Life
Life is, currently, not too bad.
I'm up in Dundee for the summer, ostensibly working on my project for work. In reality, I'm getting increasingly depressed over the bugginess of mobile Java implementations and emulators - it's incredibly frustrating when you realise that the emulator is behaving in an entirely different way to the phone, especially when it causes a whole day's work to be wasted. As a result, I'm slacking.
Most of this slack time is being sucked up by that vortex of time and energy known as 'World of Warcraft'. At the start of summer, I finished Tales of Symphonia, having picked it up just before exam time - which would have been a much worse idea if it hadn't been for the console I was using being in Dundee. Nate had been playing WoW on Mishi's account while I completed Symphonia, and he convinced me to play for a bit. I wasn't all that impressed after a few minutes, and deleted my character.
A week or so after that, I was bored and created a new character. After several hours, I emerged blinking into the light, bearing the mark of the addict. One visit to play.com (plus several days of will-it-come-today), and I had my own copy. I'm playing a dwarven hunter on Eonar, named Khyrana. I am far too easily sucked into these things.
I took enough time out from the deadly time-sink to start and subsequently finish Iain M. Banks' latest, The Algebraist. Embarrasingly, although I bought the book myself, Nate managed to read it in its entirety well before I finally got around to picking it up. Enjoyably bizarre as always, and well worth reading.
Dundee's been fairly quiet over the summer. Most of the time it's just Nate and I in the flat, with Mishi only appearing for a few hours between arriving home from work and going to bed, and Baka occasionally popping in on her way elsewhere. On the weekends, we're joined by Sharp and Mike (who are both staying in Sharp's aunt's flat, on the other side of town). We've set up 'DIRGe' - the Dundee Incredible Roleplaying Gamers etc, or thereabouts - to make up for the lack of SURGe, so we're now running an Exalted romp most weekends with myself at the head. It's proved to be somewhat fun, if chaotic. Apart from that, we've had a couple of expeditions - to the cinema, to see Pirates of the Caribbean II; and to the Dundee Botanic Gardens - but nothing particularly major.
Nate and I have designated this a summer of learning new things. As a result, we've been indulging in culinary experiments - so far, we've discovered many things you can do with chicken (one raw whole chicken has been discovered to stretch to up to seven meals, whereas a couple of chicken breasts are the same price and only do one), made Chinese steamed dumplings, discovered that Tesco often have mangos on discount (yum!), prepared some deliciously messy fajitas, bought German garlic salami with extra garlic and attempted to use it (it made excellent pizza, somewhat less excellent cabbage/sausage/paprika soup and some rather un-excellent carbonara), made raspberry icecream smoothies, cooked Nate's Mum's famous bolognese sauce, and prepared many other delectable dishes from various sources (including recipes from various parents.) Nate's also trying to teach me how to make proper cheese sauce.
As well as all of the above yumminess, we've been treated to Mishi's dad's curry (via Mishi) after several years of being told how much ass it kicks, and to Mike's baking (mmm, apple pie). My phone's photo memory is being used as a sort of impromptu food photo-diary - at some point, I'll upload them and link. I've been sending some of the photos home to my mum to prove that yes, we are in fact eating proper food and not just junk all the time. I'm not telling her how much junk we do eat, of course, save to say that we're certainly not underfed and fading away to nothingness...
Also, in the spirit of novelty, I have discovered that due to several months of putting off getting it cut, my hair is the longest it's ever been - long enough to be put into a very small ponytail. I fully intend to see how long I can grow it before one of two things happens - either I'll get annoyed with it eventually, or I'll return home and my Mum will have a heart attack and frog-march me to the barbers' to get it cut.
Nate's decided to learn to play the guitar, which makes me happy - I brought my electric guitar up to Dundee, but I've been sadly neglecting the thing over the last few years. So far he's learned the riff for Smoke on the Water, plus a few chords (the former taught by me, since it was the first thing I learned to play; the latter looked up on a website). I have, however, not managed to coax him into learning a programming language (probably Python), which was one of my aims for the summer. It didn't help that I left my Python book in Glasgow.
As well as the guitar, I actually lugged most of my music kit up with me thanks to a muchly appreciated lift up to Dundee from my Mum, so I've got a nifty little micro-studio set up in the bedroom.
