As if I never left

I've decided to dedicate my domain to more - er - professional pursuits, so the textual spojlings are back here in blogger land.

I've successfully migrated all my old wordpress posts back here to blogger, thanks to a rather nifty conversion tool I was able to hunt down on the intertubes. So aside from a few possible dead links on old posts that no-one is going to read again anyway, we're back in business :)

You might also notice I've thrown a little twitter widget thing on the right there... Yes, I've succumbed to the dark side of micro-blogging. Clare's slightly disgusted with me, not so much becase I'm using it, but rather that it's called "twitter" and I'm using it. I'm inclined to agree - it's such a silly name - but as far as keeping people updated on album things and general bits & pieces, I think it could be pretty decent. Much easier to snap a pic and post a sentence or two as things are happening, as opposed to writing masses of verbiage at the end of the day, or week, or month.

I read somebody saying that twitter jumped the shark the moment Oprah signed up live on air. I say "pfffft". If I refused to do things that Oprah had done, I wouldn't be able to sit on a couch, eat fatty foods, or pass loud moral judgement on people with no real knowledge of the relevant issues. And I don't plan to stop doing any of those things...

So, um, yeah.

Good.

Flock off

I just removed it again. Very useful, but extremely convoluted interface-wise, and ultimately I'm just not that much of a Web2.0 kind of guy.

Was going to mow the lawn today, but it's a bit wet, so I'm working on some uni work, finishing up a magazine article which may or may not get published, and putting together a job application.

 

The fun never stops at casa de Nick :)

Flocking hell

I've just installed "Flock", which is basically firefox that's been all tricked out to interact with social websites. So it'll aggregate content from facebook, myspace, youtube, this website (I'm typing on it now) and anything else you can throw a stick at.

So mainly I'm just trying it out here... nothing to report. Well, actually quite a bit to report, but nothing I can be bothered typing up right now.

Ok, you twisted my arm. I'll do it in dot points though, and perhaps come back and fill in the gaps later.

• The Who rocked


• Counting Crows were OK


• We got a neighbor complaining about Molly barking, but they were quite nice about it


• I have a mighty sore lower back


• 5 weeks is a scary amount of time to finish post-production on 13 animated TV episodes


• I'll be sans-employment again at the end of May


• No I'm not going to fly to Melbourne for the 21st birthday party of a cousin who I've met only twice and wouldn't recognise if I ran into him on the street


• The previous is not because I'm a horrible person - I have good friends interstate who I'd love to see more often, and I can't afford to do that either.


• I still can't decide if I like OSX Leopard of Windows 7 better. I've been using Win7 beta and it's verily nice, but I've been booting up on the OSX side lately and it's still very neat.


• I'm just filling space now.


• The End.

Alrighty, let's hit post and see what happens :)

Plug it in, plug it in

Gooood morning!

It's been a while between posts (again). Been mucho busy with new house and puppy shenanigans, plus work is starting to get to the very pointy bit. Oh, and I'm starting a uni course again today.

So what's news? Well, I've had a bit of time to hack together some T3E stuff, and hoping to spend some more hours (or at least a few minutes) on that particular task in the next little while. I've also been gettin' my developer on, working up a VST plugin. It's based around some workflows that I was repeating over and over for the cartoon job, and I thought "well hang on a darn tootin' minute, if I had a plugin that could do all this, then I'd save a bucket load of time". So I did a scout around the various development/authoring options, picked a flavour and I've been building it up. Of course doing so has used up far more time than just manually working through it in the first place, but I'm trying to take a long-term view. At the moment it's very embryonic and kind of ugly, but it works. Audio goes in, audio comes out sounding (sort of) the way I want. I may even put a spiffy interface on it at some point and see if anyone wants to pay me for it :)

OK, must get some work done before I scarper to Uni.

Busy busy busy

Alright, so it's been a long time between updates. But we've honestly been flat out. And I don't mean in the lame-excuse way so much as the actually having a boat-load of things to do way.

We're settling in to the new house very nicely. The usual maintenance and upkeep type stuff is around, plus of course a healthy quotient of customisation and individualisation to be done. But generally it's been ready to move into, comfortable, and relatively hassle-free. A massive change from the previous digs (or "that old dump" as Knotty aptly dubbed it for us).

