Trouble In The Air

I used to have the occasional head-butt with our old station manager, but she did a lot more work than I realized and it is starting to show now that she is gone.

This morning, for instance I was listening to the radio stream and a channel was out. Again. So I grabbed a few tools that I really hoped I didn't have to use (because I pretty much don't know what  they do and some of them are really sharp) and hustled down to station, where I  traced wires and generally got underfoot until I rigged up a temporary solution that lasted at least long enough for me to finish my shows and record the podcasts linked below.

Four straight hours of live broadcast is a lot of broadcast and I'd be damned if I was gonna let a bunch of guerrilla wiring ruin my shows. So there.

For your enjoyment, I present:


6182011 New Breakfast Snob & 6182011 Songs From The Big Hair Download
 

THE NEW BREAKFAST SNOB 18 JUNE 2011


Rathkeltair- It's All Good

Damien Dempsey- It's All Good

The Purrs- Mostly

Astronauts of Antiquity- Everywhere

Jeannine Hebb- Too Late To Change Me

Angelfish- Dogs In A Cage

Love Kills Theory- Poverty of Student Life

801- Flight 19

Mythica- Don't Be

HuDost- Skeleton Key

mr. Gnome- Three Birds

Cafebar 401- Damn These Blues

Belly- Untogether

Peter Tosh- Won't Fool Me Again

Ramsey Lewis- Sun Goddess

The Kinks- Get Up

XTC- Poor Skeleton Steps Out

Al Stewart- Song On The Radio

Alan Parsons- One More River

Jethro Tull- Big Dipper

Frames- Monument

Stackridge- Happy In The Lord

Cat Nights Begin- Of Mettle

Traffic- Withering Tree

Shannon Sharon & Steve Earle- Galway Girl

Little Feat- Time Loves A Hero

SONGS FROM THE BIG HAIR 18 JUNE 2011

Birthday Party- Guilt Parade

Stranglers - Let Me Down Easy

Dire Straits- Setting Me Up

Dave Davies - In You I Believe

Nouvelle Vague- In a Manner of Speaking


Tuxedomoon- Jinx


Warren Zevon- The Factory


David Lindley- Talk To The Lawyer

X- Because I Do


Replacements- Go

Pretty Things- No Future


Dream Syndicate- When You Smile


Robyn Hitchcock- The Cars She Used To Drive

Husker Du- These Important Years

Crack The Sky- Frozen Rain

Wire- Getting Sucked In Again

Hawklords- Psi Power

Peter Blegvad- Model of Kindness

Suzi Quatro- Breakdown

Waterboys- All The Things She Gave Me

Golden Palominos- Strong, Simple Silences

Lou Reed- Underneath The Bottle

Meat Puppets- Lost

Pat Benatar- Helter Skelter

King Crimson- Sleepless

Troublefunk- Woman of Principle

Richard Thompson- Bone Through Her Nose

Joe Jackson- 50 Dollar Love Affair

Neil Young- Shots

Never Mind

I spent this morning taking a series of on-line PC skills tests for a temporary employment agency...
I'm in the top ten percentile! Top five on most...I'm advanced.

Does this mean that I have a job? No.

But I'd be good at it if I had one.

AVG 8.0: A Warning

UPDATE: I've seen posts on user forums that have the same problem as outlined below- some of the posts date back to 2005, so I doubt AVG is the culprit. Still, you might wanna leaf through some of these forums before updating.



Do you use AVG 7.5 anti-virus software? If so, good. I used to use AVAST!, but after losing my entire hard drive to a Trojan that AVAST! missed, I switched to AVG and I have been quite happy with it...so when they offered a new version- 8.0- I was like, hell, yeah! Sign me up!

Um.

First, I noticed it includes a toolbar. Toolbars tend to be viral as fuck-all, they are to be avoided whenever possible...I also saw that it includes a 'safe search' feature, which is supposed to alert you before you visit a web-site that is infected with drive-by download.
This feature, according to user comments on the AVG forum, works by temporarily downloading and scanning all the pages returned by your Google search. I have a very old PC and it sloooowed waaaaay down as a result. Blogs and sites with photos and/or video took forever to load, often missing elements...aaargh!
My CPU usage went from 0%- 3% up to 15%-25%
Note:You can see your CPU usage by opening Taskmanager, (clt+alt+delete)

It got worse. When I tried to do a Google search (for song lyrics), I received a 403 Forbidden Error Message- Google accused me of being an automated spambot program and/or a virus and I was forced to enter a CAPTCHA (word verification) before conducting the search...I followed all the instructions- I ran scans (all clean!), deleted my cookies and my browser cache, re-installed Firefox, cleaned my Temp files...and I STILL got that goddamned 403 Error.

