If At First You Don't Succeed, etc.

You may recall that last Sunday didn't turn out quite as we'd planned: a trip over to a local dance studio for about $12 worth of rented floor space for practice ended up costing us over $200 when the studio was closed and we ended up diverted to a shopping expedition instead.

Well...

A week has gone by, and the plan for today is - go over to Lioudmila's and rent floor space to practice. I'm a little concerned, given how last Sunday turned out, but Agnes has arranged for one of her students who works there to meet us and let us in if none of the full-time staff is available. We'll see. At least, if we get locked out again, we have our Costco Annual 2% Reward Certificate (a whopping $298 this year, woo-hoo!!) that we can spend instead of gouging at my poor battered, bleeding checkbook again.

On other fronts, one of my Christmas gifts was a spiffy turntable that connects directly to my computer to allow me to get working on digitizing the roughly ten linear feet of old LPs that I've been storing for years. Agnes is particularly anxious for me to digitize all the old German children's records that she bought for Minnie many years ago, so that we can turn them into CDs for Leya so she can start learning German early. I got the turntable assembled and hooked up and it seems to work fine, but the capture software (a program called "Audacity") that came with it is for the birds. On my agenda for today is to see if I can make it work with the "Toast" program I bought some time ago. Back when I had my old PC, I had a great program called Sound Forge that was the gold standard for digital audio...sadly, like so much of my other software, it won't run on the Mac. Anybody have any other suggestions for good digital audio capture and processing software for the Mac?

AARRGGHH!!

Yesterday's post about words and phrases that ought to be banished elicited a comment from reader Mike, who blogs at Billions of Versions of Normal, and who posted this cartoon about one of them: "X is the new Y" ...

Thanks, Mike!

Final thought for today: Writer Gore Vidal once said, "These presidential ninnies should stick to throwing out baseballs and leave the important matters to serious people."

Anyone know any serious people?

Have a good day. Stay warm (it's colder than a divorce lawyer's heart this morning). More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo