xxmikexx

EDIT added later: I should never have posted this. However, given that I did I'm going to let it stand, warts and all ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Writing the parody lyrics for "Paperback Writer" got me to thinking about another Beatles song that has stood the test of time, "Taxman". I thought you might be interested in my parody lyrics, and I thought you might be interested to see such a parody while it was under development. Without further ado, the evolution of "Saxman" ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Let me tell you most musically (Saxman) About lead reed No, let’s reboot. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Blah blah blah blah blah blah you see. (Saxman) He plays heart out for you and me. (Saxman) Cause he’s the saxman … Ye-ah he’s the saxman. No, that’s not right either … xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx No bass guitar or horns, you see. (Saxman …) He blows lead reed for you and me. (Saxman …) Cause he’s the saxman … Ye-ah he’s the saxma-a-a-an ... Not baritone. Not alto sax. (Saxman …) He only blows the tenor axe. (Saxman …) Cause he’s the saxman … Ye-ah he’s the saxma-a-a-an ... If you listen loud he’ll hurt your ears. If you listen live -- he’ll calm your fears. < ------ Awful, just awful. Please fix. If you play behind poor Britney Spears If you blah blah blah as blah blah nears. Saxman! And he's playing for you and for me. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx This one is really tough so it may be a few days before it freezes. I'm not proud of what I've got so far but it's a least a plausible start, and I'll post below with revisions as they occur to me. In the meantime, anybody who would like to rescue what I've done here should feel free to post their own "cover" version of my parody. :D

GreasyBob, Obviously it's up to you to decide when you've become part of the scenery here. As for me, at a new site I basically plunge right in. This ticks some people off, but peoples' memories are short and sooner or later they get over it. I tend to write about things that i DO feel strongly about. Otherwise why write? On the other hand ... I do three kinds of posts. The first is the usual here's-my-view post. The second is the usual what's-your-opinion post. These are the kinds of conversations that you and I, and that others and you, could have here in this distant corner of the site if you wanted to. Such conversations might or might not be profound. Yes, there are other sites and forums where non-trivial discussions happen all the time. (The way The Yard over at Train-Sim used to be.) The third kind of post that I make is when I'm really talking to myself. It's fun if somebody chimes in with observations of their own, as skylab does when I post about music. In the past I've felt free to write about any topic I wanted to in the various forums that have been created here at FlightSim at my request. So, for example, I had a set of interviews going in the temporarily suspended FS Open Components forum. The interviews had nothing to do with the issue of Open Components (my term for the FS equivalent of Open Source), they were simply interviews of people I thought would make particularly interesting interview subjects. But as I say, I can do an interesting interview with anybody on the planet. All I have to do is to get people to tell me things I didn't know. But these blogs are the first time that I've felt truly comfortable doing this. It's only now, with the advent of blogs here, that I know this kind of thing has webmaster Nels Anderson's full approval. So I hope you'll open up, Bob. As I said in my initial comment to your opening post, I like people with complex personalities. Only a person with a complex personality could ask the world "Why on earth would anybody be interested in anything I have to say?" :) It's like the comedian who calls himself Red Green. I would love to spend an evening with him because he obviously has a "bent" mind, just as I do, and just as I suspect that you do too ... ... ... Hm-m-m-m. I'm reminded of some wonderful song lyrics ... Do do that voodoo That you do So well. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (You see? Celtic Writing Genes at work. :))

