Kevin Bresnahan

I sometimes wonder about Joe taking so many sideman dates around this time (late 80's/early 90's). He did a lot of them. This is certainly one of the good ones. My favorite sideman date from this time is probably the one he did with Neil Swainson but Tyner's "New York Reunion" is great too.

I was in my late 20s when I had to quit playing basketball. When I was at Raytheon, we had a pickup game every Monday night. We played for hours. My first years out of college, I was still able to play OK. I could get my shot off without getting blocked and I could drive to the hoop and even sneak a layup by one of the bigger guys. Then after about 4 years, some younger guys fresh out of school started playing. I was getting my shots blocked and getting stripped every other time I came down the court with the ball. It was extremely frustrating. I switched to volleyball shortly after that. I played volleyball 3 or 4 nights a week until I was in my early 50's and loved it. Now I really can't jump much and I really shouldn't be diving around on a hard floor. I do think about playing again. There was a time when several of the guys I played with were in their late 60's. One guy played until he was 75. He couldn't spike and he never dove, but he could still bump/set/serve fine, which was more than a lot of the younger players could do.

I'm also getting to the point of having regrets for some of the stupid shit I did when I was younger. I should have worn ear plugs to those rock concerts. The resulting tinnitus and hearing loss sucks. I should have started eating right at a much younger age. I was diagnosed with super-high cholesterol at a fairly young age and have been on statins ever since. That didn't stop me from eating junk all the time. These days, I really miss french fries. I should not have taken that job on the road back when my daughters were little. They grew up way too fast to have missed that part. I wish I had listened to my friend Paul and gone to a couple of Jazz shows with him back in the mid-80's. I would've been able to see a lot more of the greats if I had started earlier. As it was, I missed seeing Blakey & the Jazz Messengers' last Boston show by about two weeks. I should have bought that red with white cove 1961 Corvette convertible when it was offered to me for 8 grand. I didn't because it was red. Even being red, I'd love to have that car today. I was also offered a '57 T-bird at a ridiculously low price but I was never a Ford guy. I should have helped my father restore one of his Indian Motorcycles. So much knowledge was lost when he died. He had all kinds of tricks on the best way to take those things apart and putting them back together. Maybe I'd still have one if I did. I'd also know how to drive one. I never did try driving one of those suckers with the left foot clutch and right hand stick shift lever with a right hand throttle and left hand spark advance. Actually, I'm glad I never had to drive one. It sounds even worse when I describe it. I should not have cleaned my Yamaha DT-175's carburetor with that can of (now banned) Trichloroethylene (TCE). I figure some day it's going to crop up during a doctor's visit. So much stuff we used back then was unhealthy for us, it's a wonder that we're still here at all. Speaking of that... when I worked for the Holyoke Water Department one summer, they patched/replaced a water main. The way they did it was using an asbestos rope tied around the joint which was then packed with asbestos paste to contain the lead solder. They mixed the asbestos paste on site, dumping the bag of powdered asbestos into a cement mixer and adding water. I should have stayed much further back from that mixer. As it was, I did stand far away, but the dust went everywhere. Speaking of that Part 2... at Raytheon, we used some nasty toxic materials. I remember one time we had a part that contained tiny bits of Beryllium Oxide. Nasty nasty stuff. I refused to work with it. There was also the time they sent me a part to test after it had been exposed to a nuclear reactor to see if it was "rad hard". It arrived in my lab in a lead-lined box with skull & crossbones all over it. They said, "Don't worry - it's been long enough. It's safe to handle". Fuck that. I had someone else test that part.

I had just asked him what it was like playing on the Teddy Edwards session with Billy Higgins. He thanked me for the reminder. No idea why he's pointing at me other than that it might be good for captioning ideas.

Ogunquit is one town north of me. It's a nice little town. We go there often, particularly to visit their restaurants. We have been missing our Canadian friends lately. There used to be a lot of Canadian tourists visiting our beaches down here in Maine but not last year and not likely this year either.

We actually downsized almost 10 years ago now. We were living in this big house in Atkinson, NH when I came in from clearing the snow after another blizzard dumped 2 more feet on us and I saw myself in the hallway mirror. My face was purple. I asked my wife where she wanted to retire and she said, "Here", so I said, "Then plan on being a widow, because this driveway is going to kill me". We started shopping that week. I wanted to move to a condo in a city like Cambridge, MA, Newburyport, MA or Portsmouth, NH when my brother decided to move up to his beach house in York, ME. I checked the prices and I checked the frequency of major snowfall and we decided to settle up here. We still get snow, not nearly as much as we got in the boonies of NH and the driveway is a hell of a lot smaller, so that part's been good. But I lost a lot of living space moving here. The biggest PITA was downsizing my wine cellar. I used to have a shelving system in my cellar in NH. The basement here is finished, so I had to buy a wine fridge, which holds a lot less wine than my wine racks did. The cancer thing only turned my hair gray. But then again, I didn't need chemo, so that was good. It's the heart stuff that I worry about. You're lucky that your profession actually rewards experience with improved skills. I retired after 41 years as an electrical engineer and near the end, the kids knew the newer technologies much better than I did, so it was getting a lot harder to stay ahead of them. My only saving grace was that I specialized in RF technologies and RF is RF like a B♭ is a B♭.

In preparation for seeing Artimus Pyle's Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band tomorrow night, I'm currently spinning "One More For From The Road".

Tonight I'm heading to Jimmy's in Portsmouth to see Blues on the Corner: McCoy Tyner Legacy Band with Jerry Bergonzi, Benito Gonzalez, Esiet Okun Esiet & Francisco Mela. I'm looking forward to it but hope the sound guy does a better job than the last show I saw there. Tomorrow I'm hitting a rock show led by drummer Artimus Pyle of Lynyrd Skynyrd fame, who I have wanted to see for many years. He only plays small clubs and never seems to come further north than NH, so I'm off to the Tupelo Music Hall in Derry, NH to see his band. I recently watched his movie about Lynyrd Skynyrd and the plane crash, which was quite the bummer. It's not as uplifting as you'd think given the title.

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. 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've 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.

9% of Amazon reviews are 1 star, with most of them saying that the drive arrived dead. I worked in the electronics industry for over 40 years and I've been told that a lot of companies (our customers) that were making cheap electronics like this external CD drive, use the consumer for "final test". It's cheaper to have you return it for a new one than it is to test it themselves. I would send it back and get a replacement or a credit. https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B07DLRG9VH/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar A little while back, I got a new tower PC with a shit laptop-sized optical drive, so I bought an external case, this one: https://www.amazon.com/External-Enclosure-Generation-Aluminum-NST-540S3-BK/dp/B09SS74KCN/a4b666 And then I bought a highly-rated internal drive. I researched it quite a bit and eventually bought this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09G9FRFT7? And yes, I know that Plextor is no longer a company, just a licensed name, but this drive had decent reviews at the time.

Othello appears to be a little overdressed for the occasion.