Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

New Camera Day

It was just over 11 years ago. June of 2015. We had tickets to two Rush concerts. One at TD Garden in Boston and the other at Madison Square Garden in New York. I wanted to bring a pocket sized point and shoot camera into the two arenas so I bought a little Nikon Coolpix S7000 at Best Buy. 16 megapixels, a 20x zoom. Good stuff. 

I took about a couple hundred pics at the two shows and was really happy with some of the results. For example:

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New York
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New York again
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Boston. Alex auctioned off that guitar.

Over the years, I used the shit out of that camera. It went with me pretty much everywhere. I made a conscious decision somewhere along the way to use the S7000 instead of my iPhone and from that moment on I took a zillion pics with it. Then it broke. Shit. The lens cover wouldn’t open all the way, and it wouldn’t close at all. It just died. Boom. Dead. Sadness.

In September of 2025 I went to eBay and bought another one. A replacement. I was so happy to have my stupid little pocket camera back. Unfortunately it was a lemon. Every single photo it took was blurry. All of them. I would crank up the ISO in the hopes of it using the fastest shutter speeds possible but it didn’t matter. Everything was blurry. Sadness again.

Now here we are in July of 2026 and I have tickets to see Rush at Madison Square Garden (the show is less than two weeks away! SQUEEEE!!) and damn it, I want to bring a pocket sized camera into the show again. I want more of those pictures. This time there will be a keyboard player and a different drummer, but otherwise I want more of the same.

Fuck it. Back to eBay I go. I bought another one. If this third camera is also a lemon then I will give up and just use my iPhone like a normal person in 2026. The seller was in New Hampshire so the shipping was nice and fast. It was delivered today. The battery was charged. I threw the memory card that was in the second camera (that I am pretty sure started life in the first camera) and did a lap around the house snapping anything.

Is it a lemon?

Nope. It looks good!

Success (he said knowing a million things could still go wrong between now and the Rush show, but give me a break. I want to be happy for a change. Let me have this one, m’kay?)!

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Random Baby Yoda
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Random record player
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Random lego

Here’s hoping this little sucker lasts me for about 10 years the way the first one did. Fingers crossed

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 13/90

Right then. That’s better. After two days with very little progress (days 10 and 11) and one day with absolutely no progress (day 12)… I had a pretty good day.

Yesterday, day 13, was a telecommuting day so I had some time before work to try and get stuff done. I added rhythm guitar tracks to two songs. You probably heard my sigh of relief at having gotten something (anything) done.

After work the progress continued. I had three “songs” that were just a few bass riffs without any structure. I worked out the song forms for all three of them and finished the MIDI bass and drums tracks. All three songs are now ready for rhythm guitars. Next I added another song. The form, the MIDI bass, and the MIDI drums are all set. That brings my count up to 13 songs. Seven are complete and six are in various states of incomplete. I didn’t stop there though. Next I added a melody and lyrics to the two songs that got rhythm guitars that morning. I now have two songs that are ready for vocals.

There, now don’t we all feel a little better about the state of things?

What’s Going On?

The nazi fuck in the white house is going to give a speech tonight where he will say the 2020 presidential election was stolen even though it clearly was not stolen. There is zero credible evidence to say it was stolen, but the nazi pedophile rapist in the white house (which I legitimately just typo’d “shite house” and will probably forever call it that from now on) wants to pass the uber racist/sexist and utterly unnecessary save america act which will effectively remove voting rights from millions of americans including all married women who took their husbands name so he’s going to lie to our fucking faces again (which he does literally every time he opens his nazi fascist pedophile rapist racist mouth) and tell us how he has evidence that 2020 was stolen even though he will present no evidence because no evidence exists and his base will get down on their knees and swallow every word.

Okay… I need to calm down. I’ll change the subject.

On my personal laptop, I use Vivaldi as my web browser of choice. It has recently started being unable to connect to certain sites. Like, random sites that no browser should ever fail to connect to. Things like… wordl. Why? Why are you fucking with my word games, Vivaldi? I can connect using Chrome and Firefox. Why not Vivaldi? It’s not me, it’s clearly you. I don’t want to go back to Chrome, damn it. I’m not as pissed about this as I am the nazi fascist pedophile rapist racist in the shite house, but I am pretty pissed about it.