Speaking of that old dump, we had a bit of an, er... "negotiation" with the property manager. There was certain damage which had occurred that they were trying to blame us for. Thankfully, we were anal enough to take video evidence at the time, and they were forced to yeild to our superior evidence-power. Hurrah! I feel a bit mean, but then again, we're only getting what's due, so I suspect I'll still sleep tonight.

The puppies are doing great - coming along in leaps and bounds. No doubt you'll have marvelled appropriately at the photo above. The usual puppy brat-ness abounds, but generally they're an absolute joy to come home to, or wake up to. That's what I love about dogs - they're always utterly thrilled to see you. More than once this last month I've woken up tired, grumpy, and to be perfectly honest, slightly hungover, only to have my bad mood completely evaporated by virtue of the power of puppy enthusiasm. Honestly, it can't be over-stated. If you could convert canine affection into electricity you could power the planet by being nice to puppies. And that's a world I'd be happy to live in :)

The garage to studio conversion is coming along, albeit a little slower than I'd hoped. The floor coating went on in three coats, and wound up looking pretty much like bare concrete, at which point I decided to hell with it, bare conrete aesthetics is just what the audio/muso practitioner of 2009 will be sporting. On the plus side, three coats of bond-crete have made it much more resistant to dust and what-not, so while it might not be immediately aestheitcally different, it's certainly significantly easier on the gear, and much more readily maintainable. The furniture is broadly in place, and I've put up shelves for the speakers (destroying a couple of cheap-ass masonry bits in the process) so now the main issue is to clear away the detritus from the floor, and do something about the fluorescent strip-lighting. Not only is it fugly, but it's pretty poor from an RF point of view, so some tasteful halogen will hopefully not be too far away.

Oh, and I re-applied for uni, and was accepted. Yay! I initially enrolled for a 3-year degree in 2004, and have yet to finish it, the lure of paid work being too strong to resist. Actually the cartoon job was more than that - it was a fantastic chance to get a toehold into an industry that I love working in. Nevertheless, I don't want to throw away the study I've already done, and the powers that be are quite happy for me to continue with study part-time, so this year it's all on. Media Law is my unit of choice, so be prepared for some gratuitous legal proselytising over the next few months.

Musically, sadly, all this scholarly pursuit and domesticity has left scant room for much creativity. T3E is still on the top of my creative to-do list, but there simply hasn't been the time or circumstance to get it done. We're all getting together on Sunday afternoon to have a listen to some things that Knotty and Cornel have been up to, and have a general chat about things, which will be grand, as it's been a very long time. We sort of kind of got together when we moved in here, save Cornel who was otherwise indisposed. And even that was over a month ago now, so we're well overdue.

So yeah... I'll keep y'all posted :)

Four days later

Well, it was a big weekend for Clare and I.

Friday morning we woke up in the same rental place we've been living for 4-1/2 years. By Monday evening the settlement had gone through on our new place, we'd moved across pretty much everything we owned (thanks in no small part to a herculean effort by some friends and family), picked up two gorgeous cavoodle puppies from the airport, and were generally feeling much better about our living circumstances (although all those zeroes next to the minus sign on the bank statement will take some getting used to).

I'll post some more pics once we're online at home (still waiting for the DSL to transfer across) but I snapped this one of the pups in the car on the way home from the airport.

Three for Three

Ahh, Christmas over for another year. Not too bad a one overall, family time, some nice gifts on both the giving and the receiving side (at least I hope so on the latter). My lovely wife bought me various bits and pieces for the studio in the new place and I'm itching to get it set up. Speaking of which, there was a tiny bit of a scare with regard to the house arrangements, but that seems to be OK now. Hurrah for banks being open between Christmas and NYE, and sighs of relief all round :)

Frankly, the move can't come soon enough. The new neighbors moved into the house up the road recently. They're the third bunch in the place since we moved in, and also the third to have a dog who sits on the balcony and barks. Hey, that sounds strangely like the neighbors on a 90 degree angle as well. It seems obvious to me that if you place a territorial animal in a position where it can see lots of people moving around what it perceives as its territory, it might just have some words to say.

No incredibly bad visual joke picture up there today. I've spent the day buying tap fittings, packing boxes, and throwing things out, and I don't really have the energy :P