got plans for tomorrow, with the newly-non-ex girlfriend. we’ll ramble out to the big cemetery with a field recorder and microphone, recording our travels like roving documentarians. or that is at least the plan. i was out with the field recorder today, questioning all the while why i bothered, but i made some good use of the thing. i might be able to get the best of both worlds with the payphone audio project by spaking both into the telephone and into a mic, getting far better quality audio on the mic, as well as better ambiant sounds… but then why bother talking into the phone at all? i don’t know… maybe double up the sound, playing 2 tracks on top of each other. why bother with that, though? i do not know. now that i think of it, the sound could be kinda cool. should try. with enough microphones i could make it sound like a bumblebee’s eyeball.

…..

a couple of weeks ago i bought something from an ebay seller who happened to be located in China. i did not notice the China location until later, but the seller had thousands of positive ratings and reviews, and the item i bought was only $25, so i don’t feel like i took too big a risk on this.
so i bought the thing, and all seemed normal enough. then a few days later i got a broken-English e-mail from the store saying, in substance, that there had been an inventory malfunction and that the item i bought was not really available. the seller added that he was going to raise the price on the item so high that no one would attempt to buy it. that made no sense to me, but i blamed it on the broken English barrier. whatever the case, he offered a full refund, which i accepted, and 4 or 5 days later my PayPal account posted the full refund. all good, I guess, except that to close the deal i had to approve a cancellation of hte purchase, and the seller requested that i give their store a positive rating for this transaction. why would i give them a positive rating? and more importantly, i started to think that this was their game. lining up bogus purchases of products that they do not possess just ot try and scam a positive rating out of buyers? seems like a long way to go for a pretty pointless scam… but positive ratings are the currency of ebay sellers. something about the transaction was sketchy, but i got my $25 back, so who cares…

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this useless changing of the clocks comes at a good time for me. i’ve been suffereing to get up earlier and earlier, usually failing, but today i was up by 11, which will be 10am tomorrow. i have an opera ticket for next week, at 1pm, which has been my time of wake-up for hte last 6 months… but this time change will make that adjustment less onerous for my very sensitive sleep plateaus.