Well, another week has passed and the mixer drama is still in full swing.  Early last week the shop I originally purchased it at sent it to the local distributor which they found was in fact no longer in operation, so then they sent it to another distributor who said they won’t check it without paying HK$500  because the warranty has passed (by two months).  The shop owner who seems sympathetic to my cause is going to press them to check and repair it anyway and hopefully I should know something in the next two days.    

I am not holding my breath however because we seem to live in an age where the concept of ‘check’ and ‘repair’ are no longer services.  The economies of scale involved in our plastic commercial culture has forced out the repair shops of old, and more and more I encounter things that have a life span that does not stretch far beyond a limited warranty.  We live in a cycle of replacement.  TVs, appliances, what have you, if it does not break it becomes ‘out of date’ almost as rapidly.  We are often asked at checkout to buy an ‘extended warranty’ which is often expensive, and then should you need to use it the service is (in my experience) is quite poor.

Though I hate the downtime, it does give me a chance to catch up on some work before the start of the new semester in two weeks.  All Kozo from LHKF is back in town and will be starting up his film award nominations, which means I have some 2009 films to catch up on as well.  As mentioned previously, my goal is to have ES/WS back up by CNY.  Also, I am currently in the preproduction mode for a second podcast to be hosted on the site as well which I hope to start up sometime in March.  More details on that to follow later.  So for now, until my mixer mix-up gets resolved, good viewing folks.

Well, 2010 is starting off rather rough.  While Kevin was off in Japan last week getting his sushi and saki fix, we were all set up to record an episode of ESWS.  Suddenly the core of the show (a little Alesis firewire 8 mixer) decided that it was going to stop working.

To be honest the thing never really worked correctly since I started using it back in 2009, despite all my attempts at updating the drivers, the bios and the interface software.  I even moved the thing over from a PC to a Mac.  Sometimes it played nice and sometimes it wouldn’t.  In this respect it was allot like my mom’s cat.

In recording previous episodes, there have been several nights in which Kevin was waiting patiently on SKYPE while I worked through restarts and configurations that I had read about on forums.  Nothing has consistently worked.  And like being in any bad relationship, it was easy to keep thinking it was something wrong with me, something that I was doing wrong.

Finally on Thrusday evening of last week, as Kevin rested up in his Japanese hotel room from his fugu binge that day, we were going over the notes, I hit the record button and nothing.  An hour later and still nothing, no repsonse from the mixer.

At some point you can only bang your head against the table so many times before you have to call it a day, so I did.  I have returned the mixer to the store I purchased it at (a small audio shop on Apliu Street the Shum Shui Po disctrict) and they in turn are going to send it in to be checked by the local ditributor.  I am not sure how long all this will take, but it is my goal to have ES/WS up and running again by Chinese New Year even if it means I have shell out some more ca$h for another mixer.  In the meantime, I hope you will bear with us as we undergo this bumpy start to the new year.

As mentioned at the end of show 7, East Screen West Screen was approved on iTunes last week.  It has taken me awhile to get my head wrapped around the RSS code, by finally (with the assistance of some very useful coding software, I managed to get the code errors worked out.  At the time of this posting all current episodes (1-7) of the ES/WS podcast are up on iTunes and can be subscribed to normally.  You get there from here iTUNES-LINK.

Of course we do hope you will still stop by the site to comment on the ES/WS episodes, various films and events that we cover.