The music was strange and intense this morning. Sold a couple of guitars. Well I don't have the money and I still have the guitars but they're sold at some future unspecified date. They'll be back next week or next month but they'll be back.

I find that I'm barely excitable about the Microsoft case anymore. It was another lifetime. I find I have no compelling reason to upgrade anything. No XP in my house. Someday I'll find it preloaded on the next computer but all of mine still work. When they get too old just drop in the Linux CD and re-format and eventually I might be free of the Redmond cartel.

AOL posts one of the largest corporate losses in history. So much for that investment. More than the GDP of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But 54 billion of the 54.2 billion loss was associated with the goodwill they bought from Time-Warner and is now worth significantly less. I remember that as the most disturbing line item on the prospectus. The entire company is now worth about 85 billion. That's down about 280 billion from when the deal was announced and also about the value of Time-Warner when they acquired it. Which makes the internet service worth, uhm let me do the math, around zero dollars. Won't be long and they'll probably be letting go of that pesky internet browser division which of course has to give away their product since the browser wars and is therefore just a bunch of employees that cost money and don't generate any. It was the browser going into AOL-TV which is Linux based so they can't use Internet Exploder. That'll probably have a minor impact on the 26 or so subscribers to that service.

4PM comes and I'm starving. Really. This isn't something that most of us have much experience with. I've had carb snacks but just realized it's been about four days since my last real meal. Can't recall the last time (if ever) that I needed sustenance right now. Hello, room service? So I get the four-meat pizza with extra cheese. The first thirty seconds I was just cramming food into my mouth. Then all was well again.

This is probably the only business where you get sales brochures saying the company owner just took some bad acid and decided to give away free freight.

One of the main reasons I didn't pursue a performing musician career in my younger years (besides the fact that it didn't pay the rent) is that my music is horribly inconsistent. Some days I shine, some days I suck. I also have intermittent perfect pitch. I can pull a low 'E' string on a guitar out of space and get it right. Not every day. Sometimes. Anyway the discovery is that these two things are linked. Didn't know that before. When I can pull a low e out of space I can also rip a guitar apart and make you feel every tortured note. When I can't - I can still pull off some complex stuff because I've been doing for it for 35 years; but it ain't quite right. The high 'E' in my brain isn't quite an exact multiple of the low 'E' in my brain. My guitar is out of tune and so am I. Guess the trick is to figure out some pattern to this and find out if there's something causing the bad hair days. It isn't an emotional cause. I can wail in good times and bad, stressed and relaxed. It's something else.

Hmmm... The first song this morning was Machine Gun. Hendrix at Fillmore East - New Years 1970. I wrote about it earlier but erased it when I found it was a repeat of an earlier rant. When I hear that song I think of the original vinyl version - which was out of tune. Still one of the greatest musical works in history. Jimi played twice as hard to compensate for his bad hair day. Gave it everything. Gave it his soul. Today I was out of tune. Yesterday I wasn't. Don't think that as the first song of the morning 's the reason, but it's what made me start thinking about this whole subject.

Nope. I disagree with my last thought upon consideration. Jimi Hendrix, out of tune, bad acid, Microsoft, underwater stocks, these are all related. They are all painful memories. But today I experienced no pain or anger or anything like that. It's still something else although now I've gotten a bit intrigued by the connections. And it wasn't hunger because I was still out of tune after the pizza. Might take a while to figure it all out.