I've spent pretty much my whole morning staring at my computer and scratching my head. I bought this thing called Fab Four, by East/West. It's a virtual instrument thngamajig with samples of all the instruments The Beatles used. The demo sounded really cool and I had good fun with M-Tron, a virtual Mellotron plug in. I figured I'd give this a go. I read the specs & they said you need 13 gigabytes of hard drive space to install it. Well, I don't have that much space free on my laptop or desk top, but I do have an outboard drive that I used to make Cleveland's Screaming and it has plenty of space left. So OK.
When I tried to install it on the outboard drive, I got a message saying it can only be installed on the "running hard drive." Ugh. So I sat and tried to figure out a solution. Here's what I came up with. But I don't know if it'll work or not. I dumped all my iTunes stuff from the desk top computer since I never listen to music on it anyway. That freed up the needed space on the HD. I'm now installing it there. When it's done I can (I hope) copy everything onto the outboard drive. Unless it's got some kinda restriction against that. Looking at the nearly useless FAQ on their site, they recommend in several similar (but not exactly the same) circumstances copying stuff to other drives.
If it doesn't work the way I hope I guess the worst scenario is the thing is forever on my desk top & whenever I need to use it outside my house I gotta move that. It's easier than moving a Hammond organ, so I guess that's not so bad.
Anyone out there smarter than me about this stuff is invited to write me with a better solution.
Some random thoughts for the day:
I was reading a few of the responses to the previous post. I find it remarkable how I'll say something, then someone embellishes what I've said with their own imagination, then that person proceeds to comment upon the stuff they've imagined as if I said that stuff. That's such a weird thing to me.
On this blog I've opened up my life to a tremendous degree. But there's no way I could possibly report everything that happens to me. I had a really good poop this morning, for example. But I don't usually report those details. Even when I report what's going on, you're really only getting like a millionth of a percent of what actually happened. When I described that meeting, for example, I didn't tell you about the strange dude who came up to me in the lobby saying, "Kenny! How ya doin'? Don't you remember me? I went to school with you. Yale, class of '76!" I didn't tell you about the weird security system in the lobby & in the elevator that screamed of intense post 9/11 paranoia. I didn't say much at all about what the meeting was intended to accomplish. And so on and on and on and on. You'll never know any of that stuff. And, if you're sane, you probably don't care.
I'm just wondering how much trouble we human beings cause each other by reading into things, by embellishing what we hear and see with our own invented details and then acting upon what we've invented. A great blessing/curse in my own life is that I'm too stupid to do that to any great degree. I mean if you intend to insinuate something to me, watch out because I probably will not get what you're driving at. Stuff has to be spelled out really clearly.
One thing that's helped in my practice has been that I no longer try as hard to figure out what people "really mean" when they say something to me. I just take nearly everything totally at face value. I don't usually "get" sarcasm, for example. I can tell when people are using it. But more often than not I have no idea what they're implying with it. And I won't usually put in the necessary effort to try and work it out.
I think Zen practice tends to make you more like this over time. I've noticed my teachers do it even more than I do. You develop a kind of dumb approach to life.
Anyway. Whatever.
My friend Leilani who's staying up at Tassajara says that girls tend to leave the place quickly, more so than guys. She asks if Zen is a macho thing. It's a good question. I don't think it's inherently macho or masculine. Yet I do see more guys take to it than gals. Like heavy metal or punk. I don't have any real comment about that. I wish more women would show up to the classes and suchlike. Any suggestions on how to make Zen more user-friendly to women?
