i picked up the octave key from orrin last night. so i’ve officially finished the alto sax. i made a new screw for the octave key, put on a new pad and provided a flat spring that wasn’t there, and adjusted the linkage so that it worked correctly. if the octave mechanism on a sax isn’t working correctly, the probabilty is good that the entire horn won’t play right. when you’re playing in the second octave, above the G key, the upper octave key is open and the lower octave key is closed, but as soon as you activate the G key, the mechanism automatically closes the upper octave key and opens the lower octave key at the same time. it’s a pretty sensitive balance between 5 springs, and i got it to work the first time without having to figure out what it was actually supposed to do.

according to the spam LJ support sent me, my style should be back “in a few hours, once the internal cache is cleared out”… why it takes a few hours to clear an internal cache is beyond me, but apparently my style has been randomly changing for more than a year because of “the internal caches becoming corrupted in some form”… now i understand “internal cache”, and i understand “corrupt”, but what i don’t understand is why it takes so long to clear a corrupt internal cache. admittedly, i’m sure they’re running a whole farm of multi-terrabyte disk arrays, but my impression is that they’d take less time if they just rebooted the machines, and while that doesn’t necessarily produce the most desirable results for us end-users, at the same time, if it would replace information that has become corrupt with the corresponding uncorrupted information, i would do that rather than taking hours to clear out a cache on the off chance of finding something that points to the source of corruption.

i suppose that’s what they get for running a system that is in test off of servers that are in production.