Current mood:	tired
Current music:	Fats Domino - Walking to New Orleans

Everything is NOT alright AKA Mandatory Spring Cleaning, New Orleans Style
After a great, late Saturday night mixing some friends' bands (see previous post) and a relaxing Fathers Day spent barbecuing with my dad and mum, imagine my dismay when I got a call from the office at 8:30pm asking me to come by there and unalarm the zone for the cleaning crew. Why? Well, apparently the downpour that I slept through Sunday morning had also introduced 3-4" of water into the building. Yikes!

In a virtual replay of events two and a half years ago, I was greeted by the sight of a disaster mitigation team perched right outside the exit doors, vacuuming water out of the building with large hoses. I quickly entered my office to survey the damage. Hmmm, well I've seen much worse. Hurricane Katrina had brought a foot of water into the office and an inch of it into my home. This time out my home was dry and the office had 1/4 the previous amount. Another important difference - I was already somewhat prepared. A month ago, a squall had blown in and was threatening to dump a foot of rain on us again. Fearing the worst, I had picked everything up off the ground before leaving for the evening. The wind changed direction that night and the storm front blew north, right as the water seemed ready to sluice into the building. Luckily, I still had a bunch of stuff picked up this weekend, including a fine Gibson Explorer project that still hasn't been finished.

But not everything was safe. My laptop was sitting on the ground in its bag. Damn. So was a box of old science fiction books and some old legal papers. Well, no great loss there. My videogames had seen worse. My new Star Trek project didn't suffer that much, and my Omega Race had a big of swelling near the bottom - nothing that couldn't be disguised. But there was one heart stopping thing I had overlooked - a black bag filled with a friend's old ADAT multitracks. These are audio masters stored on videotape. The bag had been sitting on the floor since he dropped it off last week for me to transfer to hard disk - you see, he doesn't even have an ADAT machine, but I still keep one handy for computer transfers, and had offered to do the transfer for him. RATS!

The tapes inside weren't soaked but they weren't dry either. Fortunately though they hadn't DRIED. I caught them just in time. You can still save videotapes (and certain other magnetic media) in this state if you're careful and work fast.

After picking more things up and starting a dehumidifier going in my office, I brought the 9 tapes back to the Secret Lab and employed a technique I thought up after Katrina, and had been curious to try out. Opening each cassette shell, I removed the tape spools, taking care to absorb as much water as possible with lint free paper napkins. Water was visible between the spool and the tape, leeching its way via capillary action into the reel. All the water could not be drawn out this way, but I got as much as possible to start. Then, with the tape threaded into a new shell (with the tape guard removed), I fed the cassette into an old VHS deck with a lint free napkin wrapped around the tape (this is an old style deck that doesn't keep the tape wrapped around the rotating head all the time.) Next I set up a hair dryer about a foot away on high airflow/low heat, aimed at the exposed tape where it emerged from the shell. I then fast forwarded each tape, running it through the napkin, all the way to the end. When it got to the end, I changed out the napkin and reversed the tape, winding it all the way back. A couple passes like this got even the wettest tape clean and totally dry (though I accidentally melted the tape case of the first one through due to overzealous use of the hair dryer.) While the tape spooled, I cleaned and dryed out each of the original tape shells before putting the tapes back in their respective cassettes. At the very end of the process I tested each tape in the ADAT machine. Success! Each tape played back perfectly. There seemed to be no issues. I guess if there's any latent problems, such as lack of tape lubrication, I'll find out later this week when I do the actual transfers. But for now at least, the tapes are safe.

That process kept me up until 2:30am. Now I'm in the process of moving stuff around my steadily drying office, throwing away old trash that should have been tossed long ago. Like I said, mandatory Spring cleaning! Tonight's rehearsal. Should be a nice respite after all this.