Which he did. Eric came over within the hour and proceeded to dazzle me with his ability to lay down MIDI tracks. He even did live drumming on our MIDI keyboard, laying down an intricate pattern over and over, claiming that he wasn't satisfied with his timing. (Which may have been true.) "Stop" I said. "Stop trying to impress me. You've got the gig, now let's get to work." :D And we did. We started in immediately on ... well ... I don't remember now but it was a fairly tricky piece. I told Eric my ideas regarding how certain MIDI-related technical problems might be addressed, and I told him that I was particularly worried about laying down the drums track because there were so many parts running in it, my concern being that if we did it with one take for each part the result might need to be redone, and re-redone, and so on, until we had a satisfactory drum track. "No problem" said Eric. "Watch this ..." He then played the original recording and WROTE DOWN THE ENTIRE DRUM SCORE ON THE FLY IN ONE TAKE, after which he PLAYED THE ENTIRE DRUM SCORE LIVE INTO THE SEQUENCER IN ONE TAKE, using only a click track to keep everything solid. (He had his own special notation (quite possibly invented on the spot) so he wouldn't fall behind the music.) There were other pieces where we would get the score down verse by verse, but I don't recall any situation where Eric had to play stuff back in verse by verse. And he was a skilled drummer in his own right provided he could use a MIDI keyboard instead of an actual drum kit. He had terrific "time". There are other Eric Jacobsen stories I can and will tell, but I can never forget this moment because it was when I realized that I was in the presence of a true musical genius, and that I was going to learn a lot from him. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx And so it was. Eric was a little condescending at first, but when he realized that I was actually able to appreciate his skills, and that I too had valid musical ideas (as with composing dance endings), he accepted me as an equal for purposes of creating MIDI sequences. This was an immense source of satisfaction and pride for me -- to be accepted as a producer by ... not just a musician ... not just a musician who was able to support himself from his music (which hardly anybody can do) ... but rather, a REAL musician. I was in the presence of greatness, I knew it, and I never forgot it. We were able to do a fair amount of Steely Dan stuff because we had Eric available to us -- and of all the musicians I worked with, apart from me Eric was the only one capable of handling the intricate Donald Fagen chords and harmonies without error. (You can't sequence what you don't hear. Eric could even reproduce bell tree riffs though there isn't a drum machine in the world capable of playing them.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Hearing fatigue sets in at some point and when it does, be it with the player or the producer, I would always call a halt to the work because whatever would be laid down in that situation invariably would be garbage, even though the garbage might not be apparent till the next day when the ears had been refreshed by sleep plus absence from the studio. On more than one occasion Eric and I simply stopped working and started talking about music -- music theory, music practice, song selection for the business, song structure, lyrics, melody, harmony, rhythm, anything and everthing. I vividly recall one evening when we had been doing <whatever> and I said to Eric "the horns in the bridge are in a call-and-response part with the keyboard". "It's all about tension and resolution, Mike" he said in a very irritated way. "That's true" I said, "But it isn't all about call-and-response, which is a very special thing." So we proceeded to have a very ... well ... vigorous ... discussion about gospel music, and field shouting, and blues, and funk, and so on. In the end he conceded my point, which made me feel that our musical relationship had now fully matured. To have a REAL musician accept my ideas was intensely gratifying. P.S. ... I am NOT putting myself in Eric's class. Whatever level of inborn talent I possess, and whatever cultivation of those talents I was able to achieve, when it comes to people like Eric Jacobsen, or Ahmad Jamal, or Herbie Hancock, or ... on and on and on ... I am in the same position as a movie critic. I can appreciate what these people do, and now and then I may be able to make intelligent comments about their work, but really, folks, these people operate on a whole 'nother plane. I try to imagine what it must be like to hear music the way they do, and to play the way they do, but of course I can't. If I could I'd be one of them.

P.S. ... It wasn't until Golden Midi that I learned a little DrummerSpeak. :) So the Sly Stone lyrics Boom-a-lak-a Lak-a-lak-a Boom-a-lak-a Lak-a-lak-a are very plausibly instructions that a producer might give to a drummer ... Boom -- kick the bass drum a -- an eighth note rest lak -- perhaps a rim shot xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Eric Jacobsen taught me to count things out like this ... One Two Three Four (obvious) One And Two And Three And Four, allowing us to talk about what was supposed to happen on the "and of four", for example. For purposes of musical direction time could be subdivided even further, as in One-ee-and-uh-Two-ee-and-uh-Three-ee ..., which got us all the way down to sixteenth notes. I don't know whether Eric invented this oral notation. Certainly I've never heard it anyplace else. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Eric was about five feet two, a mousey little guy, the proverbial 98-pound weakling. But OMG could the man play keyboards. He was with Spyrogyra for a while and shares the writing credit for "Bob Goes To The Store", a piece you would recognize if it doesn't come immediately to mind. Eric was and probably still is heavily dependent on those modest royalty checks. Anyway, for many years Eric occupied the piano chair of Conjunto Colores, a now regionally famous Salsa band that was, at the time, known only in downtown Denver. That's how we met -- Golden Midi was first located in our apartment in the Brooks Tower. At street level of the Brooks Tower was a restaurant, now gone, where the band held forth every weekend. Being a big fan of Latino music in all of its various forms, I dropped in one night when I had nothing better to do. I saw Eric, noted his exceptional playing skills but didn't do anything more. A few weeks later a fellow named Bill Lyons strolled into our studio looking for work. We did a couple of sequences together, I don't remember what, but one of them had an intricate very fast tick-tack keyboard part that Bill simply wasn't hearing. Over his objections I dubbed in the pattern on one of the MIDI channels and then looped it for the entire song or whatever. Bill then said, "Mike, I'm good and so are you. But I know a guy who is WAY better than I am and I think you need to be working with him. I say this even if it means that you stop workig with me." "That's a strong statement, Bill, because you and I are doing great stuff here and it's hard for me to imagine working with somebody better. What's his name?" "Eric Jacobsen ..." I cut Bill right off. "You mean the piano player with Conjunto Colores?" "Yes" said Bill. "Let me call him right now."

skylab, For you and for me it's all about the music, isn't it. Where would we be without it?

McFarlane Mackey, a name to conjure with, son of the Jamaican ambassador to the United Nations. McFarlane (black as coal) and I were in World History together. We would always sit together and quietly do African drumming with our fingertips, long improvisations with him and me working off each other. He taught me some beautiful Nigerian rhythms, my very favorite being the 6/4 ... KON-KON-kolo KON-kolo KON-KON-kolo KON-kolo and so on, non-stop for ten, twenty, thirty minutes at a time, just like the real thing. I invented a variation of the above pattern, also in 6/4 ... kon-KO-lo KON-KON-kolo kon-KO-lo KON-KON-kolo To this day I tap these beats out with two fingers while driving. (I also do the kick/snare intro to "My Sharona".) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Of course your man Brubeck did a whole composition in 5/4. There's even some piece we're all familiar with that's in 13/4. (No, maybe we're not all familiar with it. I think it's the sequenced intro to "Kyrie Eleison".)

