a house half full

forced burst of energy.  a few more empty packing boxes.  some graphic novels and a few DVDs consolidated onto existing bookshelves in living room.  some classic pictures of my former selves mixed into the decorations on the refrigerator.  a young kermix with juggling clubs atop his parents’ beat-up car.  a Rorschach Halloween costume that, on reflection, looks a bit like an alternate-universe anti-hero Charlie Brown, avenging his childhood football nemesis.  a young adult kermix in my favorite rented tuxedo, white with black trim and red handkerchief accent, playing my upright bass with my dad at my sister’s (unbeknownst to anyone, at the time, of course) ill-fated wedding.  those huge glasses and that rat’s nest of a ponytail.  a tie littered with question marks that I wish I still had, and I have no idea where it ended up.

still no closer to having any clue where I will put the Monolith of a desktop PC.  Invaders Must Die on the shuffle, Red Bull nearly empty, the moon slowly filling.  the more boxes I can empty, the more real estate I reclaim in pursuit of workspace.

still, a lot of unanswered logistical questions.  do I get another set of speakers for the to-be-rebuilt desktop, having attached the monitors to the living room’s Future Media Center of Doom?  do I get a desk, or set a monitor (or two, or three) on bookshelves, keyboard on my lap, mouse on … something?  is there even room for a desk when everything is done?

most of that doesn’t even matter yet until I finish “moving in”.  empty more boxes.  stack remaining boxes of stuff that doesn’t need unpacking.  assess space from there.

the moon is eyeing my cigarette.  when it’s full, I quit.  I almost waited until it was full to start running around moving things, just for the added burst of energy.  but that’s not how it works.  it’s a good time to fill the house with myself.  the getting rid of things happens later.

The Joy of Tech

this article by a really smart friend of mine (and I’m not just saying that because she likes my music) details, using the example of Angry Birds, how modern technology in the hands of a child does not teach them as much about how the technology works as it did many years ago.  the example makes sense; I remember trying to recreate the simpler mechanics of some of my favorite games with TI Extended BASIC as a kid, with varying successes, and forcing myself to learn how to build and upgrade PCs as the parts became available when I got my first 286.

I’m still trying to decide exactly  what I think about this; I know I’ve got something to say about it, but my thoughts aren’t quite ripe.  there’s still a lot of interest in How Things Work and How To Make Things, and there are still child prodigies, despite the majority of the low-level work already having been done by the grand-daddies of computers and technology.  but should we be worried?  still working on that one.  it definitely feels like it’s worth discussing.

snatch the pebble from your brain

a bit of a cheat: something that has been on the brain recently, edited from an email conversation from a while back.

a lot of people ask “where can I do the most good?” when they should be asking “where can I be the most fulfilled?”  they ask how they can help others because they have gotten sick of trying to help themselves and now they’re trying to ignore it.  and it doesn’t matter, really.  some people believe that their lives are about finding some sort of destiny out there but any destiny you’ve got (if you’re into that sort of thing) is in here.  wherever you go doesn’t matter.  the only way you change anything remotely resembling a destiny is by being a different person, and ignoring an unsolved puzzle isn’t going to change anything.  you’ll still hurtle towards that next epiphany or heartbreak at the exact same speed and it won’t matter whether you’re in New York or Venezuela for it, it’ll just come in the form of something else appropriate to the local culture and climate and speak the local language.  angels do not fuck around.

anyway, the difference between kids and adults is generally how they react to stress.  you know how movie-warriors train themselves putting their hand in the fire?  they’re trying to retrain their instincts to not jerk away and panic.  it’s an important instinct when we’re growing up, because otherwise we wouldn’t learn what fire can do to us until we’re burnt to a crisp.  but the ritual is there to give them back that option.  ”I’m a grown-up now, I can decide for myself whether to risk burning myself if there’s someone or something important on the other side of that fire.  I take full responsibility.”

