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What do you get when you add a Windows SP3 upgrade with a mean Tropical Storm? A good formula for duress! Normally, I don’t complain or whine (publicly), but I just need to vent. Plus, this can help explain the lack of updates.

The two past weeks have been painful. First, I accidentally upgraded my Windows XP to SP3. I was having problems with Internet Explorer, so I upgraded to IE 7. No problem. What I didn’t realize was that “little checkbox” that says “Turn On Automatic Updates” - I wasn’t paying attention - I was grilling my dinner at the same time -  that was clearly my fault.

A couple of days later, we (Miami) were having another daily summer storm. I had just completed the radio show, and was “bouncing to disk” and then the storm knocked the power out. “No big deal,” I thought. All the equipment is on a the backup power supply unit. All except one external hard drive… that drive goes down, then Pro Tools, which maps a database to all of your hard drives, freaks out. Program crash, then system crash. The computer restarts. Once connected to the internet, it goes to Microsoft’s site and checks for Windows updates -it sees XP SP3, downloads and installs. The whole time I’m on the phone gabbing away with my friend George about “Internet Neutrality” and how the candidates will probably effect it come after the election.

I get off the phone, power is on, computer is ready to use, I turn on Pro Tools > ERROR! Can not find device! After hours of trouble shooting I figure out that SP3 doesn’t play nice with firewire devices, especially M-Audio’s Project I/O Control Surface, which I use, and highly recommend - it rocks! And it is not as expensive as the 003.

I tried “System Restore,” “Removing SP3 update” - nothing worked. I finally had to wipe the computer clean and reload EVERYTHING. I took about 5 days. Starting fresh wasn’t easy. I also updated Pro Tools to 7.4 and some of the plugins as well. Once I opened up files, I found that they didn’t work. Many plugins needed to be tweaked again… and so on. I was able to render the show “2008.08.11″ and get it out to the radio stations before they aired - just in time. This was Friday of last week.But I still had yet to upload the show for everyone else.

Then Tropical Storm Fay shows up. While I didn’t lose power, I couldn’t stay connected to the internet - so I couldn’t upload the show. By Wednesday the storm past. On Thursday the internet was normal. Thursday night I created a new show for the radio stations, which is “2008.08.18″ It is two dj sets (Dave Spoon and Markus Mehta). I usally don’t like creating shows like that, but it was necessary.

So this week - the show is on time. I interviewed Martijn Ten Velden a couple of weeks ago. He was here djing in Miami at Set. He is cool people. Mark Knight is the guest dj. Mark and everyone at Toolroom (especially Sian) are big supporters of my show. Actually, Mark Knight was my first “big name” dj interview, when I was doing the old “Progressive Soul” show many years ago.

Anyway, that’s my rant.

If you have technical problems with Pro Tools/M-Audio stuff and XP, don’t hesitate to ask me for advice - if I can help you, it would be my pleasure.

END.