Peter Buffett Memories of the Phonograph    By Peter Buffett, 2010* - Honorary Friend of the Phonograph - Excerpt from "Life is What You Make it" One of the lucky coincidences -- if it was a coincidence, as opposed to the exercise of my mother's mysterious wisdom -- was the sudden appearance, one day when I was in high school, of a tape recorder in the Buffett home. I've mentioned that I once repaired our portable phonograph with a sewing needle. That was a perhaps clumsy way of saying I had always had an interest in the confluence of music and technology. The tape recorder took that confluence to a whole new level. I saw it not just as a mechanical device, but as a magic box that held endless promise. I taught myself how to record a track, then dub another over it; then how to erase the first one and improve it. I was learning not just how to play music, but to produce recordings.