A backup day, the first of the month. I'm short of money but looking back now I've had a busy and productive July, and will always push to the limit and invest everything in my art.
Today I've fixed the top tier of the Adam Hall keyboard stand. It's very solid metal, but has a few design flaws. It grips the inside of the tubular steel with an oddly shaped hex-bolt, which means a poor metal-metal friction grip which easily slips. I addressed this a few weeks back, but I noticed that the slope of the two bars are not aligned so the top keyboard always wobbles, by 5mm or so, quite a big gap. I could just use foam to level up but I investigated options of fixing the stand and clamped the pair into a vice to measure the error. The tubular steel is not suitable to bend into shape (even though its only about 1 degree or less out). The silver teeth-like gripper could be filed down to change the angle. Really they should have had the option to manually fine-adjust the slope because, unless they carefully check the slope (which they obviously haven't), these will be out of line. I filed the metal a little, but I thought that a less destructive solution is to loosen the grip on the bar that is too high, so did that. It wobbles, but gravity will keep it level.
I've fixed a few new features to Argus; to expand (double and interpolate) and contract (half size) modulators. It is important that the start and end samples are unchanged, so for odd lengths, the halving takes every other sample: AaBbC to ABC. For even lengths, the middle values are averaged: AaBbCc would be 3 samples long: A((a+B)/2)((b+C)/2)c. I've also changed the lengths of a few Fall in Green videos to fit the performance.
Frustratingly and amusingly, the new fancy frame I've been working on for weeks in black, gold leaf etc. is 10mm too small on one edge for the painting. So I have an unused frame for a 350x240 painting, a size I'm unlikely to ever paint. I rarely make measuring mistakes, each one is too painful, yet on these I've made two! Well, I've always considered these two frames tests and neither was as finely finished as I think I could make, although still among the best frames I've made. I aim to make frames better than any framer. One should always be training to master a new skill.
In the night I listened to The Myth of Sisyphus and the CD Player kept jumping and rejected the disc, the first time this fancy Marantz player has ever had problems with any disc. I tried a David Bowie disc and it too struggled. My NVidia graphics card continues to crash with the latest driver so I'm trying a variety of older ones. The older one I thought I had a week ago refuses to install. I wish Windows had a long of driver versions.
I feel a little cursed over these past few days, but I remind myself that things breaking or going wrong are an inevitable part of the universe. Patience and fortitude over the long term must note changes to make in future to limit errors, and things must be fixed, tidied.
