the studio functioning again, and have been down here merrily recording tracks.

Today, I came downstairs, woke up the computer, and it stubbornly refused to see the Thunderbolt interface. Great.

Step one was to try all of the non-invasive stuff. I unplugged the cable and plugged it back in. I turned it over, which should make no difference, but occasionally does. I got down on the floor and checked to be sure that the cable was still plugged into the interface. (I do not so much hate getting down on the floor as I do getting *up* from the floor. In any case, the cable was plugged in correctly.)

Of course, at this point, I *still* didn't know whether the failure was on the computer end or the interface end. But my laptop has a Thunderbolt port, so I got K to (grudgingly) bring it downstairs so that I could plug the cable from the interface in there. And the laptop saw the interface, so the problem had to be the computer.

At this point, I powered down the computer, opened up the case, pulled out the Thunderbolt card, reseated the cable on the motherboard header, and put the Thunderbolt card back in. I fired up the computer and it now saw the interface.

And there was much rejoicing. And some muttering.

Everything is now reassembled and still working. I am hoping that it stays that way.

I have priced a backup plan, which involves pulling the motherboard, CPU, and RAM out of the studio computer and installing it in a case upstairs with a motherboard that is too old to run Windows 11; then installing a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM combination that includes built-in Thunderbolt ports. That's going to cost a lot of money before I am done even if I don't replace any other parts in the process. And it will take a lot of time.

I am hoping not to need the backup plan. We'll keep an eye on this.