Ugh… what else. Music. Let’s talk about that. The 50 songs in 90 days Challenge. I have had three days in a row with little to no progress. Today I recorded some guitars. I feel a little better. Not much, but a little. 

I had used my Les Paul Standard on everything I’d done since the project started on July 4th. Today I changed guitars. I was going to go to my Les Paul Custom but instead I went to my SG. I hereby declare that today is officially Gibson SG Standard day in my basement music nook. You heard it here first.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 12/90

Yesterday was day 12. Days 10 and 11 both had very little progress. Day 12 was worse.

Nothing.

Nada.

I didn’t have time for anything before work and when I got home from work I was dead tired so I had dinner and went to bed.

That’s it.

Spoiler alert, Day 13 has already been a little bit better.

One of My Dumber Moments

Before we get to the main story, how about a couple of photos?

First, our house was painted! Doesn’t it look all clean and freshly painted? The doors getting a coat of white paint was… a surprise.

Second, there are wild fires in Canada that are spewing smoke into the atmosphere that are blocking out the sun and turning the sky in Massachusetts into a weird, hazy, orange/yellow kinda thing. It is making our sky look like a Mad Max movie. 

Massachusetts exists in an orange filter

Okay, now that that is out of the way I can tell you the story of how dumb I was yesterday.

I have two pairs of glasses. One is a set of progressive lenses. The top half of each lens is for distance and the bottom half is for up close and reading. I wear those glasses most of the time, especially when driving.

The second pair of glasses splits the difference between the two halves of the progressive lenses. They are middle distance glasses. They are perfect for sitting at a computer and working. I wear those glasses while I am working.

When I work in the office I take both pairs of glasses with me. I wear the main specs while driving in, then swap them for the computer glasses, then at the end of the day I swap back to drive home. I put the progressives into a case and put the case in my desk.

Sometimes, rarely, I forget to swap back at the end of the day and I leave my desk with my computer glasses on. Once I made it as far as the car before I realized my error and felt pretty dumb going back to the fourth floor to return to my desk.

Can you see where this is going?

Yesterday I made it all the way home before I realized I had the wrong glasses on. I have no idea how I managed to drive with the middle distance glasses on. I think the traffic was really bad so I never had to look further than the car in front of me and that car was close enough that it wasn’t blurry. I guess?

I felt like a total moron. I drove for an hour and 10 minutes without noticing. What a schmuck! I didn’t want to risk it a second time so I had to dig out my old pair of progressives, which I replaced a couple of years ago. They got the job done, but still… what an idiot.

I did not make the same mistake when I left work today. I am wearing the correct glasses. Moron.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 11/90

Day 11 (yesterday) was as close to a complete bust as one can come without being 100% progress-free.

I noodled a couple of bass riffs into GarageBand on my iPhone. I made it to work a little early and brought up the app while sitting in the car in the parking lot at the office. Better than nothing though, right?

That’s all.

Long Day

Today has been a long one. It’s at least the fourth day in a row where I have failed to get six hours of sleep. That’s catching up with me in a major way. I’m working in the office and it has just been one thing after the other. We have been up to every challenge but they just keep coming.

I will be heading home in about 17 minutes. My current audiobook is going to finish before my drive does. I’m listening to The Masked Rider by Neil Peart. I think I have only read 2–3 of his books before. This is my first time through this one. It was his first. I have enjoyed it, partly for catching him using phrases that would eventually end up in song lyrics. “Time is a spiral, space is a curve.” “The Larger Bowl.” There have been a few others. 

I am always cold. I was never cold prior to weight loss surgery. Now I don’t have any insulation and I’m always cold. It is 90 degrees out today and I am in the office in the air conditioning wearing a jacket. Life is so weird right now.

Rumor has it that the fat nazi fascist piece of shit in the white house is going to try and overturn the two Georgia senate elections and throw out their two senators. If that happens we secede, right? Enough of this authoritarian bullshit.

