Kevin Bresnahan

Waaaayyy too late for me when it comes to leaving too much stuff. If I don't purge my CDs & LPs in the coming years, my survivors will have a ton of them. Don't even get me started on my tool bench/garage area. I am a bit of a pack rat when it comes to spare nuts & bolts and I inherited all of my father's stuff too. I have more screwdrivers than I'll ever need. Congrats on the 25th. This year, my wife & I will celebrate 39 years of marriage. We started dating 46 years ago. For our 25th anniversary, we went to Paris. For our 40th, we're thinking about Italy.

If you type up the listing in a entry box here on the forums, it defaults to double-line spacing when you hit the Enter button on your keyboard. I've never discovered a way to get rid of the extra LF either. The only way to have your listing be single-spaced is to create it in an application like Word or Notepad and then copy & paste it into the entry box. I try to do this when I create a sale here.

Those Japanese Paddle Wheel CDs have always been tough to find.

But it's better than the alternative. I manage a Facebook group for my high school. These days, I find myself posting a lot of obituaries for former classmates. I used to go to Jazz shows and see the greats of yesterday play on stage. Now, with a few exceptions, they are all gone. Even the rock musicians I saw as a young man are passing away slowly but surely. Too many of them are just ghost bands now. I find myself getting frustrated with some things I see around me and I can only think of: One of the ones that really bugs me is these idiots texting on their phones while they drive like crazy down the road. I figure one of them is going to kill me or a family member one of these days. It's why I stopped riding a motorcycle. I'm sure that they think I'm just a cranky old man when they see me shaking my head as I pass them. That commercial on TV where they show the driver stop just short of hitting a bunch of kids needs to be re-done and show that driver hitting those kids and cut the commercial with their bodies flying through the air. Maybe that would make an impact? As a retired engineer, I find myself very very frustrated when something isn't working correctly and customer service people almost universally treat me like I don't know what I'm talking about. Like i just want to complain. The craziest one was when I went into a Toyota service center and told the 20-something kid behind the counter that the Carista app showed a lot of error codes for my car and could they check them out. Afterwards, he said there were no error codes at all. When I showed him the error log, he said, "You must not be using the app right". Oh - old man doesn't know how to use an app! What was I thinking! One of the most difficult things I've found with getting old is planning your (shortened) future. I always planned to retire and start traveling. I seem to have saved enough money, but my better half is not as sure as I am. But here's the thing - you have no expiration date! I keep telling her that we don't need to save all this money for when we're 85 - if we even make it that far - but she just doesn't seem to want to admit that we're going to die someday. When you budget for retirement, you almost have to enter your own estimated "death" date (or a date where you won't spend as much on "extras" like travel). Even if it's only in your head, that's fucking surreal. You definitely have to do it for stuff like pensions or Social Security so you can decide when to start collecting. Then there's your health. I wanted to retire early to enjoy a healthy retirement. I did it. I retired early. Then I had health issues. Then my wife had health issues. It's crazy when you are an active person for most of your life but then find yourself unable to do a lot of those things as you got older. I used to love playing volleyball. I can't do it anymore. If I suddenly stop posting here someday, it'll be one of these health issues biting me in the ass. We'll see how this year goes. We have 4 vacations planned - one down, three to go. Fingers crossed.

So I've been using this set-up for almost 4 years now and I have to say - this was one of the best decisions I ever made for playing my digital music library. I have been using this system to listen to my music more than any other playback option i.e. CDs & LPs, to the point that I am feeling like selling off the majority of them.

Arnie Krakowsky - Where The Tenor Meets The Bone (Seaside Recordings). Arnie is a local tenor player who still gigs at a lot of the smaller clubs in my area. I bought this CD and the other featuring this band, "Is It Minor Yours?" from him at a couple of these gigs. This CD is very nice, with Arnie on tenor, George Masso on Trombone, Jon Wheatley on guitar. Paul Schmeling on piano, Marshall Wood on bass and Artie Cabral on drums, "local" musicians who I managed to see perform many times over the years. Sadly, Masso & Cabral have both passed away.

Not my kind of Jazz but no matter... the audio sucks. The reverb makes it sound like they're all playing in a giant warehouse. Not for me at all.

That's a good CD. I haven't spun it in a while.

Alternatively, you could add a powered USB hub. Looking at newegg.com, if I were to buy one of these today, I'd look at: https://www.newegg.com/lg-model-gp65nb60-slim-dvd-burner/p/N82E16827136283 or https://www.newegg.com/lite-on-model-ebau108-slim-dvd-burner/p/N82E16827106104 This seems like a decent powered hub: https://www.newegg.com/p/0J2-06XW-00002?Item=9SIAV17DG26732&cm_sp=SP-_-463287-_-0-_-1-_-9SIAV17DG26732-_-usb-c powered hub-_-c|hub|power|usb-_-4

I am reading that you need a powered external drive for most Mac PCs. They don't supply power to their USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. I've had good luck with newegg.com They have a bunch of drives that use an external DC supply: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=optical+drive If you don't have one, you may need a USB-C to USB-A adapter and a USB power adapter.

I had never heard of these releases until now. Learned something new today. Mosaic box?

That means there's no power. It could be DOA or it could be that the port is not supplying any power. Have you tried plugging in some other peripheral that gets its juice from the port (like an external hard drive)? Does it work?

Does the adapter pass power as well as data? Not all adapters do it.apable Maybe I should ask what does happen with your external drive... Does is light up/power on? Does the tray open and close? Does the disc spin up? Have you tried plugging it into different Thunderbolt ports on the Mac? Are all of the Thunderbolt ports capable of providing DC power? My car only has one USB-C port that provides power. The other two are data only. FWIW, Apple products tend to do stupid shit to force you to buy their accessories. I would not be surprised in the least if Apple did something so that you can only use one of their external drives. They're done it with other peripherals in the past.

I recently spun the surround mix from the BlueRay of "Animals" and I was even less impressed by it than when i first played it years ago. So much more could have been done with this album using the full surround soundstage. This was a stereo LP that used phase to move stuff around in the stereo mix and yet when they made a surround version, they left each part stationary in discreet channels. I mentioned listening to this when I was stoned as a young man and the thing that used to be cool was the dogs barking all around you. They barked in front of you. They barked behind you. If you had headphones on, they barked inside your head. It was cool. The surround mix sticks them in one speaker and leaves them there. What a shit job they did when mixing this. I'd also add that as I have aged, the lyrics to these tunes really hit home. I've met so many pigs, dogs & sheep in my life and I realize that a large part of my life was necessarily "piggy", as was most anyone trying to make a living. Hopefully the stone doesn't weigh me down too much. I am not a big fan of Syd Barret era Pink Floyd at all. I rarely played them when I was younger & haven't found any reason to go back. If I'm playing Pink Floyd, it's usually "Wish You Were Here" or "The Wall", with "Comfortably Young" being my favorite Pink Floyd tune.

An optical drive should plug & play in Windows - no driver should be needed. Besides, it sounds like it is being plugged into a Mac in this case. One thing to consider... this drive draws power through the USB-A connection. If you're plugging this into the Thunderbolt/USB-C port on the Mac with an adapter or port replicator, it might not be getting power. Check the specs on the adapter.