James Callis

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the second and third verse of “Mickey maousse” by Serge Gainsbourg and almost nailed down the last verse, but kept losing the third line. 

            I tried video and audio recording my song practice, this time with the Scarlett interface plugged into my old computer. I wasn’t able to listen to any of it afterward because it’s too much of a hassle to transfer the speaker jack from my new computer. I’ll put the file onto a USB drive later and transfer it to the new PC. I assume there will be no clipping on the file because the experiments I did yesterday evening showed that the old computer records cleanly. I don’t know if it just has to do with the computer itself or with the internal settings. It’s a bit of a hassle because the ideal would be to be able to do everything on the new computer. The old one is slow, 32-bit, and with a lot less RAM and so the chances of being able to use audio editors like Audacity and Ableton on it would be limited. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday, I mopped my floors twice and the water in the bucket was dirty both times. I plan on mopping every day until the water’s not dark before I start scrubbing certain areas that have gotten stained. 

            I weighed 84.1 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride but it started raining lightly so I only went as far as Bloor and Dovercourt. I went down to Queen and then to Freshco where I bought five bags of red grapes and a pack of five-year-old cheddar. When I left the supermarket the rain had stopped and so I rode east on Queen to Steve’s Music where I talked to Connor about the fact that it doesn’t seem to be the Scarlett interface that is causing my new computer to clip in recordings. It clips with every device on the new computer, but the Scarlett interface works fine with my old 32-bit PC. Connor referred me to a guy in the acoustic guitar section who is also an audio expert. He suggested that I should try to set the privacy settings on my computer for the Scarlett interface. I didn’t quite understand since the clipping happens without the Scarlett. 

            I got caught up on my journal at 18:30. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos at 17:31. 

            I continued to try to solve the clipping problem for recording on my new computer. I found that I could make the Scarlett interface the default input device but if I disabled the microphone labeled “USB Audio Device” it would not record at all. Turning the microphone level way down to 5% did not stop the clipping. I disconnected the Scarlett and with no microphone plugged in and I discovered that it still recorded. I stood in the middle of the room, two meters away from the computer, and sang and played guitar with the Windows Sound Recorder on and it recorded and clipped. No tech-knowledgeable people I’ve spoken to about this issue find it at all familiar. 

            I had a potato with gravy and two chicken drumsticks while watching season 2, episode 7 of Star Trek Picard. After Picard was hit by Soong’s car, his team took his unconscious body to Teresa’s clinic, where his life signs are now stabilized but he won’t wake up. He is not in a coma because his brain is fully functioning. Inside of his mind, Picard is having a therapy session with a Starfleet psychologist who looks to me like an older Dr. Bashir from Star Trek Deep Space Nine, but it turns out it isn’t. It’s actually the guy who played Dr. Baltar on Battlestar Galactica. Picard tells the story of his mother being taken by a monster. 

            Tallinn goes into Picard’s mind to get him out. She finds the ten-year-old Jean Luc Picard in the tunnels beneath Chateau Picard and helps him against the monsters. But then they face Picard’s father, Maurice Picard, who Picard says is a monster. Picard’s father is the psychologist we'd seen earlier and Picard’s mother is confined in the basement because she is insane. 

            Teresa demands to know from Rios what is going on in her clinic. Rios has a stabilizer beamed from the ship. Teresa asks Rios if he is a spaceman but he says no, he just works in space. 

            Picard wakes up and Tallinn reveals to him that she is Romulan, like Laris, the woman with who she is identical in his time and for whom he has romantic feelings. 

            Seven and Raffi discover that Agnes has taken the Borg queen into her mind. They track her movements over the last few hours and with every release of endorphins in Agnes’s body the queen becomes stronger. If they don’t stop her she will become the new Borg queen and begin assimilating the very vulnerable people of the 21st century. 

            For some stupid reason Rios beams Teresa and her son to his ship and they are in awe. 

            Picard goes to see Guinan and asks her to help him find Q. El-Aurians have the power to summon any nearby members of the Q Continuum but when she tries, nothing happens. But a man walks into her bar and asks for a drink. Then he starts talking about his interest in Sci-Fi and shows a video on his phone of Picard materializing out of nowhere. Then the man shows a badge and several agents bust in to arrest Picard and Guinan. 

            Maurice Picard is played by British actor James Callis, who after graduating from the London Academy of Dramatic and Musical Arts won the Jack Tinker Award for Most Promising Newcomer for his performance opposite Bob Hoskins in the two-actor play “Old Wicked Songs.” He co-starred in the film, “Bridget Jones’s Diary”. As I mentioned before he played Dr. Gaius Baltar on Battlestar Galactica and won a Saturn Award and an AFI Award for that role. 

            For the fifth night in a row, I haven’t found any bedbugs.