Ah-ha...I read a forum post where a user speculated that the program AVG uses to scan your search results is seen as 'mass-spambot activity' by the Google engine; this makes sense- it IS scanning 10 or more sites at one time, after all.

So I looked all over the web for a reliable download of AVG 7.5 in order to switch back. Not to be found- the links for 7.5 all led to 8.0.
Fuckity.

Ah-ha! I had sent the 7.5 installer to my Recycle Bin way back in March! I disconnected from the Web, deleted 8.0 and re-installed 7.5, then re-connected my DSL and updated AVG.

Google has re-opened it's gates to me! My PC is smooth again!

So, if you are considering updating, I strongly suggest that you save 7.5 before you do so.

I hope a patch or new version is coming soon, but for now, I'm sticking with 7.5. I also hope AVG keeps updating it.

__________________________

Today is the debut of my newest Radio Program: Elastic Rock.
I'm now on Saturday afternoons at 1 pm EST, a truly prime-time spot!
Stream it here, if you wish. Two-hours of diverse musical excellence and oddities , played for you, ,my beloved Oddience.

(Tip o' the scalp to the redoubtable Donn for the term 'Oddience'...I can certainly use that word! Thanks Donn!)

Start Over

Above: What a section of my PC music library used to look like. This is how I 'sort' my songs.

Then there was this. It was supposed to be a non-destructive recovery. Instead, what happened was the complete eradication of all the data on my PC.
All data, including Windows itself. It was a suicidal recovery.


The Downsides:
-My PC's original 40-gig hard drive crashed and burned, taking the contents of my 180GB secondary drive with it. Except for a pitiful handful of CD backups, I lost eight years of data, including irreplaceable personal photographs, writings and music . I spent years scanning old photos, transferring music from deteriorating tapes to digital...converting records to mp3...downloading songs...accumulating blog fodder. I had thousands of songs- enough to do any sort of radio show...aargh...some are on CD, scattered across a shoebox full of mix discs, but most are are gone forever...the computer programs that helped me find songs; to scan them for viruses ; to record 'streamed' tunes; to edit them for airplay etc - all gone.
I can't even open a simple PDF, much less edit .wav files.
I'm gonna be downloading and installing for a long, long time...

- I had more car trouble, but I fixed it OK; however,I managed to inflict a wound on my pinkie finger that probably should have been stitched...two days later it's still bleeding a little. Ow.

-I lost every program and application I had; all of my saved games ; all my bookmarks and settings...the music editing software that I have relied on for years is gone and I can't afford to replace it...1,000 unfinished novels (most still in the 'Title' stage, heh), gone forever...I lost three years of radio recordings...I can't open Word docs or Excel sheets...the list is as painful as it is long.

Long...

... installing Widows updates is taking forever. One of ninety-two? 91 to go? Fuck.


Upsides:

-My pal Blake was able to install Windows on my 180GB drive and get my PC running again. He fed me a home-cooked meal too, so big kudos to him!

-I'm getting Office Suite soon, so at least I will be able open Word docs etc.

- Gmail is a good back-up. I found a copy of my resume attached to an old email .
Also, I can recover a few choice songs from other emails and my calendar is still intact.

-In the middle of all this PC hell, I got a call for a job interview next week. I don't wanna jinx myself, but damn, it's hard to get an interview these days, so it's something to look forward to...more to follow if it pans out.

-I have 160 pics saved on my camera, including some featuring my Grandmother that I want to save forever -and the two above.

- I found out that I have friends here, in real life and here in blogville. I don't know why I keep forgetting that...it's a known issue and I'm working on it as best I can.

- I wasn't an informed consumer when I bought my PC back in 2000-ish. I thought that having a lot of 'value-added' software on a new PC was a good thing. It is not.
I wound up with a ton of useless crap that did nothing but slow my rig down.
My PC used to have 40-45 processes running at any given time...I had problems with games, large music files, Youtubes etc...now, with all that extra crap gone, I'm running 22-25 at a time and my ancient relic of a machine is fucking flying (at least by my low standards)... over the years I have spent a lot of time and money on new hardware and have not been overly thrilled with the minor improvements- but without all that extra crap, it zips right along...a PC from the year 2000 that can handle Pentium 4 programs? Sweet.

The thing to do, given the chance, would be to save everything you wanted to keep onto an external drive and then build a computer from scratch ( a lot easier than you might think) , then load the external drive onto your new PC.
Note: Start with a good firewall and a resident anti-virus scanner.

(Or buy a Mac)

So, I lost almost everything but at least I have 175 gigs of quick-acting hard drive to run around in and fill up with anything I choose...you can fit a lot of music on 175 gigabytes!


I'll be around soon... now I have to get my printer working again.....and find drivers for my sound card...and video...

Peace be with.