We had Michael Sobel, whose parents were involved in the the Rosenberg Spy ring. We also had Nancy SeniorMoment, whose father, known as The Hanging Judge, had presided over the Rosenberg trial. (Because I knew anybody and everybody at the school I became aware of peoples' backgrounds even when the student body at large didn't know these things. So Michael Sobel was amazed when one day I asked him whether his father was Morton Sobel. He confirmed it.) More where these came from ...

A partial name has come back -- Julie? Damone, daughter of singer/drummer/producer Vic Damone. Another was Jason Sachs of the Goldman-Sachs Wall Street firm family. (But it was not known as Goldman-Sachs at the time.) Not an artsy type but my goodness did he have expensive clothes. We were all required to wear a shirt and tie (I wore them with black jeans :)) but Jason was always dressed to the nines like a wealthy conservative banker which, of course, his father was. Let me tell you, Jason was not the life of the party, this from me moi Mikey, who can draw ANYBODY out into a conversation -- unless his name is Jason Sachs.

There's more to the Jimmy Hernandez story ... After high school we went our separate ways. But a few years later I ran into Jimmy on a New York Central train headed upstate out of Manhattan. I was on the train because I was going to Peekskill to spend the weekend with my cousins and, as it happened, I decided to bring my Stratocaster along. Anyway, there was Jimmy sitting in one of the cars along with four other guys. Mutual introductions having been made, it turned out that they were an unknown group who called themselves ... The Kingsmen ... and who had a record that was just starting to happen called ... Louie, Louie. (I'm completely serious here.) They were all on their way to Albany where they would open for ... I don't remember but it was a name act. They got their guitar and bass out (not the drums and not the electric piano), I got mine out, and we had an unplugged jam session courtesy of New York Central, who were experiencing some kind of departure delay. Anyway, the guys liked my playing invited me to join the party up in Albany. But I declined the offer and got off at Peekskill. Of course their record hit it big time later in the year and who knows what trajectory my life would have followed if I had stayed on that train. I don't recall how they and Jimmy had hooked up, or why Jimmy was on the train, but most likely he had become their road manager. End of story, or at least of the Jimmy story. I never saw or heard of him again.

Kids at Rhodes who had famous parents ... Well, let's see. She was really shy but there was Letty Ferer, daughter of actor Jose Ferer. There was ... d-word, my mind is going ... extended senior moment and I can't remember anybody else just now. I'll have to come back to this later. However, I remember one girl because I wrote about her elsewhere on this site several months ago. It was ... d-word ... either Carol Baker or Carol Lynley or ... d-word ... Oh well, it'll come back to me, and so will the other names, and when they do I'll extend this thread. Anyway, the key thing here is that this girl was famous in her own right, as a teenage movie actress. (It was her parents who were complete unknowns. :)) Perhaps between movies (I don't recall), she was with us for only about six weeks. Everybody thought she was very stuck up because she wouldn't talk to anybody, but I guessed that in reality she was simply intensely shy like a lot of famous people. (Which is why they go into acting, so they can be somebody other than the shy persona they can't lose any other way.) And so it turned out to be. I struck up a conversation with her one day and found her to be very funny, very charming, very grateful to have somebody to talk to. I tried to screw up my courage and ask her out but I never was able. As I realized in later years she probably would have said yes because most child stars live in a bubble and never get asked to go anywhere. (So typically they miss the experience even of making out, for example. How sad.) This, by the way, was during the period before my high school classmate wife and I had hooked up permanently. Had I dated <Carol Lynley?> goodness knows what might have happened after that. Tuesday Weld! That's who the other possibility is. So it was either she or Carol Lynley, I'm not sure. (But I think it was Lynley.)

You may well be right, skylab, but note that I said "jazz SUPPER club". Most of the places on West (52nd?) were lounges. If I recall correctly, Upstairs At The Downstairs eventually booked in an unknown piano playing singer/songwriter named ... Bobby Short ... who never left, so no other acts were booked in until Short died. (No, I dont know where the supper club was located. I was never there.) Here's another part of the story that you'll relate to. Our school was a prep school, and even though I was born into poverty, by the time I was ready for high school my father had pulled himself up and was a high ranking corporate staffer at General Electric, my point being that he could afford to put me through Rhodes Prep, which he did. Many of the kids at the school had famous parents -- actors, musicians, more about this immediately below. Anyway, it really wasn't all that unusual for me to have a guy like Jimmy for a friend. And some of the school staff had bright futures ahead of them too ... Like my music club teacher, Nat Hentoff, already a jazz columnist for for Downbeat Magazine, and who is a political columnist today. I joined that club only because everybody had to belong to at least a few clubs. (My others were, predictably, debating and chess. :) I cut both of these as often as I could get away with.) Anyway, I had Nat Hentoff telling me what to listen to and as long as I didn't have to lay out any money I followed his recommendations. (He even lent me a couple of records. The others I borrowed, mostly I think from the 42nd Street Library, which was only about ten blocks away from school.)

