Well, Alice’s brain (body) transplant did not work, and I’m not sure why. I gave up after working at it for three days, and she’s back in her old (and a little worse for wear) case, with her partially non-functional motherboard. Her one remaining IDE port is running her almost-completely full 40-GB hard drive and her DVD-ROM drive, and it’s going to stay that way, I guess.

I did get a few good things out of the exercise (I should—I spent three days at it). I have a rather sturdily-built case with a motherboard with a Pentium III processor and roughly 1.2 gigabytes of its own RAM; it’s got its own video card (which is nothing special compared to Alice’s) and a 52X CD-ROM drive. This puppy could theoretically be turned into a Real Computer. It probably needs a good hard drive—I have four hard drives left from my Dr. Frankenstein efforts, ranging in size from 10GB to 40GB, but I have no idea whether any of them work and no way to tell. Needs a network card, too, or (even better) a wireless card—the college’s old network cards are like nothing else on the planet (not surprising). I will keep my eyes open for an awesome deal (the only kind I can afford).

One more piece of hardware work to do: Alice will get her CD-rewritable drive back—I really do need it. I’ve got a spare 52X CD-ROM drive I can swap with the Arts Center (Alice’s old CD-RW drive was only 24X) which will be a plus for them. I really can’t do any work on Alice except simple word processing (and not much of that) until I can archive a bunch of Important Stuff That’s Taking Up Space.

The above means that when I go shopping Wednesday, I’ll be shopping for RAM, mostly. I want (1) at least 512 MB more RAM for Alice and (2) 1 GB RAM for StuartLittle—both if I can afford it, of course—and (3) a DVD-rewritable drive with external case so it can be swapped back and forth between Alice and Stuart. That’s probably it.

The Deathgrass CDs have been ordered from DiskFaktory; I should have them in about two weeks. Some paranoia there—I have no way of knowing for sure whether I’ve done everything right. DiskFaktory wouldn’t send me “proof copies” of the CD and case unless I was willing to spend an extra $125 and wait additional weeks (I am not willing to do either).

I did sign up for their “digital distribution” service; having an additional online source where people can get the CD seemed like a good thing. “DFJams” is of course not as well-known as CDBaby, but I figure I’m going to have to be doing the marketing, anyway. What I need is a place I can send people who want either to buy the album online or buy individual songs (though I would think that anyone who’d heard one song would feel like they had to have the whole album); since I am not expecting people to mysteriously snap up this stuff out of nowhere, any digital distributor is as good as any, I guess. (I still may archive the album at CDBaby as well.)

Three gigs lined up for Concert Season thus far—June 18 with Candice in Ilwaco, August 12 with The Impromptus in Manzanita, and September 18 or 19 with Deathgrass at the Rocktoberfest. And they’re all paying gigs! (Deathgrass is probably also going to be playing Garibaldi Days, which will be a freebie like it’s been the last two years.) On the minus side, the Willamette Writers Group doesn’t want me to play their annual conference this year; last year, they at least considered me before they rejected me. I realize you can’t win ‘em all—but I want to.

Joe