Current Geek (And Other) Activity

Nina and I took a week off at the start of the month to get out of the city and relax for a bit. As with last year, we went to the Slieve Donard hotel, and spent the time in and out of the gym, pool, jaccuzi, sauna and steam room. It was amazing - I haven't felt so relaxed in recent memory. I had intended to spend the remainder of my time off recording, but my 8-year-old PC has become useless for pretty much anything other than browsing, media playing and basic coding. It now boots and runs off a highly-customized Puppy Linux USB stick, which is great fun and lightning-fast, but leaves me with no viable way of working on my music.

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Without an audio workstation, my creative endeavours have stagnated badly. I've enlisted the help of Happi in sourcing parts for a new rig, which I sincerely hope to have picked and purchased by the end of this week. I really can't wait. Following my little spa retreat, I've really found my inspiration coming back, and if I can get my equipment in order, there really won't be any more excuses (apart from time, of course).

Away from music, I'm currently learning a new programming language: Python. I've been hearing about it for years as an excellent tool for everything from general-purpose tools to automation, game development and even PHP extensions. Many of the job apps I've looked at over the past month or so list experience with Python as one of their desired (though not essential) criteria,. It's cross-platform, which is important for me at a time when I'm running Linux and Windows alongside each other. In order to learn it I'm trying to replicate one of my old DIV-Basic efforts, Detonator, in Python. Once I've got that down, I have to choose between McGrathi Apocalypse, 14 Days and some sort of Knightmare engine as my first original Python project. All are in the advanced stages design-wise, so it's really just a case of picking one and sticking to it. Again, time will be the major obstacle.

So in the next few weeks I'll hopefully have yet another string on my big geek bow. I also hope to have a new audio solution in place and maybe, just maybe, a finished track or two. Though I've said that so many fucking times over the past five years that I'm actually scoffing at myself. I've got other plans and projects in the works too, so here's to finding the time and patience to tackle them in 2010. (What do you mean, it's nearly April? Shit.)

NJM