Ugh… show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I wanna go to bed.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 10/90

After cranking out a ton of work on days eight and nine I considered blowing off day 10 entirely but in the end I didn’t. I noodled out a couple of songs worth of bass riffs just before I fell asleep. Not a lot, but enough to say I’m up to 11 songs in progress now. One of the ideas from last night is in 5/8 time because having one previous song in 5/8 wasn’t mental torture enough.

Sail Boston Pics

Today is Monday. At about 7:30am today the house painters arrived. We booked this months and months ago and in the intervening time we’ve had 100 things go wrong in the house and we just sort of lost track. They have been here for 11 hours. They are scraping the old paint off and prepping for the actual painting. Will that start tomorrow? Who knows.

In the meantime, here are a few more pics from our visit to Sail Boston on Saturday. Talk about your gorgeous day in the best city in the world, am I right? It was spectacular from start to finish. We walked about 400 miles in total. I took about 100 pics with the digital camera and one roll of 35mm film and a handful of shots on a second roll. Someday I will get them developed, but not today.

Here are some digital pics to hold us over until the film is developed, probably before the end of the century.

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Two of my favorite people
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Norway fans. They were sad. The lost 2-1 to England
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I took a bunch of fireworks pics but they are all lame so I am only posting one.

There you have it. Our trip to Sail Boston. I am guessing we saw maybe 5% of the ships, but what we saw was worth it.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 9/90

First, a little back story. The 50/90 Challenge used to be run by the same folks who run the February Album Writing Month challenge (fawm.org). That’s the one that dares you to write 14 songs in 28 days in February. I do that every year without really thinking about it. I do the RPM Challenge, record 10 songs or 35 minutes of original music in February, and I always just make sure I write at least 14 new songs. When I do that I complete both challenges. Hooray.

50/90 didn’t originate with fawm. They took it over at some point and spun off a website all its own. Then last year they shut down the 50/90 website and stopped playing along. I decided to just do it on my own and failed miserably. This year I decided to try it on my own again and we’re on day 10 now. Also this year, in place of 50/90 (which is HUGE), they have started a new thing which is sort of a mini-50/90. Write five new songs in nine days. They kicked it off on July 4th, just like they used to do with 50/90, and yesterday was the ninth and final day.

Was I successful in this new challenge?

Oh yeah, I was.

Did it take a huge rush at the finish line to get it all done in time? Yes. Did I actually over do it and end up with more than five songs? Why yes, yes I did.

So back to the main topic at hand. What did I do yesterday to get it all done on time? When I woke up yesterday morning I had four songs ready to mix. I needed one more but I didn’t have anything close to done yet. I had two songs with rhythm guitars recorded, two songs with just fake bass and drums, and one song that was just a few bass riffs. Notably, that one that just had the bass riffs also had a fake guitar that was meant to be a guide for when I recorded the real guitars.

So what did I do? I just got busy. I drove out to the parking lot I go to when I want to record vocals (so no one in the house can hear me yellin’ at the microphone) and I wrote the melody and the lyrics to the two songs that had guitars while I was recording the vocals. Then I got weird and took the idea that wasn’t really a song form yet but had the guide guitars and just wrote lyrics and a melody and recorded the vocal over each of the three riffs. Sure I would end up using the same recording any time that riff was repeated but so what. It’s my song, I can do whatever the hell I want with it.

When I got home the first thing that I did was make a quick and dirty mix of two of the songs that were ready to go. Then I went down cellar where my guitar nook lives and put lead guitars on the two songs that just got vocals, worked out a rather repetitive song form for the idea that had vocals but no song yet (funny, eh?), then put down the rhythm and lead guitars. Now I had two songs done and five more ready to mix.

Over the course of the rest of the day/evening/night, I mixed ’em all.

So where does that leave me? The five songs in nine days thingie is a resounding success. The 50/90 Challenge is in a state that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. Nine songs in the production pipeline. Seven of them are complete and two are just a song form with MIDI bass and drums. That’s everything.

Now the question is, do I take day 10 off because my brain is still fuzzy after cramming so much in over the last two days, or do I start another five songs in nine days mini-challenge and see if I can crank it out again? I guess I’ll let you know when I post day 10’s recap tomorrow.

The Great Decline
Don’t Be Gentle
Go Far
Full Scale
Regression
See Right Through
Cling