I finally figured out why my Ozone (combination MIDI keyboard and low-latency pro soundcard) wasn't working. I bought it well over a year ago, and never got a power supply with it, but it was a standard 9V DC barrel plug, so I'd used my guitar power supply at first. The keyboard's LEDs lit up, but Windows wouldn't recognise it. A few months later I tried using a different PSU - a cheap-ass unregulated multi-adaptor - which worked, sorta: the keyboard was recognised fine, and the MIDI section worked, but the analogue audio parts didn't. Finally I got round to emailing tech support (rather than just believing that I'd been sold a lemon by my eBay seller) and was cheerfully told that it was a 9V AC supply rather than DC. I hadn't even realised those existed, but I found one in Maplin for a tenner, plugged it in and the keyboard worked perfectly. I think I actually bounced about in happiness - it's a rather nice feeling when a £150 piece of gear turns out to be working after all. I have a hunch that the reason the keyboard sorta worked with the cheap PSU but not with the guitar pedal one was that the cheap PSU's power was sufficiently dirty and unsmoothed to allow the internal transformer to work, albeit not providing enough power for the analogue circuitry, whereas the regulated guitar PSU's power was just too clean...
Anyway, power geekiness aside, I now have a working USB keyboard and sound card, a USB MIDI input for the DrumKAT, and a large portable hard drive, all of which dock to my laptop to create some sort of uber-system. Even with all the peripherals around, it's still a much smaller, quieter and more portable studio system than my PC at home. The entire thing (DrumKAT and drum hardware included) fits into a single holdall (albeit one which weighs a significant fraction of my body weight and which nearly crippled me hauling it up six flights of stairs.)
Unfortunately, having a nice setup does not necessarily beget creativity. I've been drumming fairly regularly, but I haven't laid down any new tracks for a long time - at least, none that I feel have enough spark to become a proper release. Perhaps I really have just lost my touch altogether. It's a sad thought - I love making music, but none of my ideas seem to lead to much nowadays. On the bright side, I'm learning to draw a little better, thanks to Nate's tuition - I sent my dad and sister drawings for Fathers' Day and birthday respectively, both of which were great fun to draw.
Finally, after several weeks of dithering, ordering, waiting, collecting, finding they didn't fit, re-ordering, waiting, missing phone calls, waiting some more, and finally re-collecting, we now have matching engagement rings. This makes me very happy (but also very scared - this all feels too grown-up...)
PS: sitting wrapping someone's head in duct tape is a rather surreal experience.
I'm up in Dundee for the summer, ostensibly working on my project for work. In reality, I'm getting increasingly depressed over the bugginess of mobile Java implementations and emulators - it's incredibly frustrating when you realise that the emulator is behaving in an entirely different way to the phone, especially when it causes a whole day's work to be wasted. As a result, I'm slacking.
Most of this slack time is being sucked up by that vortex of time and energy known as 'World of Warcraft'. At the start of summer, I finished Tales of Symphonia, having picked it up just before exam time - which would have been a much worse idea if it hadn't been for the console I was using being in Dundee. Nate had been playing WoW on Mishi's account while I completed Symphonia, and he convinced me to play for a bit. I wasn't all that impressed after a few minutes, and deleted my character.
A week or so after that, I was bored and created a new character. After several hours, I emerged blinking into the light, bearing the mark of the addict. One visit to play.com (plus several days of will-it-come-today), and I had my own copy. I'm playing a dwarven hunter on Eonar, named Khyrana. I am far too easily sucked into these things.
I took enough time out from the deadly time-sink to start and subsequently finish Iain M. Banks' latest, The Algebraist. Embarrasingly, although I bought the book myself, Nate managed to read it in its entirety well before I finally got around to picking it up. Enjoyably bizarre as always, and well worth reading.
Dundee's been fairly quiet over the summer. Most of the time it's just Nate and I in the flat, with Mishi only appearing for a few hours between arriving home from work and going to bed, and Baka occasionally popping in on her way elsewhere. On the weekends, we're joined by Sharp and Mike (who are both staying in Sharp's aunt's flat, on the other side of town). We've set up 'DIRGe' - the Dundee Incredible Roleplaying Gamers etc, or thereabouts - to make up for the lack of SURGe, so we're now running an Exalted romp most weekends with myself at the head. It's proved to be somewhat fun, if chaotic. Apart from that, we've had a couple of expeditions - to the cinema, to see Pirates of the Caribbean II; and to the Dundee Botanic Gardens - but nothing particularly major.
