John Maar

I heard that the manufacturing process was so gross that employees had to sign non-disclosure agreements before starting on the job. Velveeta may look yellow, but a process controls engineer who had to enter the plant for some repairs/upgrades told me he saw a lot of "green". That's all he would say.

Oh, hell no. Arcachon is at the same latitude as Boston, but in my 3 winters here, it has snowed only once, with zero accumulation except on the edges of roofs of buildings and cold cars. Gone in a couple of hours. But we have a lot of glacesiers. 🍨

The PapiLLus Fromagerie here in Arcachon is one block from my apartment. My dogs love the place. The owner will occasionally give them a cheese treat when we pass by on one of our daily walks. The dog in the photo is always there or across the street by their son's shop. They have a huge selection of French and a couple of Basque cheeses. The first time I went in there after moving here, I thought, dang, they're as or more expensive than what was imported to the States. Then I remembered that the prices were per kilogram (about 2.2 pounds). Whew. Cheese heaven. As long as we're talking about dairy products, the glaces (ice creams) here are superb. Lots of small shops sell cones and cups. My favorite is just around the corner from my apartment. This guy has the best glaces, gives you more per scoop than the other shops and charges less (2,50 € vs 3 €). Here's a photo I took at 10:30 pm during the summer vacation period (July and August). Arcachon is a popular holiday and vacation destination in France. It becomes a ZOO in the summer. Just look at the line all that way across the street that late at night.

Have they no shame? The v3.10.3 installation was just as broken as the previous ones. Twiddler stuck in a forever loop. Close NA. Restart NA. Install Kontakt v7.10.0 update after the 17 updates from yesterday using v3.10.2. Since there was only one program to update, the Update window actually managed to keep up. But, why oh why do I still get the message that they're sending usage data back to their servers when I've disabled that "feature". NI, this isn't hard. Way back in the day (the 1980s), when I did both hardware and software development for use in the oil and gas industry, I couldn't afford such simple mistakes. The only saving grace was that if I blew something up, the explosion also blew up the cause of the explosion. OK, I admit that one time I did blow something up. My product group in Amoco Oil (now BP) had just be authorized to sell outside of the company. The city of DeKalb, IL was installing two new huge elevated water tanks and several new wells. They wanted to switch to off-peak pumping to save significant money on their electricity usage. I was tasked with writing the PC app to control the 10 well pumps while monitoring the levels in the 4 water towers, including the 2 brand new big boys. I coded the app based on the specs written by the city's engineering consultants, the ones who designed the potable water distribution system. After the 14 RTUs (Remote Telemetry Units) were installed on the 10 pumps and 4 tanks and the MTU (Master Telemetry Unit) plus the PC were installed, I showed up with the app I'd written, installed it on the PC and sat with it for a couple of hours (along with the city and engineering bosses) after its 10pm startup (the beginning of the off-peak period). Everything ran great. We shook hands and I drove back to Chicago and went to bed. I was awakened at 3am by a phone call telling me to get back to DeKalb. Apparently, the system had over-pressurized and an old clay pipe from the 1920s had ruptured, blowing a hole big enough that three of the four lanes of the main highway through town were gone. Good lord, but they were angry with me. After a thorough review, the design engineers finally took responsibility, agreeing that my code perfectly conformed to their specs, which they agreed were way too agressive and that they didn't really understand what the hydraulics of the system were after the addition to the 2 new huge towers and 4 new wells. But the explosion revealed a shovel from the 1920s that the director of public works mounted on the wall behind his desk, and they found a "pig" (a large rubber ball that you would insert into the system and run it through to remove buildup in the main water pipes (we used pigs in oil pipelines, too)) that had gone missing decades before. And my reputation was not only intact, but enhanced, so all good for me.

Depends what you mean by "working correctly." NA updated before I could run the product updates. The NA update installed, then went into a forever loop spinning its twiddler. I closed it, then restarted it, then clicked on "Update All" to install the 17 updates shown. The updates downloaded and installed quickly, but NA's UI couldn't keep up and got lost. I got a message that all updates had installed correctly, but the twiddler top left by the "Native Access" text kept spinning and the update list info was all over the place. I closed NA again and reopened, then the Update page was correctly empty and no twiddlers to be seen. So, updates installed, but NA's UI is still an f'ing mess.

That landing page reminds me of the TV ads for the Infinity car brand that ran for a year before their launch with no cars in them, just scenery seen through a windshield. Except that the landing page looks like it was made with an 8-bit Atari running Basic. That's so "special".

I'll wager that fast-forwarding is disabled while the commercials play. Also, are the "ads" for other movies/series still there, in addition to the new commercials? At least you can skip those teasers.

I've had Prime since Day 1 (2006?), when they comp'd me the first year. I use in mostly for shipping and Amazon Music. I also agreed to the 1,99 €/month fee for commercial-free Video, but I use Prime Video the least of all of my streaming apps. Here in France, there are too many movies that are only offered with French dubbing of the original audio, without even French subtitles. If Prime Video was the only reason I sub'd Prime, I'd drop it in a heartbeat.

Way too expensive. In fact, FREE would be too expensive.

There's a new McDonald's ad on French television with a horribly autotuned rap song whose lyrics are basically a list of every item on the menu. The song's also got a false ending. You think the pain is over. And then it's NOT. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. 😠

One Knob compressor. One Knob equalizer. One Knob saturation. One Knob reverb. One Knob...you get the idea. Too many knobs for me. I want One Knob to rule them all! Think of it. One plugin instead of the 900+ I have now. I have one for my bass guitar pedal board. Why not for my DAW? 🤪

There's something happening here But what it is ain't exactly clear

My fav Oingo Boingo concert was the Farewell Tour in 1995. Five nights, ending on Halloween with a 4 hour show. Here's a good portion of it.

I verified the issues with the VST3 version of Scaler 2 in SO v6.6. The VST2 version worked just fine, so there's the workaround for the time being. I dislike having to remember that Scaler 2 is an instrument in the Plugin Boutique folder. PITA, when you don't use it often in SO. The VST3 version of a plugin is listed first, followed by the VST2. With Scaler 2, the VST3 version is "Scaler 2" and the VST2 version is "Scaler2". Go figure.

Thanks for the heads-up on the Diva update. I installed it, and it worked fine in SO v6.6 in a new song with just a single track with Diva on it.