News, April 2007

After a devastating latter half of February, I’m back on my logistical feet. At St. Augustine’s Parish we have a back room behind the stage in the parish hall, where the senior choir stores its choir gowns. I’m a member of this choir, and when we sing upstairs we leave our coats in this room. On February 11, while we were upstairs for the 9:00 mass, someone entered the room and stole my Palm Pilot, a Tungsten E, along with its Lexar 512MB memory card. I had taken the Palm Pilot into Best Buy just after Christmas to have its battery replaced and had only had it back from them for four days. Fortunately, there was nothing on it that hadn’t been uploaded to it from the data backup--I’d been using an older Zire 21 during January. And all that was on the card was a handful of Kira MP3s.

I wasn’t in a position to simply buy a new Tungsten E, because that model isn’t being made any more. The Tungsten E2 is available, but when it comes to buying a new one, once you add the sales taxes and an extended warranty plan the price balloons to about $400 or so--far more than I was prepared to pay. Besides, the E2’s synchronization software requires Windows XP or Windows 2000, and my computers have Windows Millennium Edition and the original version of Windows 98. Buying an upgrade on eBay would have jacked up the final cost even more.

Fortunately, a San Jose eBay dealer by the screen name of allprices was offering several used Tungsten E’s with 512MB cards for about US$200 after shipping, and it was only because I’d put some money away per the "pension plan" idea I talked about in my last newsletter that I was able to buy one from him without much of an impact on my other finances. I was so happy when the unit arrived on March 5 that I nearly cried. Except for those four days in early February, I’d been without a Tungsten E for over two months.

I’ve since had to buy a larger-capacity memory card for it, however. Soul Review Board is expanding its repertoire somewhat, to the point where my existing card wouldn’t hold the new material without me converting all the 170 or so existing MP3s to 64k resolution (they’d already been down-converted to 96k). We’ve added another singer and are gearing up for our upcoming April 20 show at the Rainbow Bistro, which was moved back from its original March 10 date. Other dates are in the works, and I’ll post them on my main web page as soon as I have them.

Although Hotter than Ice resumed rehearsals on March 11 and is working toward a CD, it continues to be in a state of flux. We will likely be looking at finding yet another bass player. In the meantime we tentatively have a house party gig scheduled for June 16.

I’m continuing to plug away at preparing my German pop repertoire, a process that has been given an inspiration boost by Kira’s "Fast wie Sommer" tour, which began on March 30 in Berlin (see my personal Blogspot and Bebo blogs for her full schedule).

As you may have noticed in the last few weeks, I’ve added a "Chalk Talk" page to my blogs. I had written a couple of articles for my professional Bebo site, but I guess after a while Bebo felt they were too long, and so I decided to move them to their new home. The articles are only in English at the moment, but I hope to have time soon to translate them into German. Stay tuned!