guitargeek

_Tab threatened to pee in my shoes if I didn't feel better, so guess what... I feel better!

I just got back from town. My dad was going stir crazy, so we piled into the little Nissan, but the air conditioner compressor locked up and the belt caught on fire! The defroster/defogger setting relies on the air conditioner to blow dry air on the windshield, and without it we couldn't see fuckall through the windshield (it's been raining like a bastard here for the last couple weeks), so we put the fire out and took his pickup truck instead.

While we were in town I mailed the money order I bought the other day to pay for the MP3 player I scored on eBay for seventeen bucks.



This is to replace the Rio Nitrus MP3 player I got recently.



When I got it, the hard drive had a bunch of the previous owner's music still on it, most of which was crap. I did find, however, a couple Weezer albums, which I successfully saved to the computer. I reformatted the tiny 1.5GB hard drive and started loading it up with Neko Case and Tom Waits when the hard drive went tits up! After a LOT of online research I found that this is a common (in fact, inevitable) malady, and that there's nothing that can be done for it as replacement drives are simply not available. I even took the little fucker apart to see if I could do anything for it...

The culprit:



Now that I can focus my eyes again, I think I'll go out to the shop and tinker with the amp a little. I stopped at Radio Shat on the way to my doctor's appointment the other day and bought some stuff:



18AWG solid core hookup wire, some fat fucking 5404 diodes to replace the tiny ones on the rectifier board, some solder and desoldering braid, some LEDs and a couple pretty holders for them. I plan to build an A/B footswitch box for channel switching on this amp, and the LEDs (red and blue) will tell me which channel I'm on. Can you believe that cost me $27?? Jebus, I've got to find a decent local source for electronic components, Radio Shat hardly stocks any components anymore, and they charge three prices for the few that they do stock. They're much more interested in selling you a cell phone or satellite TV system. There used to be a great place in Oklahoma City called Radio Supply, where you could buy vacuum tubes and capacitors and resistors and cable and all sorts of stuff, but they seem to have switched to selling modern high tech equipment like routers and servers and data transfer stuff. (sigh) I guess I'll end up just ordering stuff online...