a stranger's view

I wanted to share a photo of mine.

For a year and a half I have been ripping my vinyl and tape to modernize my musical library. Today music is digital, consisting of a download in mp3 format or a WAV in CD format. So I am converting to both. I know that the MP3 is more modern, but I like a physical representation of my music. (Plus I haven't succumbed to buying a converter for my car so that I can listen to MP3 tracks on my car's sound system. I tend to think that the standard MP3 doesn't have the sound quality of a CD.)

It struck me today for not the first time, that I am listening to a slice of time when I rip my older musical library. It was vinyl, vinyl, vinyl for me and many others from the time we came of musical age until cassette tapes became ubiquitous. Those darn 8-tracks were an evolutionary dead-end, similar to the Neanderthal. I recall that cassettes became a viable medium sometime in the late 1970's. I bought a high-end cassette deck in 1978 I think. (1979?) But I continued to buy vinyl as my "music delivery system" until well into the 1980's. It wasn't until about 1985-1986 or so that I started to record every vinyl record onto tape when I listened to it. Even then, I still bought vinyl for several reasons: (1)used vinyl was one of my music sources and who ever bought used tape? (2)from 1986 through the mid 90's vinyl was discounted because consumers abandoned vinyl quicker than did the manufacturers of it. (3)Some of the music vendors were slow to adopt tape as a medium.

Last weekend I ripped four pieces of vinyl: The Who's Who's Next, Sugarloaf's debut album, Wendy Waldman's Strange Company, and a greatest hits compilation for Blood, Sweat & Tears. The middle two were purchased "as it happened" and represent the fact that vinyl was ubiquitous in the 70's. I bought the other two as vinyl was being consigned to the remainder bins because no one wanted it anymore.

But mostly, in my collection when I look at the vinyl I'm looking at 1966 to 1980 or 1982. From that point on, if it isn't from some minor label, it's on cassette tape. And from 1991 to present, if it isn't on CD, than it represents a really good buy from some discounter or used music store.

Today I ripped David Bowie's retro band Tin Machine's first cassette tape, self-title (check it out if you liked Ziggy Stardust). And now I'm ripping The The's album Infected, again on cassette tape. They're both from the mid to late 80's.

It's weird how physical things can indicate time. Not so much like an old rocker indicates a long ago time, but how the medium on which your music resides indicates when it was purchased. I don't know--this is probably something of interest only to older persons such as myself.

When I worked at a pharmaceutical company in 1999, the site belonged to a major multi-national giant (think aspirin). They had put it up for sale and in that year it was purchased by a local management group. The buyers intended to make it a contract filler for pharmaceutical companies, but before they took ownership they expected the parent company to lay off a significant number of personnel that the new owners didn't want. My wife and I have forever after referred to it as the Night of the Long Knives (even though it happened in the daytime). When it was done, 19 persons were gone from a company of 200-250. They even called a guy up from several hundred miles away simply to fire him.

The past two weeks have been more like the Death of a Thousand Cuts. On Feb. 6th they "suspended" the director of manufacturing. On that Friday, Feb. 8, they "suspended" the manager of Quality Control and a guy who had numerous personnel complaints. On that Monday the 11th they fired my closest friend for a combination of reasons (none of them good). On Thursday the 14th they made permanent the suspensions of the aforementioned personnel. On Friday they fired the former Director of Quality Assurance, the manager of Validation, the manager of Tech Services, and the site administrator and executive assistant to the General Manager. The manager of Facilities announced his resignation last week too. This means that in the past ten days, six members of the management team have been fired or resigned. There are only seven others and that includes everyone up to the GM. Put another way, that's a total of 8 persons in a company site that has only 125 employees.

And the best money is on the bet that the firings aren't over. It would only take the firing of three or four more persons and then every person who presided over the debacle of 2007 would be gone.

It's refreshing to see things being done correctly, but you remember in school when two or three miscreants would cause the whole class to be punished? That's what's going on here.

Pray for us all.

The tooth extraction today served to "extract" me from the insane work week I've had. I forget the exact number, but I worked around 100 to 105 hours in 11 straight days. Not as killer as some people have been known to do, but killer enough for me.

Doing the nitrous oxide while my (split) molar was pulled and bone grafting material was packed into the hole actually wasn't so bad. The worst part was the needle that delivered the local anesthetic to the roof of my mouth. I was numb up to my eyeball!

That was five hours ago, however, and the pain is starting to rise. I've got some hydrocodone/acetominophen combination pills to take--I wonder why they bother with the acetominophen?--and some mega-ibuprofens (of the 600mg variety). I also have to take a lot of antibiotics due to the work into the jaw, I guess.

No smoking for four or five days. There goes my Sunday cigar. And I suppose beer is a no go, given the painkillers.

Wish I wasn't fading so fast. I can hardly hold my head up and it's just dinner time.

ciao for now...

Does anyone know how to get a blog to display "my" time instead of Norway time? All my posts that are made in the evening look as if they were made at 2 a.m. the next day.