A few months ago I discovered that I have a talent for writing parody lyrics to popular songs. For example, here's one that I posted to the Dreamfleet 2007 forum at that time. The situation was that a new user of Paul Golding's magnificent 727 had complained that thus-and-such didn't work and that as a result he could not use the aircraft, which he considered to be total garbage. The problem was a simple one to solve, something like putting the elevator in the green range prior to beginning the takeoff roll. But whatever the problem was, consulting (not even reading) the manual would have given the poster the required information. Without further ado, here's what I posted ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx As long as I’m on a song parodies roll, an ode to Paul Golding’s commitment to customer support and product excellence. With apologies to Ray Davies of The Kinks ... When he gets up in the am, ‘fore he buckles down to work, He scans the DreamFleet forums, to see if there’s a jerk Who didn’t R-T-F-M and has really gone berserk. And he’s oh so good, and he’s oh so kind, And he’s oh so patient with the folks of hostile mind. He’s a well respected de-vel-op-er making planes of High fidelity. He castigates the poster but decides to help him out Because Paul knows that his Good Karma will damp down an angry shout And make a happy cus-tom-er - - that’s what it’s all about. And he’s oh so good, and he’s oh so kind, He does in-house tests and beta to kill bugs that folks might find. He’s a well respected de-vel-op-er making planes of Such high quality. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx One thing that did and does startle me is that the basic form of a parody takes shape very quickly. In the above case I had the essence of the whole thing down in about ten minutes. I spent another hour refining the parody lyrics but that's all it was, refinements. I take no credit for this stuff. It's simply genes passed down to me from my anscestors -- most definitely a luck of the draw. But while I'm just getting going with this new "career" in song lyrics, i WILL take credit for having cultivated the remainder of my musical talents. I was born with the ability to learn musical instruments without lessons. (Fine, lots of musicians are.) But the determination to do it -- to spend six years learning to play rhythm and jazz guitar really well, and to play well enough to get paid for playing -- was something I generated on my own. My goal had been to replicate all the R&B and Pop stuff I was hearing on the radio plus all the jazz stuff on the records that my sister owned. I succeeded. And even though I can't play lead guitar, I can COP it. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Speaking of jazz, one of my high school friends was the son of the maitre d' at NYC's then premier jazz supper club, the Upstairs At The Downstairs. My friend, Jimmy Hernandez, played tenor sax quite well, and he sometimes sat in with the "name" musicians who would perform at the club. But I didn't know any of this till after we became friends, and he heard me play, and he invited ME to sit in. No, Jimmy, absolutely out of the question. How am I, me, moi, Mikey going to sit in with the likes of Ahmad Jahmal, or the Modern Jazz Quartet? How would that work? Oddly enough, Ringo Starr has the same reactions. When asked to sit in with <whoever> he will usually reply something like "No, I couldn't possibly do it. Those are REAL musicians up there." I was never really satisfied unless I was playing with people who were better than I was and who therefore were people I could learn from, but c'mon Jimmy, those are REAL musicians up there.

You're not the only one who doesn't buy any payware. There's plenty of excellent freeware available, like your beloved Christensen Eagle. But payware widens the range of choices. Evidently that's not important to you but equally evidently it is to me. Yet I straddle the fence. I own the Dreamfleet 727-200, but I'm also the custodian/maintainer of the fsOC (FS Open Components) 727-200. (This aircraft is credited as follows: Airframe by Erick Cantu, FDE by Charles Fox and panel by Richard Probst. I'm simply making changes, mostly to suit my personal taste.) So I quite deliberately acquired both aircraft, one payware and the other freeware. It's because I really like 727s and I suppose I'm collecting them. I even bought the CaptainSim 727 a year ago though I haven't installed it yet. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Anyway, I understand your not buying payware aircraft but surely there are payware FS and operating system utilities that you own?

I was being half-facetious. A fellow simmer insisted that I install the Christensen Eagle that he flies. I did, and found it to be a marvelous aerobatic aircraft, just as you so obviously have. Trouble is, I have no interest in flying aerobatics. I like to watch it, but having done 1-2 hours of basic aerobatics in a Citabria (I have a PPL) I discovered that it's not for me. Rather, my thing is hand-flying big iron in IFR conditions. So is your thing flying the Eagle, which motivates the repaints, or do you just like the way the aircraft looks? (I do too.)

If only I liked biplanes ...

