I don't know which is worse. The friends who do a lousy job of pretending everything is okay and then vaguely allude to their numerous problems every time you talk to them, or the ones who talk about nothing but the difficulties involved just in existing. Worse to me? I don't mean more annoying, I mean painful to be around. I don't like seeing people in pain, It upsets me a great deal more than experiencing pain myself, and I'm less prepared/inclined to ignore it. Probably worst of all is the friend who doesn't mention problems but on whose face abuse is etched like an epitaph.

Today was a recording day at band practice. Four Track Follies. Wanting to throw together some simple demos, we reverted to analog four track technology, and were immediately force-fed a large serving of what can only be described as GAY. After recording flawless keyboard, guitar, and drum (duh) tracks, we discovered that during the guitar bounce (with only four tracks, we have to mix in stereo tracks as we record them) we had somehow lost most of the left signal. We brought out the cable tester, re-took the tracks, checked the signal all the way down the chain.. and found the culprit was the tape. After a brief test, we confirmed that we could not record on channel one of that particular tape, only. We are unable to use the tape for anything, as a result, and lost all work we had done today. Welp!!! Thanks, tape, for reminding us why four track is so annoying, compared to digital! We all agreed that we had learned something, but that the amount of learning occurring was all out of proportion to the stress and tedium involved.

(during last weeks initial 4 track recording, the first analog recording we'd done in a year, we found that we were used to having 24 tracks. Woops. Suddenly we had 2 tracks left and 4 instruments unrecorded.)

(terms "coding", "programming" still being cheapened by people who write HTML)

(Every 64.8 seconds someone is reading this sentence.)