feelings are basically there to tell us what is going on, like emotional nerve endings.  when it feels overwhelming, it’s like putting your hand in the fire.  if you’ve been overwhelmed for a while, do take a break (don’t want to burn your hand clean off), but with the understanding that at some point it would be awesome to have the option of running right through that stupid fire to deal directly with what’s on the other side.  this analogy has all sorts of potential that I’m sure I’ve missed here.  you can fill in the blanks.

that, to me, is being an adult.  being able to run through the fire if needed, without complaint or panic.  not for glory or anything.  just to give ourselves back that option.

orange things

I’ve been sick for the last few days with what I believe is the annual bronchitis that comes with the shift in weather and temperature at about this time every year.  as a result, my sleep is further off than usual.  I stayed awake far too long yesterday in an effort to correct it, and then I ended up sleeping for an entire day to wake up at 10:30pm.  ah, life, you are too funny.

I seem to recall an aspect of a dream in which I wore a good pair of black dress shoes that were quite comfortable.  (at some point, when I have money, I do want to update my wardrobe and have at least a little class in it again.)

a part of me wants to weigh in on #ows, and the millions of words being thrown back and forth regarding it, but I spend so little time thinking, or talking, about political things that it is difficult to form an opinion.  the only thing that seems obvious to me is that, with as many people involved as there are, the message is occasionally unclear or misstated, which only fuels its opposition.  some people are angry that they don’t have a lot of money, which is fine, but it is not necessarily related to any problems that can be argued politically.  the least I can say is that “we are the 99%” is not as communicative a tagline as “corporations aren’t people” which is the closest to a succinct, useful message as I’ve read so far.

let’s get organized

in lieu of ADVENTURE, and while procrastinating on organizational and technical tasks for my parents, a couple of useful things.

* an external hard drive dock.  not an external hard drive, but a bay which holds a SATA drive which would normally be internal.  a few years ago I was shopping around for an inexpensive way to store a whole mess of stuff, without just buying another hard drive and shoving it into the computer.  as it turned out, internal hard drives were (and probably still are) the cheapest data storage around, and external USB hard drives were not only more expensive but tended to include a lot of proprietary management that I have absolutely no use for.  the dock and a few 1TB SATA drives suited me perfectly and still do; all my backups and gigantic chunks of media go to hard drives that are only powered on when I need them to be.

* Google Reader and Lifehacker.  I don’t exactly have a ton of RSS feeds that I power through every day, but every once in a while Lifehacker drops something useful.  (it was from their article that I found flavors.me and had the big idea to get myself back into writing and put myself back online.)

* Dropbox. while my netbook is too tiny to hold another 2GB of shared data*, it is still handy for keeping some important documents backed up, and it was really useful when I was writing music on both a desktop PC and a laptop, as it kept one copy of everything synced up between the two machines.

* LogMeIn.  kids, if you’ve ever done phone tech support for your parents, you know what I’m talking about.

(edit: I realized soon after writing this post that I didn’t have to share every folder to every machine with Dropbox; I can easily tell it to sync only the text-containing folders to my netbook.)

break time

I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately. for me, there are generally more things going on at night, and that is when the world is currently more interesting. part of the problem is that I also have some daytime obligations, which inevitably cuts into my sleep. between this, and the dust that has flown around the house in the last 24 hours, my head feels a slight unhappiness, but it will pass.

over the last few days I have developed a slight sense of urgency, the need to create and polish up my online appearance, just in case someone who is interested looks at them.  things feel scattered, but it’s not a good idea to let my health suffer in the meantime. some actual rest is in order.

technomancy

my new housemate once called me a techno-pagan; he was not referring to a musical genre, but instead referring to my efforts to will a web server into reading tarot for its users and displaying the results on a web page.  lately, I haven’t made as much of a conscious effort to bend the universe to my will.  (although, I do have some time on my hands.)  but I have been doing a lot over the last two days or so with my gadgets. (and the tarot web app could yet be revisited at some point in the future, so don’t count it out yet.)

