Letters to my sons.

Dear son,

I queued at the Apple Store on Regents Street on Friday night to get my hands on Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. I have an old iMac G5 that was running slowly with 10.3 and I was sure 10.5 would speed things up. And sure enough, it did.

Getting more performance from a new operating system is not some thing that happens in the Microsoft world. With each release a much more powerful machine is needed just to keep the whole thing running at the same speed as before.

While waiting in the queue with a couple of work colleagues we tried to decide on the collective noun for geeks. When I did a Google search I found some ideas but we came up with “a nurding” of geeks. Nurding being an invented verb describing the actions of a nurd.

Despite being miles away from the front of the queue we were in the shop by 10 past 6, only ten minutes after the store opened it’s doors. The great multitudes who had arrived much earlier than us to queue were busy down stairs trying to pay for their new acquisition. We went upstairs to find loads of copies and an empty set of tills and they even had free t-shirts as well.

Yesterday we had a trip into town as I needed to buy a microphone cable, some plectrums and Logic Express for my newly upgraded iMac. By leaving early and using the bus and tube, we were on Denmark Street before 10am and able to have a look in the windows of the guitar shops and buy plectgrums in the one guitar shop that was open before entering a more hi-tech shop for the essentials. After coming home for a quick spot of lunch we went to the guitar shop in Dalston to pick up my serviced guitar, which sounds fantastic now. The same people serviced my other acoustic guitar and I had it Nashville Tuned. I’m looking forward to getting my audio and MIDI interface tomorrow so I can multi-layer some guitar parts I have been working on. The guitar with the Nashville Tuning sounds fantastic and has allowed me some more creativity as the tuning is the same but at the same time very different from a traditional guitar.

We formed a duo yesterday as you played with my old Spanish guitar and I used my main acoustic. It is still some time off until we are playing together but you are getting the idea of picking one string at a time, you have been strumming and singing for a while already. Now if you could form chords and then strum …

I still need to upgrade my iMac’s memory to 2gb and buy a 500gb hard disk for backing up the computer – I’ll use Time Machine to do that, but my return to making music is happening fast. I’ll be publishing my music on PJCaudle.com, I have already published one my old pieces from 2000. I am very excited about writing and publishing more.

Dear Son,

I was going through our photo collection last night and I found this image taken by your mother when we were in Chamonix over Easter. You look your usual handsome self and because most of my face is obscured, I don’t look too bad either.

This picture is now on my computer’s desktop at work.