A frustrating day

Today was a rather frustrating day.  Helping a friend, I tried to clone a drive to a refurb I bought from Newegg.ca with no luck because the drive was a dud.  I will never buy from Newegg again.  It would cost more to return the drive than for the cost of the drive itself!  Judging from the reviews, it's likely the replacement drive would also be a dud.  A load of crap indeed.  Not only that, but another drive I tried to clone on an Emachine would always stop at about 90% completion.  Tried 3 different software (Easeus, Paragon and Reflect) all for naught.  Well, that was a waste of 5 hours!

Yesterday, I bought three CDs from the Saskatoon Symphony Book Sale.  I looked for stuff that was a little less mainstream.

1. A CD of Josef Suk playing the Dvorak Violin Concerto.  This was a Suphraphon recording.
2. A CD of Babette Hierholzer playing Schumann.  I saw it was an EMI Electrola recording from Germany.  The audio quality isn't very good despite the digital recording.
3. An Eurodisc CD of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra playing some baroque and classical favorites.

So, it was 3 for $10, but keeping in mind the great bargains now with boxed sets, I refrained myself.  I was looking for Naida Cole's recording, but no luck.  It's really cheap used at Amazon.com, but they won't mail to Canada.

Listening to Pollini play the last three Beethoven sonatas to forget the frustrations today.  The final movements of each of the last three Beethoven sonatas are quite amazing.  Nr 30 is a set of beautiful variations, Nr 31 is a fugue, Nr 32 is almost jazz-like!  Also reading Joel Osteen's book which I got at Bookcloseouts.ca.  Also played the Mason and Hamlin Model A today - tried to play Chopin Waltz Opus 69, Nr 1.  Alice Sara Ott plays it like no other I've ever heard!  At Superstore, my son asked me if Beethoven played the violin.  I said, no, he was a pianist.  All the greats were pianists (Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms).  That's why piano is the best instrument!