Last week I received a letter from Norwich Magistrates Court. It was our compensation payout from Jakeem Nathaniel Browne – the man who crashed into us. £175. That’s all this trouble is worth. The excess of one of the insurance policies is £300 so it doesn’t even cover that. If only I’d got blown up…£1 million payout. Ker-ching!
Category: Diary
Today, completely out of the blue, I received a letter from the local Magistrate Court informing me:
“On 19/10/2008 at Norwich in the County of Norfolk, Mr J K B used a motor vehicle, namely a VW Golf index xxxxxx on a road, or other public place where there was not in force in relation to that use such a policy of insurance or such a security in respect of third party risks as complied with the requirements of Part VI of the Road Traffic Act, contrary to section 143 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 and Schedule 2 of the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988.
Compensation order made £175”
I don’t want to sound ungrateful but that won’t even cover the excess on the two insurance claims made to cover the £100,000+ damage, loss of business and rehousing.
Oh well, c’est la vie, innit?
We are thinking of giving the money to charity as we don’t want this dirty cash.
I posted this yesterday, but then subsequently added some extra lead guitar and turned it into something slightly better. This is based on a track that was left over from the last set of recordings. I had done something with this before and turned it into a synth based track, but wasn’t really happy with what I was hearing.
However, I liked the basic rhythm track and decided something better could come from it. This track is a bit of a hotch-potch, but I think it just about holds together. It is not one of the best things I’ve done but I couldn’t throw away a decent track bed. Enjoy!
Vinculum
Direct download: CLICK HERE
And this is what this track could have sounded like…
The Imperceptible Sense that Reality is a Lie by vrooom
For any of you out there in InternetLand who follow my musical publishings, you will be heartened to hear that the next CD is almost in the can. I have eight tracks already finished and I’ve done 30 minutes of a possible 40 minute album. (I always aim for 40 minutes – as we all know the optimum length of an album is approimately 37 minutes). The new recording will be called “Every Thing You Have Ever Owned is Mine” and I can’t wait to finish it, so I can prep myself for the next one.
I’ve not even picked up a guitar during the month of October and so I thought I should get back on the bike, as it were. Don’t think I haven’t been busy musically speaking. I have – it is just that I haven’t been recording or playing. Much of the last month has been taking up with an archiving project I am undertaking,
In ye olde days, when I first started using my PC to record, I was using software called Canam Audiomaster, which was a budget application that came supplied with my soundcard, but despite it being at the lower end of the market, it was a very able digital sound recorder.
Unforunately, time and a number of operating systems have passed and so Audiomaster sometimes doesn’t always work and so I decided to go back to those masters and convert them into Cakewalk Sonar compatible mixes. Out of this idea came the “Legacy Editions” concept – go back, archive, remix and republish where necessary. I have been doing this for my first digitally recorded album “Fade In/Fade Out” and the remixing/remastering process has been interesting. I will eventually get around to publishing the album here for download in the coming weeks. The downside to this project is that it takes time and is incredibly boring to do and I think I’ve got another five or six albums to convert into this format to complete the cycle.
So watch this space!
Today is The Missus’s birthday. This time last year this was overshadowed by us re-opening our premises after our incident and trying to run the place without mains electricity, relying on good ol’ fashioned car batteries. This year, things are a little more civilised and time can be taken to celebrate and reflect. With weird synchronicity, the building insurance claim is finally been signed off today and our outstanding creditors can be paid off. The thing I’ve learnt about insurance is that these companies and loss assessors work using a different concept of time compared to the rest of us. So something that should take a week takes a month…
This is more a tip for those of you EDIROL M-16DX owners out there who are thinking of upgrading their computer system to the new sparkly Windows 7 operating system. I was a bit cautious about upgrading as my experiences with my previous upgrade to Vista taught me that unless system drivers for your hardware are actually ready, you could end up with some equipment that just won’t work with your new operating system. As my digital mixer is the heart of my recording studio, I was naturally worried, but I needn’t have been.
One of the best features of Windows 7 is something called the Compatibility Troubleshooter. Basically, this allows you to use old Vista (or WinXP) drivers with Windows 7. The idea of this blows the top of my head off and is a feature that I’ve been waiting for for a long, long time. It means that no hardware need ever be made redundant by missing drivers ever again.
In the case of my EDIROL M-16DX, all I did was download the latest 64-bit Vista Drivers from the EDIROL website. Then I right-clicked on the executable file and selected “Troubleshoot compatibility”. The menu will ask you about the previous compatbility of the drivers before doing some tweaks to the executable. Before I knew it, the old Vista drivers were being installed and everything was working perfectly.
Top rate stuff, indeed. Hope this post helps anyone out there who might be having trouble with their Windows 7 setup.
It is hard to believe that it was this Sunday morning a year ago when half our house fell off… Where does the time go? Oh, I remember – chasing the insurance company for money. The building contractor moans at me and so again I have to chase up payment that is now nearly two months late. I keep telling myself that it will be over soon – though I don’t think that the actual work has been signed off yet.