Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"There are only five real people in Hollywood. Everybody else is Mel Blanc." -- Jack Benny

Can't sleep; leg cramps have eaten me.

In a mostly-but-not-entirely-unconscious bit of connect-the-dots, my earworm somehow got from "Folsom Prison Blues" to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" without intending to.

Unrelatedly: I don't know how much is due to using OS X instead of Win XP, but I'm sure the presence of a gig and a quarter of RAM is a big chunk of the reason that I can watch YouTube videos now as soon as they start streaming, instead of having to hit pause and go do something else while the buffer fills. (Same LAN segment, same Internet connection; Windows wasn't sucking the bytes in as fast as everything upstream was trying to send them.) Also: relieved to discover that the X server[**] is installed by default, not an optional component like I thought it was. (Even with a nifty OS X machine to use, I'm running enough things on computers elsewhere in the house to definitely want X (or at least VNC).)

Now to wade through the pile of documentation I'd planned on doing after a good sleep, and hope some useful portion of it sticks in my insomnia-addled state. Downloaded a bunch of tools; now it's time to learn a new language and an unfamiliar handheld UI.

Did poke at GarageBand briefly. So far it seems a lot harder to use than Audacity for a basic recording with overdubbing, but maybe I just haven't grokked its underlying model yet. Worst case, I'm betting that either there's an Audacity port for OS X out there, or it compiles straightforwardly and finds the Mac audio drivers without help. Now if GarageBand has a yet-undiscovered-by-me feature that can take a simple and clean audio clip and turn it into notation I can read, to save me figuring it out by ear at half speed, that'd be super nifty...

[*] Okay, maybe my brain is like that when I'm rested and alert, too...

[**] Y'know, the similarity of names between X and OS X never seems even a tiny bit confusing to me until I refer to both in the same sentence, and then it suddenly feels like a really big deal. Until the next paragraph, anyhow.