Everybody knows the term "beta test" but hardly anybody knows where it came from or what it really means. Well, folks, it's an IBM term dating back fifty years and more. And beta testing was preceded by alpha testing. Let's talk about that. Alpha was IBM's term for in-house testing. Like Microsoft they made every effort to use their own products in house, and to become dependent on them. This was because the definition of a product -- its capabilities, look and appearance, packaging, etc -- comes only from the real world of use. So IBM would create a product and then put it into service in-house. This is part of the product definition phase and they called beta because just as beta follows alpha, so does field test follow in-house test. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Many software vendors go directly to beta thinking that they can bypass alpha. What usually happens instead is that beta becomes alpha, and the guinea pig customers become very unhappy because they think they're buying a finished, debugged product when in fact the party is only just beginning. With FS Flight Training, and with AirBoss , my PC Game Controls company is not going to make that mistake. I've been working with a tester, Michael Blomberg, whose mission in life it is to help me determine what an AirBoss is. You see, the Golden Midi experience taught me that while you can go through the motions of developing a product, and while you may think that you've got it styled because you don't know of any bugs, the fact is that only your customers can tell you what business you're in. Michael Blomberg is the first AirBoss customer. When he says "Can you ..." or "Gee, I wish ..." or "I'm getting frustrated ..." or blah blah blah, I have the opportunity to make changes to AirBoss without angering a whole bunch of early adopters. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Michael asked me yesterday whether I have a schedule. "Only a very loose one" I said "because the product will be ready when it's ready, and not before, and it's not ready yet, though I can see it from here." When I think that AirBoss is ready, and when I think that the FS Flight Training set of products is ready, then and only then will we be going to beta test. That's right. We're going to pre-announce the products and, as much as possible, work with actual customers who will be told that they are guinea pigs. Why should they do it? Because they will have the same opportunity that Michael Blomberg does -- a chance to help shape the product definition to arrive at something that fits them to a T. Of course by the time we get there I hope it will be more a matter of refinement than of the kinds of outright changes that Michael has been helping me want, but you never know. Here's a story about that ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Early in the product's development I was product manager for DEC's R-80 removable disk drive. This was a revolutionary product -- 500 MB in a package not much larger than a milk crate. :) The project began in Massachussetts but was moved to Colorado Springs about the same time that the early prototypes were coming on the air. The protos worked fine in Massachussetts, but they died in the Springs. I made the wild guess that the head flutter we were seeing was because of the thinner air. Maynard, MA is at about 25 feet MSL. Springs is at about 6,000. My guess proved to be correct but that didn't help a lot -- the engineers still had to make the drive work. This was a crisis because the VAX had just been announced, but essentially no VAX machines would ship unless the R-80 had entered volume production. At just about the time this problem was surfacing, we got a new manager of Storage Systems -- disks and magtapes. I don't remember the gentleman's name but when the following incident occured I realized that he was a Good Guy. (Which meant that he would not last long at DEC, which had become totally political by then.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I'm going to call this fellow "John". The manager of Disk Engineering, Grant Saviers, who now reported to John, came to the Springs every six weeks with his royal entourage in tow -- about thirty people. I mean no criticism of Grant, he's a crackerjack engineer and a brilliant manager. However, by then the DEC culture had changed to the point where sixty people were looking over his shoulder, and thirty of them insisted on coming out to the Springs with him. Anyway, one fateful day about four months into the problem, with no solution in sight, the newly hired John came out with Grant and his groupies. As the usual 3-day meeting convened, John turned to Grant and asked "When will this drive be ready?" Grant hemmed and hawed and then said "In three months". "Wrong answer" said John. "It will be ready when Paul Esling, the Project Engineer, says that it's ready." John then turned to Paul and asked "When will this drive be ready". Paul's answer was, "I don't know". "Right answer" said John. "Now lets's talk about how to identify and fix the problems. Forget the schedule, as of right now there is no schedule, only hard work." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Predictably, John didn't last long. And when he was fired I realized that the DEC I had known and loved was gone forever. The Wall Streeters had put enough pressure on the company to let the VP of Finance start driving the train that the board, and founder Ken Olsen, had to make concessions to them. The result was the destruction of the company, just like Passport's SOB meant the stillbirth of their MIDI sequences business. So I became an entrepreneur and, except for the occasional short stint as a wage slave, have been one ever since these events of almost thirty years ago. Have I been a financial success? No, but the words of the wife of a detective in one of my True Crime books have some relevance here ... "He kept us poor but there was never a dull moment." Exactly. I might get weak from starvation but what the hey, I was born poor. What I could never tolerate would be to die of boredom.

Oh yes ... You will notice that I hang out here at FlightSim.com, and that the FS Flight Training venture is with FlightSim.com. There's a reason for this ... It's because Nels Anderson and his business partner Dan Linton, and Rick Frerichs, the fellow who does the site programming, are just as committed to excellence as I am. Yes, they are in business to make a living and a profit. However, they know that what DEC's Ken Olsen taught is true -- if you always Do The Right Thing, the money will follow.