the desktop PC has been down for months and I haven’t bothered to rebuild it.  I had two old 500GB drives as a RAID and one day it just refused to boot, saying that one of the drives had a problem.  I let it go because it was just a giant game machine and there wasn’t anything of dire importance on it.  (probably a good decision.)  I also have a pretty good laptop (Core i3) and an old, but functional, Asus Eee 901 netbook that hadn’t been used in a while.  and, of course, my Android phone.

at the moment, neither the phone nor the netbook are running on the same operating systems they shipped with.  I have a habit of tinkering with things, and shopping around for free warranty-voiding modifications that will give me whatever level of control I happen to be looking for.  it’s a personal preference, and it’s not for everybody. the way I see it, I am someone who is past the point of wanting things to “just work”; I would much rather have some clue how it works, so that I have the best chance of performing the correct voodoo on it later, should it be required.

the biggest challenge, at this moment, is getting the most out of each of my three major devices — but still retaining the ability to do most anything on whichever device is in my grubby little hands at the moment. I know. I don’t need to write a WordPress column on the phone, even though I can because there is a WordPress app for Android. I’d even prefer not to use the netbook, with its scrunched-up little keys and no dedicated home/end/PgUp/PgDn, for protracted writing sessions. but I want to keep a task list, and notes, and IM, and other communication tools, decentralized wherever possible. and the netbook is running Lubuntu. I have three separate devices on three different operating systems. if I didn’t know as much as I know, I would be technical support’s nightmare.

the Windows/Linux crossover isn’t that bad for my purposes, though. the only things I am doing with the netbook don’t require anything but a web browser.  Trillian’s web app for IM.  Google for mail, tasks, RSS, calendar, et cetera. adding the Android phone to the mix complicates matters, but only slightly.  I used to keep notes in Dropbox where I could edit them in either Android or Windows, but I also keep a large number of my working audio files there, and they would just take up most of the already-limited space on the netbook.  so I could end up using Evernote again (now that I know it’s a Chrome app and not just Win32/Android).

amidst all of this, the notion of simply carrying a pen and a small spiral notepad is always in the back of my mind.

fortune favors the bold

something interesting (to me) has been happening over the last day or two.

there is a part of me that is working very hard to be acutely aware of what I am doing.  an online presence is being re-established and re-shaped towards new goals and, for lack of a better term, a new career path.  my brain is attempting to keep track of what sites I should keep an eye on, and how often, and what software I should be using, and why I wanted to use it in the first place.  tasks are started; reminders are digitally scattered to go back and continue working on those tasks; and completed tasks are forgotten, remembered, double-checked to remind myself that they were actually completed, and then forgotten again in a continuous cycle.  I am remembering to eat periodically during these procedures.

so there is this one part of me that is working on tangible goals that make sense, and there is another part of me that is thinking, “I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen”.  this is a useful thought.  I’ve been connecting several of my different online accounts together, personal and professional, and some of them are more public (and less professional) than others, which made me question whether or not I would appear “hire-able” into any given work force.  the feeling I got was that I was straddling my previous technical resume (such as it is) and my interest in pursuing more artistically-creative endeavors, with little industry experience and only so much financial wealth behind me.

“I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen.”   this is a very useful thought in a situation like this.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in a state at many points in my life where I felt I had everything under control, and it should come as no shock in this day and age that, looking back, those were some of the more boring times of my life.  sure, there is a sense of comfort in the familiar.  one can only be subjected to so much rattling before they start to lose sense of things.  but I learned a while back that there is something to be said for seeking out the unfamiliar, though I’ve only consciously put it into practice in moderate degrees.  at its simplest level, seeking out the unfamiliar prepares you for the times when it finds you.

