I think I’ll be rebooting my Mac here in a bit; mdimport seems to be hanging. [Darn Apple, phoning home like it's E.T. or something! YEESH! 
] I’m doing one other process that I can’t quit right now, but as soon as that’s done, it’s reboot time. My uptime is a bit over a couple weeks … reasonable enough for me.
Another hour, another time-appropriate song: “03.45: No Sleep” from The Cardigans’ Long Gone Before Daylight an album I have been obssessed with lately. Far from the best song on that album, but maybe you’ll pick it up on a lark. [That's an iTMS URL.]
Blogging will be light while my SuperDuper! backup that happens nightly at 0330 finishes its job. My Mac mini is overloaded …
Anytime that insomnia has me in its grasp, I hit a breaking point with wakefulness, usually sometime between 0330 and 0500, when sleep just isn’t going to come, and the best course is just staying awake. The craziest insomnia I ever had happened to me in college—it was the only all-nighter I ever pulled in school, and totally not for and real reason. I don’t remember if anything much stressful was happening, but it was fall of my freshman year [I know from what classes I was in], so … not really! I had just taken to MUDding, so I MUDded through part of it.
I remember trying everything that night: complete silence, the lights on, TV on at normal volume, TV on so that I could barely hear it [and would have to close my eyes so that I could focus on the words, hoping to go to sleep], even drinking some Diet Mountain Dew in the hopes that the injection of caffeine at a stressed state would trick it to go against its normal stimulant reaction. [You laugh, but back in those days, I drank one before going to bed, and it never kept me up or made me sleep fitfully. Strange, I know. But hey ... this is the Weblog of a guy who's been awake for 21 hours, 19.5 of which he's been blogging. ]
I went through the rest of that day waiting for the crash, fully expecting that, at some point, I would just tump over and have to go back to the dorms and crash. I never did, and I was up over 40+ hours for no real reason. The next day, I was fine, too. It was really pretty dadgum weird.
I need another day like that, y’know?
Oh yeah, let’s knock this one out good and early!
Here’s last week’s bootleg fest:
Yep, I totally rigged myself to have Elliott Smith going with that song at this time of night. I’ll have to follow up with The Cardigans’ “03:45 (No Sleep)” in another hour.
I don’t know what’s a bigger mistake—listening to Wilco’s excellent “(Was I) In Your Dreams” [from Being There] because it mentions dreams and sleeping at a point when, hey, sleep would be nice, or because this version is … so … sloooooooooooooooow.
I’m definitely approaching 2:45 a.m., which is always a fun time to break out Elliott Smith’s “2:45 AM” from Either/Or.
One of the things that I forgot to mention from our discussions over at the Granades’ earlier is that both Amy and Jeff sounded interested in participating. Add them to the Granades, the Kings, and our man in Hawai’i, CanSpice, I think we’d have a good group! We could probably entice the Creekmores to regale us with discussions of computations and biology, and maybe Duckie—whose URL is just escaping me at quarter-past-two; sorry, Chris!—would join in, too.
Our mission, of course, would be to get Tim “I don’t read any of your blogs” O’Neil to blog. That would rule. And we could probably coax a videoblog out of Eli. That would be one big group effort o’ fun. We’ll just need two things: a domain and a cause. Right now, if you asked me, I’d push the Dalit Freedom Network, but I’ve been listening to CC for an hour. 
[Oh, and I might be dumb enough to double-dip. We'll just have to see, eh? ]
I read that the Reds are purportedly interested in Craig Wilson of the Pirates. That … just doesn’t make any sense. His positions are catcher, first base, and the two corner outfield spots, places where the Reds are just fine.
I haven’t looked to see who needs to move pieces, but the Reds seem like they could actually stand to move a spare part—someone like a Rich Aurilia—to a pretender or contender with a little pitching to burn. Richie is a nice spare part, and he’s played decently for the Reds this year, but removing him from the infield rotation would allow folks to settle into roles better.
Given that the Reds just signed Scott Hatteberg to an extension to play 1B in 2007 with an option for 2008, the Pickin’ Machine would seem to have 1B cornered until Joey Votto is ready to play or until the Reds get another OF that pushes the Big Donkey in from left field. I honestly prefer that move for Dunner: if he can spend an offseason learning the footwork of fielding at first base, he would be a huge target over there at 6′6″. He could be the lefty Mark McGwire, minus all the acne scarring and steroid suggestions. Votto looks like a stud, though, and the Reds are the franchise that let George Foster roam left field for a decade.
Anyhow, back to Wilson: I just don’t see him being enough of a bat. The Bucs wouldn’t want Hatteberg, and I’m not sure if Aurilia interests them, either. If you put Wilson in RF, you’re then stuck without a place for Ryan Freel to play, unless you make the midseason move of sliding Brandon Phillips back over to SS [the position that he played in the low minors before moving to 2B] so that Ryan Freel can play 2B five days a week. At that point, you’ve got to send Chris Denorfia down to AAA again so that he can play and not stunt his growth by riding the pine.
The other big frustration: one of the “sell” points of the Bray and Majewski trade was that Royce Clayton came with them. But … the Reds got their good-glove, no-bat SS a couple weeks before in picking Juan Castro off of the waiver wire. Why employ them both? It’s almost as crazy as early in 2006 when the Reds employed Freel, Aurilia, Phillips, and Tony Womack, all of whom are nominally 2B. Would the Reds jettison Clayton and/or Castro from the roster? Krivsky has shown a willingness to cut bait on guys from the old and new regimes alike—hello, Cody Ross!—so I’d think so. Ray Olmedo can do what each of these guys do for the ML minimum, but I guess he doesn’t have that veteran sheen, and I know that he’s made his managers mad in the past, including Narron. I grant that there are things there that I might not know, but in that case … move the guy for someone else’s organizational soldier, y’know?