I then offered the postproduction sparkler software to a telephone friend, our closest competitor in the sequenced music business, Trantham Whidby of "Tran Tracks". I invited him to come to dinner in our midtown apartment studio, we met face to face for the first time, and we had a really fun evening because even though he had no interest in the sparkler after all (see below), he was a musician/entrepreneur just like me, and we spent most of the evening talking not about business but instead about music. You see, Tran had been a professional keyboard player. In fact, he did the keyboards and MIDI stuff for the Hues Corporation when they went on world tour. ("Rock The Boat", remember?) Tran was so good that he could and did, single-handedly, crank out 5-7 sequences a week versus our ten (much better) sequences every six weeks. So by the time we shut down Tran, who had entered the business six months after we opened our doors, had a huge catalog, something like 350 songs to our 120 (only about 30 of which were really good, it having taken us a year to learn what to do). Trouble was, all of Tran's sequences were quantized -- it was the key to his high productivity, that and the fact that he did not spend time analyzing the music the way I did. "Look, Mike" he said. "You and I both know that without you Passport isn't going to make much headway, so I'm going to assume that they won't be real competition for me. Similarly, with you gone I automatically inherit first place. The fact is that everybody will now be coming to me for sequences, and they'll take what they can get, which is standardized quantized sequences with standard drum notes." That was the extent of his and my wife's and my business discussions, maybe ten minutes in all. Then we sat down to the REAL business of the evening, which was a nice dinner laced with conversation about the musicians we knew in common, industry scuttlebutt, the music we each liked and didn't like, and so on. Aside: I failed to mention earlier that we kept extensive records of our customers MIDI rig configurations, and that in addition to the sparkler I had written production software that allowed us to deliver versions of our master sequences that were custom tailored to the customers' equipment, including to their drum machines. Passport hadn't been smart enough (in my opinion) to demand that software so they didn't get that stuff either. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx As ye sow, so shall ye reap. :D In the end Passport got a bad deal but were, in my opinion, absolutely 100% clueless that I had rocked their chops simply out of spite. Had SOB been a good guy and met my fifty thousand dollar price I'd have given them the sparkled sequences along with the customization production software. (But not the sparkler itself.) Furthermore, I'd have actively helped them to enter into the business and be successful -- because while they had bought me out, in an emotional sense it was still my baby and I wanted to see the child grow up and prosper. But that never happened because in my opinion they slapped me in the face, something that bean counters who look only at the nominal bottom line are very good at. They always see the announceable profit. They almost never see the invisible losses -- the profits that might have been -- because they are bean counters, not visionaries. In my opinion Passport's entry into the sequenced music business made barely a ripple in the waters of the world of working bands. Tran inherited the mantle of Number One, and he has been hugely successful in the years that have followed, a success that he worked very hard to earn. (Trust me, to crank out a complete pop music sequence in a day is tough to do, especially if you have to run a business on top of it all.) In the end Tran's business strategy was much more successful than my own. However, while I had known that we could turn the profitability corner by cheapening our product, I refused to do it. You see, our customers bought from us because we were not simply the best there was but the best that could possibly exist. The worst of our sequences were on par with Tran's. The best of them will never be topped. Our customers were counting on us to make their bands sound as good as a two-man band can ever sound -- and we delivered on that. The fact that the business was a financial failure doesn't matter much to me. (Because I had a ball. The journey is far more important than the destination.) You see, I answer to the Man In The Mirror, and he's a pretty tough critic. If I don't satisfy him then I have nothing at all in a reputation sense.

