frustrated
Damn. DAMN ! I'm so annoyed; all I wanted to do was plug my guitar in and have the laptop record some lame-ass playing. Was that so much to ask? Apparently so.

Here's 90 minutes of my life I won't get back:

1) Spend 30 minutes finding the 1/4" to 1/8" adapter that I *swear* I used to have. (It turned up in the closet, not the "Big Box O' Adapters" that all geeks are required to own.)

2) Wonder why this doesn't work right away....develop ominous feeling of Impending Doom

3) After much cursing and downloading, find that the sound input on the laptop is microphone ONLY - this laptop doesn't "do" line-in. There goes the guitar idea.

4) Plug my two microphones in, yelling "HELLO !" into them, trying to get the audio meter to acknowledge my existence. Immediately follow with "Shut up, Patch !" as the dog thinks I'm greeting a pizza guy, which means he has to bark in order to make Mr Pizza-man drop the food and run away. This gets old quickly.

5) Curse laptop for remaining totally uninterested in my voice unless I twitch the microphone cord by a fraction of a millimeter, which triggers a storm of static and a 100% signal overload situation.

6) Throw microphone in the bin.

7) Curse Microsoft for designing the crappiest volume/record source interface EVER devised by sentient life. Why, pray tell, is the microphone's +20db gain checkbox on the Playback screen? And why do I need to go Options->Properties->Recording->OK to get to the screen that allows me to choose a recording source and volume ? Can't I see playback and record at the same time, or is that too much to expect ? Apparently so. I need to be protected from having two choices at once.

8) Give up on the whole thing, put my beloved guitars away and go do a puzzle in utter silence to calm down.

If you want to hear some music I managed to record 10 years ago, click the "Brian's Music" link on the right. It will not escape my notice that NO computers were involved in recording those tracks :)