Nate and I have designated this a summer of learning new things. As a result, we've been indulging in culinary experiments - so far, we've discovered many things you can do with chicken (one raw whole chicken has been discovered to stretch to up to seven meals, whereas a couple of chicken breasts are the same price and only do one), made Chinese steamed dumplings, discovered that Tesco often have mangos on discount (yum!), prepared some deliciously messy fajitas, bought German garlic salami with extra garlic and attempted to use it (it made excellent pizza, somewhat less excellent cabbage/sausage/paprika soup and some rather un-excellent carbonara), made raspberry icecream smoothies, cooked Nate's Mum's famous bolognese sauce, and prepared many other delectable dishes from various sources (including recipes from various parents.) Nate's also trying to teach me how to make proper cheese sauce.
As well as all of the above yumminess, we've been treated to Mishi's dad's curry (via Mishi) after several years of being told how much ass it kicks, and to Mike's baking (mmm, apple pie). My phone's photo memory is being used as a sort of impromptu food photo-diary - at some point, I'll upload them and link. I've been sending some of the photos home to my mum to prove that yes, we are in fact eating proper food and not just junk all the time. I'm not telling her how much junk we do eat, of course, save to say that we're certainly not underfed and fading away to nothingness...
Also, in the spirit of novelty, I have discovered that due to several months of putting off getting it cut, my hair is the longest it's ever been - long enough to be put into a very small ponytail. I fully intend to see how long I can grow it before one of two things happens - either I'll get annoyed with it eventually, or I'll return home and my Mum will have a heart attack and frog-march me to the barbers' to get it cut.
Nate's decided to learn to play the guitar, which makes me happy - I brought my electric guitar up to Dundee, but I've been sadly neglecting the thing over the last few years. So far he's learned the riff for Smoke on the Water, plus a few chords (the former taught by me, since it was the first thing I learned to play; the latter looked up on a website). I have, however, not managed to coax him into learning a programming language (probably Python), which was one of my aims for the summer. It didn't help that I left my Python book in Glasgow.
As well as the guitar, I actually lugged most of my music kit up with me thanks to a muchly appreciated lift up to Dundee from my Mum, so I've got a nifty little micro-studio set up in the bedroom.
I finally figured out why my Ozone (combination MIDI keyboard and low-latency pro soundcard) wasn't working. I bought it well over a year ago, and never got a power supply with it, but it was a standard 9V DC barrel plug, so I'd used my guitar power supply at first. The keyboard's LEDs lit up, but Windows wouldn't recognise it. A few months later I tried using a different PSU - a cheap-ass unregulated multi-adaptor - which worked, sorta: the keyboard was recognised fine, and the MIDI section worked, but the analogue audio parts didn't. Finally I got round to emailing tech support (rather than just believing that I'd been sold a lemon by my eBay seller) and was cheerfully told that it was a 9V AC supply rather than DC. I hadn't even realised those existed, but I found one in Maplin for a tenner, plugged it in and the keyboard worked perfectly. I think I actually bounced about in happiness - it's a rather nice feeling when a £150 piece of gear turns out to be working after all. I have a hunch that the reason the keyboard sorta worked with the cheap PSU but not with the guitar pedal one was that the cheap PSU's power was sufficiently dirty and unsmoothed to allow the internal transformer to work, albeit not providing enough power for the analogue circuitry, whereas the regulated guitar PSU's power was just too clean...
Anyway, power geekiness aside, I now have a working USB keyboard and sound card, a USB MIDI input for the DrumKAT, and a large portable hard drive, all of which dock to my laptop to create some sort of uber-system. Even with all the peripherals around, it's still a much smaller, quieter and more portable studio system than my PC at home. The entire thing (DrumKAT and drum hardware included) fits into a single holdall (albeit one which weighs a significant fraction of my body weight and which nearly crippled me hauling it up six flights of stairs.)
Unfortunately, having a nice setup does not necessarily beget creativity. I've been drumming fairly regularly, but I haven't laid down any new tracks for a long time - at least, none that I feel have enough spark to become a proper release. Perhaps I really have just lost my touch altogether. It's a sad thought - I love making music, but none of my ideas seem to lead to much nowadays. On the bright side, I'm learning to draw a little better, thanks to Nate's tuition - I sent my dad and sister drawings for Fathers' Day and birthday respectively, both of which were great fun to draw.
Finally, after several weeks of dithering, ordering, waiting, collecting, finding they didn't fit, re-ordering, waiting, missing phone calls, waiting some more, and finally re-collecting, we now have matching engagement rings. This makes me very happy (but also very scared - this all feels too grown-up...)
PS: sitting wrapping someone's head in duct tape is a rather surreal experience.