I was forced to close down Golden Midi after about 20 months of operations. I offered the catalog to Passport Designs, a California company that makes sequencing software. Their having asked me a year earlier "How can we get in on this?", they agreed that we should talk. That phone conversation took place just a few minutes before the La Prieta earthquake of 1989, the epicenter of which was not far from the company's location in Half Moon Bay. I flew out there the next morning, driving south from SFO through areas that clearly had been hit hard by the quake. When I arrived at the company we got right to work. No socializing, just bitter coffee. The receptionist had expressed surprise that I hadn't cancelled the trip but I explained that, having spent considerable time in SOCAL as a kid, I was not put off by earthquakes. The receptionist was the only person there who treated me like a human being. They had me over a barrel, they knew it, and they intended to exploit their top dog position for everything it was worth. After all, if they didn't buy the catalog, who would? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx There's nothing wrong with that other than its furthering a reputation that, in my opinion, was for being ruthless not only with competitors but also with the stores and end users who were their customers. (To avoid the possibility of a lawsuit even after these 20 years, from time to time I'm going to say "in my opinion" here. This removes all grounds for possible legal action since the things I will be saying are in fact my opinions. :)) Greed is legal, and crushing the competition is also legal within limits. They had just hired a "mergers and acquisitions" flunky and I was this guy's first case. In my opinion he was determined to acquire the Golden Midi catalog at the absolute rock bottom price he could force me to accept. Anticipating that something like this might happen, I had brought along a deal sweetener -- a demonstration of some remarkable postproduction software that they could also buy from me if we could come to terms that I would like. Anyway, the demo took the form of two stereo studio recordings of our magnificient sequenced version of Les Elgart's "Bandstand", which you know as the theme of the American Bandstand TV show. The first stereo recording was of a quantized version of our master sequence. Quantization is a software proceedure that places all the notes and other musical events on precise time markers. So, for example, if you have a keyboard chord that was played in live and whose notes occurred within a 30 millisecond time span, quantization will cause all those notes to occur within about one millisecond. The result is dead music, a complete loss of whatever live feel existed in the original. You've heard this kind of music before. You call it "elevator music", and this is exactly why we did as many instrument tracks as possible as live takes. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Being a combination programmer, musician and entrepreneur, it occurred to me one day that I could write software that would take a dead, quantized, sequence and bring it to life. By the time that idea had occured to me I already knew more than I ever dreamed possible about how to arrange notes in time and space. So I put on my thinking cap, made reasonable extrapolations of what I knew, wrote software to implement those extrapolations, and the result was nothing short of miraculous. I'm not going to reveal the techniques here because at some point I may want to patent the process. Suffice it to say that experiments confirmed what I believed I had finally figured out -- exactly what makes live music sound live. Certainly nobody has done anything like what I built, which amounted to back-end production software driven by our master sequences. At first I was simply "sparkling" (as I called it) our already live feel masters, but as I gained experience with the technique I built a quantizer right into the upstream end of the sparkler and then turned the algorithms loose on the quantized version of the sequence. This meant that the software could take quantized sequences built by my competitors and make them sound live. I believed, incorrectly, that Passport would want the technology since it would allow them to create sequences using musicians of a lower calibre than Golden Midi had been using. So the second tape of the demo was of the "sparkled" version of Bandstand. Note that both recordings featured the identical tone generators rendering the identical musical events, set to standard volumes and standard voices, and with identical arrangement of the instruments in the stereo field. The only repeat only difference between the two stereo recordings was that Tape A was quantized whereas Tape B had been sparkled. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Before the negotiations got seriously underway I said to the company president (also a musician/entrepreneur) and the M&A guy "Look. I've brought a demo along of our postproduction software. What it can do may be of interest to you. I'm not going to tell you what it does unless you agree to buy it. Instead I'm simply going to play Tape A and then Tape B and let you decide whether there's anything to this technology." So I played the tapes, the quantized Tape A followed by the sparkled tape B. As B got underway the company president had to leave the room to take a phone call. After a few more seconds the M&A guy said "Big deal, this one's in stero." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I was disappointed, of course, but not surprised. Why should a numbers guy be expected to have anything more than a tin ear? I think that the company president might have understood the difference between A and B, but he was out of the room by then, and anyway experience had taught me that people are aware of this stuff mainly subliminally. If he was one of the many musicians who really didn't hear music consciously then the importance of the B tape would be lost on him. But it didn't matter because the president had delegated complete authority for the deal to the man I will call SOB because, in my opinion, that's exactly what he was and probably still is. When the president left the room he did not come back, and it was SOB and me mano a mano. SOB asked me what I wanted for the catalog. "Fifty thousand" I told him. "I'll give you twenty" he said. No way. No f-wording way. Being a pretty fair salesman I talked about the kind of success that Golden Midi had enjoyed, and I tried to show him how this catalog would allow them not simply to jump start their planned entry into the sequenced music business (which is why they wanted the catalog) but also why there was every reason for them to expect that the catalog would allow them to have an instant sizeable sales volume. No deal. We went around and around for two hours, with him never budging from twenty thousand. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Now you must remember that not only do I have Celtic Writing Genes, I also have Celtic Anger Genes. There was no way I was going to give these folks the satisfaction of launching a big time business using me as a low-cost booster stage. So I told SOB that the deal was off, asked to use a phone, called my wife and told her to expect me for a late dinner, and that I would be taking the next available flight to NYC, which was where I had moved our studio. I told her what had happened and she agreed that we should not conclude the deal. Her pride was as strong as mine. Meanwhile, the phone I was allowed to use was in an office with no door, so SOB was able to overhear my conversation with my wife. When he realized that I was completely serious and was just about to walk out on him he said "Okay. I'll come up to twenty-five but I want your customer list, I want you to write a report for us about how we should enter this business, and I want you to agree never to enter this business again. "Close" I said, "But no cigar. I'll give you a one-year non-compete agreement but that's it. And while I'll be giving you our new master sequences, I'm going to keep derivatives of them in case I do decide to start a competing business." "Okay" he said. We shook hands on the deal. He never understood that what I delivered was the newly-quantized masters, and that the derivative versions I held back were the live feel versions (from which the quantized masters could be reconstructed anytime I wanted). So that's what they got -- quantized sequences -- and they never understood why they weren't able to sell stuff in anything like the quantities I had discussed in my report, which was 100% honest. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

dobar, Have patience. Webmaster Nels Anderson personally handles all file library submissions but I'll bet that he simply couldn't get to it. As he told me very early this morning by email when he explained that he could not process my article yet, today is Sunday and even he needs to take a Sunday off now and then. But if you're unsure about the method for packaging and uploading scenery, how about taking the question to one of the forums, whichever one seems most appropriate.