What would really make me happy is one more bat, dumping some of the infield morass, moving Jason LaRue, and getting a back-of-the-rotation starter. If Wayne can make it happen in the next 37 hours, he’s my new hero. We shall see…
One of the biggest adjustments to having a roommate here at my house—there aren’t many; neither of us are home terribly much, and we both keep pretty much to ourselves—is that I no longer can do middle-of-the-night laundry sessions. I was notorious [in my own mind] for starting laundry before I went to bed and meandering downstairs when I’d come out of a REM cycle to move stuff from the washer to the dryer or to run the dryer a second time. Now, the laundry area is ten feet from where someone’s trying to sleep, so I have to be courteous. But this week? FREE REIGN!
Yeah, I’m excited about doing laundry. Mmmmmm … blogathon.
As I listen to a bootleg of Caedmon’s Call that I captured back in Atlanta at the beginning of June, I feel like it’s worth talking a little about what I use to record. My recording equipment is a MicroTrack 24/96 that I purchased from B&H Photo & Video. Because I haven’t figured out what microphones I’ve wanted to use [and because I've been cheap about that ... the $400 outlay for the rig still smarts a little ], I use the included T-microphone, which does a passable job of recording in stereo. It’s not a condenser microphone, but it was free. [And, well, it sorta sounds like it.]
On the CC bootleg, the big issue is that I was sitting too close to the stage and was out of the convergence zone of the speakers. All the vocals sound behind me because, well, they were even as I was sitting there.
I transfer to my Mac via the provided USB cable; the Mac treats it like any mountable drive. I track in Audacity and transcode to FLAC via xACT. It’s been doing right by me for six weeks or so, and I can’t wait to be able to afford kickass microphones and a rig that lets me record all stealth-like. [Of course, I fidget like a crazed man, so ... yeah.]
The one thing I don’t have at the moment that I need—other than good mics—are the cables I need to do a good soundboard patch. I need to find those by Monday night, since I’m sure that Derek and Sandra will want to be recording.
Another question from the B:WM folks:
Water is an easy way into the HIV/AIDS crisis, but why is blood more difficult? Should it be?
Blood is, as I discussed before, difficult because it requires us to give of ourselves. Like I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve never donated blood, mainly for just silly-ass reasons. But I can’t imagine that I’m the only person with such hangups. I don’t know African culture well-enough to know if it has any of these same hang-ups, but the lesson is pretty simple: water searching, at some level, scales better than the blood supply does. People are thirsty, and if you give them the resources to go and seek their own water, they will do so. But man, blood is a whole other deal. One can only donate so often, and then there are all sorts of issues with getting folks to donate. Add to that the fact that economic incentives towards donation are likely to motivate people from the same high-risk groups you want to avoid as donors, and you’ve got a nasty witch’s brew of issues to handle.
But knowing that I don’t know all the issues, I choose to give money. I know that we in the developed world have developed good screening procedures to control our blood supply; if we can lower the barriers to entry to bringing these techniques to Africa—and Asia, which struggles just as much with AIDS in some places—we will have done what we can from afar to help limit the spread of HIV. The other issues with the spread—cultural behaviors, education, etc.—are things that the local governments and non-government organizations sadly have to saddle on their own. On that score, we just have to urge them to get educated and pray that they will heed reason’s call.
All right … seven more hours of posting! Let’s get ‘er done.
I had no idea that there was a Titan Missile Museum out in Arizona. I’m gonna have to check that out some time! It’s near Tuscon and Mr. Gilby. That would kill two birds with one stone. 
I think I come by my ability to churn through the late nights partially because of genetics and partially because of practice.
The genetics comes in from Dad: when he was a lieutenant in the Air Force, he was on a Titan II missile crew at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita. [This is where my brother was born.] He used to do 24-hours-on, 48-hours-on shifts. Talk about crazy!
Then there’s all my hockey experience, where I’d do all these road trips. My specialty was sleeping as we left Huntsville and driving when the guys needed a reliever out of the bullpen. I never will forget a trip back from the Upper Midwest where I drove from somewhere around Champaign all the way back home, only stopping a couple of times on the way. Mike and George needed a rest, and I had been sleeping; once I got going, I just didn’t stop. [George out-did me later that season, driving from Nashville to Marquette, Michigan. Yeah, 16 hours solid ... and he had three guys in the bullpen. That was ... stunning. I flew that trip. ]
So yeah, I’m just warming up! But fellow Blogathonners, hear my cry: hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Not only will the regular need to urinate keep you awake, but it will counteract the dehydration all that caffeine and alcohol is doing to your body. Yes, you. Go now. Drink water!
Off to go read about Titan II for a while.
It’s time for the home stretch!
Well, sorta. I may have eight hours—okay, seven hours, forty-five minutes—left of blogging, but I have a good eight hours’ worth of church work to do afterwards tomorrow. That part promises to be fun—lots and lots of singing!—but I’m gonna be hella tired. When I look at it like that, I’m only halfway there, which feels about right.
It is now time for me to return to my humble abode. Amy has left to go back home, and Misty is getting sleepy. Of course, I’m getting sleepy, too … :yawn: … but that’s because I’ve not done caffeine in about four hours. I shall fix that quite soon.
See you back at home!
It's all just a stream of consciousness for me, folks.