I had all these different ideas for how I was going to recount these last couple of days, but none of them seemed to work. It's been a disjointed, fragmented time, and that unfortunately doesn't lend itself to the narrative very well. For the most part, the afternoons and early evenings sucked, either due to persistent computer problems, traffic, or somewhat lackluster rehearsals, and the later hours were great, entirely due to music. Starting from the end and working backwards, I dropped in on a second open mike on Wednesday night, this time at the Hidden Shamrock. What was cool about that was that I was able to go in, and just play songs that I knew well, and come across like I actually knew what I was doing.

That sounds a little more self-deprecating than it actually is. Vaughan's has been great, but it's been mostly about me figuring out how to get in front of a room full of people and sing. The train wrecks have been frequent and sometimes spectacular, but that's mostly because I feel comfortable trying things out there. Now, I'm itching for the next step, and that's a more polished front that almost has to exist outside of that protective bubble. To that end, I finally replaced my CD burner on Tuesday in order to record a demo, which leads to the bulk of the craptasticness of the rest of my week.

I swapped out the drives, no problem, but then RealOne, my media player of choice, seemed to start acting up more than usual. I had already had some issues with it and the integrity of the database of songs, but now we seemed to graduate to catastrophic, blue-screen-of-death problems. After one or two of those, I figured it was time to move on, and I downloaded MusicMatch. Since one of the key reasons for my using RealOne was the downloading of complete albums from EMusic, their introduction of a new download manager made that completely obsolete. Except that MusicMatch wouldn't work at all on my machine. I managed to get it hobbling along enough to submit a tech support request, but received an automated reply that said that since I was using the free player, they more or less didn't give a rat's ass what sort of technical difficulties I was having, but if I gave them fifteen bucks for a better version of the program that still probably wouldn't work, they'd get right on it. Right.

With the technical problems accumulating, I tried complete uninstalls of both programs, flushing out the Windows registry as best I could, but I was still faced with blue screens and hard reboots. Clearly, RealOne was choking hard on something, and MusicMatch had some kind of fundamental issue with my system. It has crossed my mind that the two problems could be related, but I don't know how to troubleshoot that. I've been toying with both WinAmp and Zinf, but the former's library management sucks, and with the latter, I couldn't figure out how to add tracks to an existing playlist and resave it, so that was out. After four days of wrangling, I'm now using a program simply called "Music Jukebox" that, among other things, can deal with the complete album downloads from EMusic on its own. So far so good, although there are some idiosyncrasies I still have to get used to, and it has crashed on me once, but I think that was related to a specific sequence of events.

In other news, a smaller, acoustic version of the Lindsie band graced Vaughan's on Tuesday, and I have to say, there was an aura about that performance that bodes well for that future of the project. Without much of any preparation, we were able to own the room. People stopped their conversations. It was cool. Also, some promising leads in the job hunt, but still too early to even call them "qualified" leads, and I bought more drums today.