Category: Something Other than Trump

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It Arrived…And It's Alive!

Very happy with my first foray into Japanese auctions! Upon arrival it powered up fine with an AA sidecar battery and/or power adapter, but wouldn't recognize a perfectly good, fully charged internal gumstick battery—nor would it charge said gumstick. Even though the contacts on the external battery door looked okay, I knew there had to be corrosion inside, so after shining a flashlight in the battery compartment and confirming the internal contacts were caked with the infamous green corrosion, I gingerly removed the rear case. Armed with vinegar, an old toothbrush, q-tips, and isopropyl alcohol—and having watched numerous videos on how to do it—I set about removing the green gunk. Afterwards I put it all back together—and to my utter amazement, not only did it still work, but now it recognized the gumstick battery and worked great. And that color! Sony sure knew how to do orange!

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Busy, Busy…

I'm doing everything possible to stay as far away from social media as I can this weekend. To that end, I tackled one of my post-retirement tasks early.

My office closet had become unmanageable. Last weekend I pulled everything out and started going through shit.

The big boxed items hoarding the most space were the two vintage receivers  as well as a vintage amp I'd posted extensively about here but were no longer in use. I'd been planning on putting them all up on eBay for over a year, but they had to be unboxed, photographed, and in the case of the amp, the speaker terminal board needed to be reattached. I kept putting it off because it was all just too much.

Well my friends, now they're up (here and here in case you're interested). And one has already sold.

I also realized my old Yamaha CD player was sitting on a shelf in the bedroom closet, and BAM! That's listed now too.

While there is some sentimental attachment to all this gear, it feels damn good to be getting it out of here—especially since I lost my mind last week and bought another Minidisc deck:

I should have sought this one out initially, but until I stumbled across a review on YouTube I didn't know it even existed. It's got all the functionality of the Sony deck I bought, but in addition it has a headphone jack, pitch control, and—most importantly—a keyboard jack so track/disc names can be easily input. Will I eBay the other one? Probably not. It's always good to have a backup…

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Off to a Rough Start

I recorded my first minidisc in over a decade last night.

And after I finished, ejected the disc so it could finish writing the table of contents, and when I reinserted the disc to listen, the machine took a crap. C13 Read Error. Ugh. And it wasn't just that disc—it was even brand new, unused ones. And of course the seller I bought it from said it was fully functional and doesn't accept returns.

Being a nerd that's still relatively good at fixing shit, I did a hasty search online and ended up getting very depressed. Firstly, because there wasn't a whole lot of info out there and a lot of it was, "Take it to a Sony Service Center." Yeah, like that's an option any more…

I did all the suggested troubleshooting: cleaning the laser's lens, blowing out the mechanism with compressed air, reseating the ribbon cables that run between the mechanism and the main circuit board, etc. But none of it worked.

Anyhow, after mulling it over while wide awake at 4 am this morning, I thought about one other possible culprit: dried lubricant on the sled rail.

After getting ready this morning, did a search on YouTube and found one video that described the error and what needed to be done. It was basically everything I'd already done, but I felt that if the guy in the video could resuscitate a machine that was in much worse condition than mine, I certainly could get this one working.

I pulled the top off again and did everything I'd done last night and in addition, ran a Q-tip drenched in isopropyl alcohol along the rail and under the gears that drive the mechanism. I cautiously inserted the disc from last night and viola! it worked!

So fingers are crossed. As I type this I'm adding a few more tracks to the disc from last night and so far everything is working as it should. The true test will be when I'm finished and it has to write to the TOC (Table of Contents) before ejecting…

UPDATE: It worked!

UPDATE #2: It's hosed. After recording two discs, the error returned. After popping the cover was obvious the disc was refusing to spin up, triggering the C13 error. I spoke to the seller this afternoon and she's agreed to refund what I paid for it upon return of the unit. On the positive side, the MZ-S1 arrived today and it works like a champ.

Nugget acquired
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From theaidsmemorial:

"I took this image of a Navy friend, Jim, at a house I was living back in 1984. Being a Navy photographer at the time, I would take more than just snapshots of friends. On this night, I took Jim with some harsh lighting. This being my favorite. He was not at a low point during his time in the Navy. He had been reflecting back to how much easier it was when he was a kid.

I was transferred overseas in early 1985, and lost touch with Jim. When I returned from overseas years later, I found out of his passing.

After my Navy career I was attending college. One of my electives was a photography class. During that class we had an assignment to put images together into a book. We could use any image we had taken during our lives. I put one of the images I had taken of Jim all those years ago in 1984. I was using Photoshop at the time so I added text to some of the images in my book.

To Jim's image I added a quote from an Elizabeth Akers Allen poem titled "Rock Me To Sleep."

"Backward, turn backward,
O Time in your flight,
Make me a child again
just for tonight!"

It seems he has been gone a lifetime. Rest in Peace Jim." — by Chuck Cavanaugh

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A Small Fiction

"I'm lonely," she said. "Do you have a potion for making friends?"

"Sure. Drink this," the witch said.

"Tea?"

"Yep. What's on your mind?"