The Unhappy Me thread

[LaurV]

Romanian version: Let's go to Alps to pick some flowers...

[kriesel]

Last week: fiber internet deployment in the area "June 2019". This week: "2019". (Happy New Year?)

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Last week: fiber internet deployment in the area "June 2019". This week: "2019". (Happy New Year?)

You probably don't want to hear this, but here in Bimshire we have just about 100% FTTP availability from two different providers.

This was, however, after a tropical storm blew over us, and half the country was without power nor water for about a week...

[ewmayer]

The Day The Music Burned | NYT Magazine

The fire made news around the world, and the destruction of the video vault featured prominently in the coverage. But nearly all news outlets characterized the vault fire as a close call, in which worst cases were averted. The New York Times reported that “a vault full of video and television images” had burned up, but added that “in no case was the destroyed material the only copy of a work,” a claim attributed to Universal Studios officials. Subsequent articles focused on the fire’s impact on film festivals, which relied on prints from Universal’s library. But journalists moved on from the story, and there has never been a full accounting of film and video losses in the fire.

The Times’s report was typical in another way: It contained no mention of a music archive in the devastated warehouse. The confusion was understandable. Universal Studios Hollywood was a movie backlot, not a record-company headquarters. What’s more, a series of mergers and acquisitions had largely severed the ties between Universal’s film and music businesses. In 2004, Universal Studios was purchased by General Electric and merged with G.E.’s television property, NBC, to become NBCUniversal; UMG was cast under separate management, and in 2006 fell wholly under the ownership of Vivendi, the French media conglomerate. When the fire struck in June 2008, UMG was a rent-paying tenant on NBC Universal’s lot.

One of the few journalists to note the existence of the UMG archive was Nikki Finke, the entertainment-industry blogger and gadfly. In a Deadline.com post on the day of the fire, Finke wrote that “1,000’s of original ... recording masters” might have been destroyed in the warehouse, citing an anonymous source. The next day Finke published a “clarification,” quoting an unnamed representative from the record company: “Thankfully, there was little lost from UMG’s vault. A majority of what was formerly stored there was moved earlier this year to our other facilities. Of the small amount that was still there and waiting to be moved, it had already been digitized so the music will still be around for many years to come.” The same day, in the music trade publication Billboard, a UMG spokesperson again pushed back against the idea that thousands of masters were destroyed with a more definitive denial: “We had no loss.”

These reassuring pronouncements concealed a catastrophe. When Randy Aronson stood outside the burning warehouse on June 1, he knew he was witnessing a historic event. “It was like those end-of-the-world-type movies,” Aronson says. “I felt like my planet had been destroyed.”

The archive in Building 6197 was UMG’s main West Coast storehouse of masters, the original recordings from which all subsequent copies are derived. A master is a one-of-a-kind artifact, the irreplaceable primary source of a piece of recorded music. According to UMG documents, the vault held analog tape masters dating back as far as the late 1940s, as well as digital masters of more recent vintage. It held multitrack recordings, the raw recorded materials — each part still isolated, the drums and keyboards and strings on separate but adjacent areas of tape — from which mixed or “flat” analog masters are usually assembled. And it held session masters, recordings that were never commercially released.

UMG maintained additional tape libraries across the United States and around the world. But the label’s Vault Operations department was managed from the backlot, and the archive there housed some of UMG’s most prized material. There were recordings from dozens of record companies that had been absorbed by Universal over the years, including several of the most important labels of all time. The vault housed tape masters for Decca, the pop, jazz and classical powerhouse; it housed master tapes for the storied blues label Chess; it housed masters for Impulse, the groundbreaking jazz label. The vault held masters for the MCA, ABC, A&M, Geffen and Interscope labels. And it held masters for a host of smaller subsidiary labels. Nearly all of these masters — in some cases, the complete discographies of entire record labels — were wiped out in the fire.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

The Day The Music Burned | NYT Magazine

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=umg+buildi...=v167-1&ia=web
Heartbreaking story.

Many hits on this story.
(Most seem to be riding on the firewalled NYTMag story. I haven't checked them all that closely, except to weed out several that were just touting a link to the Times.The first Variety piece below was published the day after the NYT story
.

Nirvana, R.E.M., Roots Did Not Know Warehouse Fire Destroyed Their Recordings

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/...gs-1203240538/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news...ngs/ar-AACIVVo

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/...es-1203239661/

https://www.nme.com/news/unheard-mat...s-fire-2507236

[Spherical Cow]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

The Day The Music Burned | NYT Magazine

Just read the article; can't believe I never heard about that. That is really tragic; masters of Patsy Cline, Etta James, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry. And so many others. Incredible.

[xilman]

Oh, oh, woe is me, my life is a misery and, can't you see, I'm at the start of a very big downer.

I've just swallowed the second of several 1g doses of amoxycillin to treat an infection. I'm now feeling like and the pain in my jaw isn't much reduced. The tooth comes out on Monday.

The camera and/or filter wheel on the telescope died last night. No more astronomy for the immediate future. Repair or replacement is likely to be expensive. Probably going to be replacement as the broken stuff is ~15 years old.

Life. Don't talk to me about life.

[rogue]

Originally Posted by xilman

Oh, oh, woe is me, my life is a misery and, can't you see, I'm at the start of a very big downer.

I've just swallowed the second of several 1g doses of amoxycillin to treat an infection. I'm now feeling like and the pain in my jaw isn't much reduced. The tooth comes out on Monday.

The camera and/or filter wheel on the telescope died last night. No more astronomy for the immediate future. Repair or replacement is likely to be expensive. Probably going to be replacement as the broken stuff is ~15 years old.

Life. Don't talk to me about life.

I see two positives. First, the pain will be gone after the tooth is extracted. Second, you can upgrade your equipment.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by xilman

Oh, oh, woe is me, my life is a misery and, can't you see, I'm at the start of a very big downer.

On the plus side, at least judging from my suddenly-boosted Paypal balance, you have received the Odroid N2 micro-PC I shipped to your Canary Islands lair 2 weeks ago to set up as a spiffy new telescope controller for your nonfunctioning equipment! And while you resolve your equipment issues you can do LL tests with it.

Good luck with the extraction distraction ... I will need one of those sometime this year as well, a long-crowned lower left molar which had been feeling funky whenever I bit down on it had the above-gumline portion of the tooth just break off last month. The one silver-lining aspect: the same tooth had also been root-canaled, so no pain in the as-yet-unextracted root, I simply filed off a couple sharp corner left from the breakage and have been putting off get the root yanked, since with no above-gumline toothage to grab, the extraction is likely gonna mean a visit to the oral surgeon.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by xilman

I've just swallowed the second of several 1g doses of amoxycillin to treat an infection.

I was given some left over amoxycillin by a relative to treat what ever I had. I was told to take 2 to start with. I am allergic to penicillin. And it turns out I can't take any -illin. The amoxycillin was time release. It felt like I was getting punched in the stomach by a boxer when they went off. I was a pain riddled wreck for 15 minutes balled up in an over stuffed chair. For about 5 minutes I was ok. Then WHAM another time release. This went on for several hours.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

I was given some left over amoxycillin by a relative to treat what ever I had. I was told to take 2 to start with. I am allergic to penicillin. And it turns out I can't take any -illin. The amoxycillin was time release. It felt like I was getting punched in the stomach by a boxer when they went off. I was a pain riddled wreck for 15 minutes balled up in an over stuffed chair. For about 5 minutes I was ok. Then WHAM another time release. This went on for several hours.

Horrible, but better than anaphylactic shock. The slow release may have saved you from more serious consequences.