Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Tonight, my daughter called for me after I put her to bed. It's unusual that she calls for me now as she's gotten older. I used to find it so irritating to get these calls, sometimes 3-4 times a night ("Papaaaaaaaaaa... uhm, I love you"). Now it seems to happen once every few months and is usually something more serious (at least to her), so I run up. She's sitting up in bed telling me about how she was terrified I had "gone away." I think she was just afraid I was going to die (of course, we all are going to some day), but it was hard to get that out of her. Usually the harder days are the days she has the most fun, I guess (maybe creating a lot of memories?). I know we're slowly descending into fewer and fewer days to be together, fewer chances to snuggle before bed, to tell "Kwazii stories."
I did tell her that some day I will die - and that I hope that day comes long before her time comes. That I won't be feeling anything when I'm gone, and that I would be happier if it were me and not her. That, of course, didn't really make her feel much better. Me staring at her boogery nose and making a face did. She started giggling, and I knew I had cracked the sadness, which faded, and we could say our good nights.
If you remember me saying the other day I had a financial problem - well, it was that I plugged the Kawai SX-240 back in to play it and it was dead. Nothing would happen. I was miserable, because I was planning to sell it and of course it would die before I could! Well, I managed to fix it. If you ever look up the service manual for this thing, it's horrible. I didn't realize how bad it was until I messaged Bob Grieb about his Tauntek eprom update (thinking maybe a bad eprom was the problem). He said it wasn't likely the problem, but sent me his version of the service manual and you can actually see the traces on it (the online version is so bad it didn't even pick up half the traces!). From there, I could see there was a bad solder joint between Pin 3 of the EPROM (I was right, something was wrong with the EPROM!) and Pin 2 of an adjacent IC. And - well, I brought it back to life. Another successful repair.
Kawai SX-240 and Fractal Audio FM3 for FX.
Tonight, my daughter called for me after I put her to bed. It's unusual that she calls for me now as she's gotten older. I used to find it so irritating to get these calls, sometimes 3-4 times a night ("Papaaaaaaaaaa... uhm, I love you"). Now it seems to happen once every few months and is usually something more serious (at least to her), so I run up. She's sitting up in bed telling me about how she was terrified I had "gone away." I think she was just afraid I was going to die (of course, we all are going to some day), but it was hard to get that out of her. Usually the harder days are the days she has the most fun, I guess (maybe creating a lot of memories?). I know we're slowly descending into fewer and fewer days to be together, fewer chances to snuggle before bed, to tell "Kwazii stories."
I did tell her that some day I will die - and that I hope that day comes long before her time comes. That I won't be feeling anything when I'm gone, and that I would be happier if it were me and not her. That, of course, didn't really make her feel much better. Me staring at her boogery nose and making a face did. She started giggling, and I knew I had cracked the sadness, which faded, and we could say our good nights.
If you remember me saying the other day I had a financial problem - well, it was that I plugged the Kawai SX-240 back in to play it and it was dead. Nothing would happen. I was miserable, because I was planning to sell it and of course it would die before I could! Well, I managed to fix it. If you ever look up the service manual for this thing, it's horrible. I didn't realize how bad it was until I messaged Bob Grieb about his Tauntek eprom update (thinking maybe a bad eprom was the problem). He said it wasn't likely the problem, but sent me his version of the service manual and you can actually see the traces on it (the online version is so bad it didn't even pick up half the traces!). From there, I could see there was a bad solder joint between Pin 3 of the EPROM (I was right, something was wrong with the EPROM!) and Pin 2 of an adjacent IC. And - well, I brought it back to life. Another successful repair.
Kawai SX-240 and Fractal Audio FM3 for FX.