after a point, I decided to file the majority of unfamiliar territory (good or bad) under the blanket term ADVENTURE.  you may, at your leisure, pick a more personally suitable, though equally positive, term for your own ventures into unfamiliar territory.  just remember that “unfamiliar” does not mean “dangerous” and the two should not be considered synonymous.  maybe when you were a kid you wanted to go around hopping on trains for a while.  that’s only one raw form of ADVENTURE.  yes, there are dangerous elements to it, but the danger does not define the experience as a whole.  most ADVENTURE in modern-day first-world adult life contains far less of that raw, meaty danger (or it should).

it is, at its core, an exercise in understanding fear, and learning to transform your fear reactions into something immediately more practical.  we learn more about ourselves in unfamiliar territory.  think of it as a science experiment on yourself, as a way to open your mind (somewhat literally, by creating new pathways in the brain, via synapses between previously-unconnected neurons) and learn just how little there really is to be afraid of.

write something every day

even if you’re not actually a writer (I don’t define myself as one), it seems like a good idea to write something every day.  I didn’t come to this conclusion on my own; there was an article somewhere that I should try to find again so I can give proper credit.  but I have what I think are my own reasons for doing so.

years ago I went through a period of time where I wrote every day in an online journal, and it had some pleasant side effects.  it kept me communicating with the outside world when I was living alone.  it kept my vocabulary sharp.  it challenged me to take ordinary events, no matter how small, and make them readable and interesting.  it gave me a place to share things that were already extraordinary (and, again, challenged me to make the most of them in writing).  it made me want to try to emulate some of my favorite writers.  it made me a little more observant.  throughout my day, I would occasionally think, “this is something worth writing about.”

and if you’re already aspiring to be a writer of any kind, all the above applies even more.  all writers experience writer’s block.  committing to write something every day pushes you through it, even if you’re not writing the thing you’ve been trying to write for weeks or months or years.

social media like Twitter and Facebook complicates the idea a little bit.  Facebook and Google Plus implicitly encourage bite-size communication.  (Twitter does so outright.)  no one goes to their social media feeds looking for essays.  I couldn’t follow 200 people on any given social media service if they were all writing more than a single paragraph at a time.  but the kind of writing I’m talking about isn’t a status update; nobody needs practice writing those.  they don’t encourage you to write or think or communicate deeply about anything, unless they’re linking to an already-written article outside their boundaries.

this is about stepping outside those boundaries yourself, and writing and thinking deeply for yourself.  this is an exercise in staying in touch with the rest of humanity.

in which an introduction is made

a little bit about me.

I’ve been a musician for just about my entire life; my dad has The Ear and has more or less passed it on to me.

I’ve also used computers for about the same amount of time.  the first computer in the house was a TI-99/4A, gifted to us by my dad’s parents.  it went straight into my room, because nobody else was interested in it. (every computer that graced my parents’ home would go straight to me, and no computers entered their home after I moved out, until about two years ago.)  I loved electronic games, so I quickly learned BASIC and made some simple games with it.  I also tried to re-create various tunes that I’d heard elsewhere, sometimes from arcade games.

I wrote the following, sometime within the last year, as a sort of mission statement:

“when I was 15, my passions were very simple: music, computers, and games.  they are still a part of my life now, but in vastly different quantities than I might have hoped they’d be by now when I was 15.  I could argue that it was going to happen anyway, if I believed I was no better than anyone else.  but somewhere along the line, something changed.  something that happens to a lot of people early in their lives.  something causes some of us to react to it and makes us forget our goals, our passions, and how simple our lives can be.  we allow ourselves to react throughout our lives, instead of leading with our hearts.  I should be composing my own music again.  [ed: I am!]  I should have a small studio in my living space by now, and it should be full of all sorts of musical gadgets and weird technology.  but I don’t, because I stopped leading with my heart somewhere down the road back there and stopped being passionate about the things I wanted.  but I’m remembering again, and the things I need to do are slowly becoming clear as the things I want are returning to my vision.

life is not complex.  life is simple.  if you’re not doing what you’ve always wanted to do, you are not leading with your heart.  that’s it.”