MG Metro

This music always makes me think of my MG Metro.

Heh.

S900 arrived. I noticed from their website that rather than the £53 I paid for it, they wanted £150 (and at the same time the S950 I'd been watching - slightly better admittedly but still 'crap' - finished for £215), and it's in the sort of condition that might make one think it was worth that. They'd even printed a manual out for it. It does seem to need to acclimatise as the disk provided has errors, but it's still a little cold from the box. Need to find rackspace for it now, and a 13 pin cable to connect it to the AX73. Should be sweet once set up, though I'm trying to decide how I want to route it. Having cured a buzz from the T1 by moving the cables away from a power lead, I think I want to gut the studio and reorganise it all with better cable management.

Got me bluetooth MacMIce mouse on eBay, £36 - almost 1/2 the new price. Still expensive but it's the best mouse you can get for the Mac if you like the shape of the soap-bar mice.

Enterprise 128 sold for £84 to Greece, and I got a "I couldn't bid! Argh!" message from the second high bidder. Poor guys. Still, they all sniped in the last minute. I know exactly how that feels, but it's why I snipe less and less now - if I want something that badly I just bid the most I would pay for it.

I did use bid intimidation on the mouse because someone had bid the same as me; ergo they knew my high bid and might have sniped. What they didn't know was that whilst I was bidding constantly at the end, I was only increasing my bid by a penny. If they wanted it more than I did, they'd have got it. All the increasing the bid does in that case is make it clear that I'm watching the auction end.

Pimpin'

MSX carts, a broken MSX (keyboard fault, annoyingly), Atari Lynx II with case and 7 games going quite cheaply right now (few hours left), and for the circuit benders, a sampling Yamaha keyboard.

Oh, and that bloody huge box of Scalextric. I'll deliver to Whitby if any flist people want it and are going!

http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZrichardk66QQhtZ-1

Organisational confusion

Things I am thinking about right now:

Studio - I am impressed by the reduction in buzz from my T1 just by making sure the cables are well away from the power adaptor. I know I can't rewire the studio to give it a dedicated ground and so forth, but I can make some improvements clearly The place is a mess of cables and disasters sometimes...

I think I need to rearrange the racks quite a bit, one contains the Multiface, a CD player that is entirely redundant, the ADAT, mixer PSU, amp and Wavestation A/D, the other contains 3 x patchbays, GM70 guitar interface, TX416 and ultramizer. What I think should be set up is the Ultramizer in the effects rack above the desk, the patchbays, multiface and GM70 in the PSU/ADAT rack with the GM70 at the top, the multiface on a rack shelf with a 1/2 space beside it where the GM70 cable can escape from, and the TX416, MEP4, Wavestation A/D, S900 in an instrument rack with the TX416 at the top to give clearance for cooling.

Cars - Siani argues that I love my Supra and like to have a car I enjoy, so I shouldn't get rid of it. At the moment we have 4 cars - Supra, Sera and Beetle which are mine, and Scorpio which is hers. The Sera and Supra are very much duplicates; I enjoy the way the Sera looks and the way the Supra drives, but they're both vaguely redundant. Siani enjoys the Sera and can insure it, which I can't do cheaply. If she sells the Scorpio and I sell the Supra, we'd have a good pair of cars, then I could get a >10 year old estate car (or similar thing like an Espace) for the practical vehicle.

The alternative is to sell the Sera, of course.

Computers - next thing up on eBay will be my US-spec Apple IIe Platinum, with a few upgrades. Fingers crossed for that one. I think I've got everything as I want it computer-wise - the Apple IIgs is 'there', the QL is behaving itself, I'm almost an Amiga-free zone and I've got three button mice sorted out for my main Macs (BT for the laptop, USB for the G5).

House - gotta get the summerhouse carpet put in, finish some tidying. Long term plans should start happening soon, the weather is good and the more junk I can clear out the more chance we have of getting things finished. Siani looks like wanting to get wallpaper up in the hall soon, which will be nice but needs some work completing.

eBaying - well.. I'm considering selling some of my diecast models next. I have the Flowery Twats model of the Austin 1300, which is quite a rare model (less than 80 in existence) and hit £150 last time I listed it just to see what it was worth. I've got a few Dinky models, some limited edition American market diecasts, that sort of thing. I just don't know what's worthwhile selling these days. I'm also considering selling a couple of my guitars as I simply cannot play them - the MIDI bass and the GR300 & Strat clone, perhaps. Not sure on that though.

Heh. I don't have too much stuff. Really.

I just reorganised the studio a little bit.

In the progress I realised I have not only got space on my patchbays, but more patchbays than I could ever need.

On the plus side, my S900 is in a rack happily near the AX73, the MIDI patchbay is implemented in a more predictable manner, the GM70 MIDI guitar interface is very easy to use now, and I've got less cables crossing power lines. On the minus side I need another loom to reconnect the ultramizer, but that's sort of redundant at this stage anyway. The effects rack looks truly mad.

Perhaps there is a chance of a malcygoff visiting this weekend, which will be fun.

Woohoo.

Well, I spotted this modular effects board a while back, and pondered what it was worth (I reckoned £75 which Siani didn't seem to think was mad), so that's what I bid. I did my usual "up by a penny" thing at the end, but I didn't need to. The strengths of just bidding what you wanted to pay in these days of sniping and messing around.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=7312548142

No need for PSUs, no need for cables apart from one from the instrument, and in the very, very, very unlikely event that I find extra modules, it can be reconfigured. Though as it is, it has all I need. There's a compressor available for sure. For those that can't be arsed clicking, this one contains:

Octave V
Analogue Delay
Analogue Flanger
Analogue Chorus

Which is a really nice set to go with my OHM 50 amp and Kramer for practising. Apparently the PME was a really good system but a commercial failure.

Apparently there were 14 modules available - overdrive, distortion, a compressor, a stereo flanger, a distortion/wah, a stereo chorus, a sub-octave generator (with options for one, 1.5 and two octaves down!), a phaser, a waveshaper, a noise gate, an analogue delay, a graphic EQ and, in 1985, a digital delay and digital chorus.

Don't worry. I have no intention of collecting the set, Siani.