Yesterday member dobar asked why nobody had told him that a blogging facility now exists on FlightSim.com. I told him I was writing a feature article on that very subject. I sent it off to webmaster Nels Anderson early this morning, but I thought I'd give the readers of my blog a chance to see the article before other people do. I'm particularly interested in feedback regarding the parody song lyrics at the very bottom of the piece ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx In a recent news article located here [Link Expired] webmaster Nels Anderson did a short writeup of the new appearance and features of the revised FlightSim.com web site. I’m now going to write at some length about the blogs feature. The term “blog” stands for “web log”. A blog is effectively a person’s personal forum, but one that is open to the public. The blog owner (an ordinary forum user like you or me) can make posts which, if readers care to comment, become de facto threads in the blog. Anybody who is registered to the forums can start his or her own blog. That person can moderate the blog. The blog owner also can post comments to the threads in the blog (or to other peoples’ blogs), so each blog truly does behave like a privately manged forum. (Note: As often as not “blog” here will be used in lieu of “post”. So it is perfectly correct Internet technobabble to say that a blogger is someone who blogs to blogs. J) As one blogger said, “Why on earth would anybody be interested in anything I have to say?” Well, mon ami, all people are interesting, everybody has something important, or educational, or entertaining, to say to the world on many different subjects. Blogs are a terrific way to do this. Blogs let you too be an author, and they let you write articles on essentially anything you want without having to submit them in advance to the Great Webmaster In The Sky, and therefore with no waiting. Maybe you will write about your job, or your other hobbies, or the feminine curves of your favorite aircraft, or the way your daughter repainted her room. I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is that if you write blogs I’m going to read them. And I’ll probably engage you in conversation because I love talking with people about the things that interest them, things about which they feel strongly enough to write. (Sure, once this thing gets going I’ll step back and let everybody talk to everybody else. However, I’m still going to blog on my own, and it would be interesting if other people wanted to talk with me.) What’s different about blogs? What do blogs do for us that forum private mail or real world email don’t do? The main difference is that even if you and I don’t know one another – even if we didn’t know that the other person even existed – we can become friends because I can see what you write, you can see what I write. We can make our lives intertwine in this special way if that’s what we would like to do. No form of electronic mail can do this. Now … While I don’t speak for FlightSim.com I’ve been posting to my own blog under the following self-imposed rules … 1 – No politics, religion, sex or profanity. (Maybe tasteful vague hints but nothing overt.) In general, if I wouldn’t be willing to shout <whatever> through a bullhorn at my work because some people might take offense then I won’t write about <whatever>. Similarly, if I wouldn’t want my nine-year-old granddaughter to hear my shouts about <whatever> then I won’t write it. Beyond those rules essentially anything goes as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been writing about anything and everything and very little of it has had to do with either aviation or simming. As often as not a certain good friend will chime in with some comment or other and that will get a conversation going between us. The conversation can end up being wide-ranging because in my blog there is no such thing as an off-topic post. Why don’t we have those same free-form rules for forums? Because people come to a given forum with the expectation that they’re going to be reading or posting on the subject that the forum name indicates, and while I’m too often an offender, there is a similar expectation that a given thread is going to remain on-topic. (Otherwise it becomes difficult for readers to retrieve information later, or to follow a large and complex thread.) But blogs are different. They’re off in a corner of the site that does not interfere with the mainstream forum activity so there is less need to restrict or police the content. Anyway, if you go to the FSX forum you certainly won’t want to read my scholarly pontifications about Ancient Egypt there. Conversely, if you go to my blog, located HERE https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/blog.php?u=17162, you should not expect threads about tips and tricks for FSX. These MIGHT happen, as with a recent thread about the possibility of my writing some articles about nifty modifications to aircraft.cfg files, but for the most part my blog is about …. … … Well, to be perfectly honest, my blog is about ME, just as your pending new blog inevitably will be about YOU. So give it a try. I love reading just as much as I love writing, and I guarantee you that if nothing else happens -- if nobody else does it --I’ll read what you write and then have the kind of conversation with you that will show the world what an interesting person you really are. P.S. To create a blog, log into the forums. At the top you will see a toolbar. The link second from the left says “blogs”. Follow it. You will then see on the left four boxes with dark blue headers. The second one down says Options. The process should now be self-explanatory. Parodying the immortal lyrics of “Paperback Writer”, which John Lennon did NOT write but Paul McCartney did … Sir or madam won’t you start a blog? It’s very easy, just like falling off a log. Based on a concept that’s so very clear You won’t be disappointed, You won’t shed a tear so be a blog writer … FlightSim blog writer. Ten thousand chars is all a blog may be But that is not a problem, not for you and me. If you need more chars to say what you must say Then add a comment blog And you’ll be on your way, a famous blog writer … FlightSim blog writer. If they really like it they will tell you so ‘Cause everybody likes being in the know. You’re someone special and they want to hear About what interests you So be a sport and try it. Be a blog writer … FlightSim blog writer. Now you can dazzle all those friends of yours Who have heard of blogs but don’t see the doors Open to them in this new frontier But really, that’s okay because You have no fear so show them, Blog Writer … Blogosphere Writer. mike@pcgamecontrols.com Go Broncos

No, not that guy, but the snake was of that same size. :D (But a dark green, as I recall.)

I haven't heard of pet rattlesnakes but years ago I knew I guy who had a pet big snake, I think it was an anoconda. (Whatever it was, it wasn't a constrictor and it wasn't venemous.) At any rate, my colleague swore that the snake knew him, and that it was affectionate in its own way. Having seen his photos I do know that the snake would drape itself around his neck and shoulders. This was simply a guy I worked with. We disliked each other so I was never over to his place and never saw the snake for myself.

"Cats will just never be as smart as dogs." That's true. And dogs will never be as smart as horses. And chickens will never be as smart as cats. So what? The question here is whether various animals make nice pets, not how they'll score on an IQ test.

East Anglia. Norwich. You do know that English place names are magic to USA peoples' ears, yes? Some of my favorites ... Slough Portsmouth (but we have one too :)) The Strand (whatever that is) Hadrian's Wall Knightsbridge Kensington . . . And on and on. Now for some of my favorite USA place names ... Six Shooter Mountain Tie Siding Superstition Mountains China Lake Watervliet (Belgian?) . . . And on and on. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Why did you blur the photo of the Spit? Was it to provoke exactly the feeling that I got from it?