So I got myself a copy of Ableton Live recently, and I’ve been playing around with it, trying to get a handle on interface and workflow of the program. So far, I absolutely love it! Here’s the result of messing around in Live for a little bit (I mixed it on iPod earbuds, so it might sound god-awful on your speakers, or it might sound okay.)

It’s Not Much, but I’m Learning!

…

What do you know, I couldn’t get enough. Recorded a slightly different version when I got home today. I like it better.

StillLearning.mp3 

… One more before bed… firsteight.mp3

I’ve been thinking a lot about fruit lately. Have you ever thought about fruit? It’s amazing! What a great bit of symbiosis. An apple tree gets its seeds spread around a bunch from animals eating its fruit, and I, as one of those animals, get a friggin’ delicious apple! Granted, I’m not likely to drop the seeds in a field any time soon, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s no WONDER fruit is so delicious; it’s evolved to be that way for ages! Interestingly, this realization comes at a time when I’m starting to like meat less and less. I guess that’s fitting, because there’s no evolutionary imperative for beef to be delicious. I guess really what I’m saying is that we could all use more fruit in our lives.

I asked a friend how he was doing the other day. This was his reply:

Most of my problems have a humorous side, and that’s all I really ask for.

Words to live by.

I’m on a bus right now. How wild is that?!

Today is the first real snowfall of the winter, I think. There’s a light dusting of winter’s essence coating the whole city. I kind of like the mood that winter creates; there’s a certain magic to it. I’m sure I won’t miss it when I’m laying on the beach in Australia next month.

I originally set up this blog as a place to document the progress of my personal projects, but as invariably happens, I was pinned to the ground by a heavy school workload. I was thinking today about Google’s famous 20% policy, wherein every employee is encouraged–nay, implored–to spend 20% of their time working on personal projects on the company’s dime. Some of Google’s most successful products have been the fruits of this policy, so I thought “why not apply the same principle to my life?” So I am. One day a week, I’ll give homework a pass and work on something I’m interested in instead.

A few weeks ago, I started listening to the album “Out There” by The Heliocentrics, and I found myself struggling to decide what I thought Laurence would think of it. This got me thinking that it might be fun to start a CD club of sorts. Similar to a book club, we would all agree on some album to listen to ahead of time, then get together and discuss our thoughts about it. Reminiscing about my days running RL Radio all those years ago, I started thinking that the conversations resulting from such a club might make for quite an interesting podcast. I started thinking about the stages involved in creating such a podcast, and arranged for Steve, Laurence, and Alecia to get copies of the album and give them a listen. We convened on Saturday, but Alecia couldn’t make it and was stood in for by Dain, who had given the album a listen by chance. After shooting the breeze for a little bit about who was listening to what bands, we put on the album and got started. There were only a few minutes of dead air over the entire seventy minute album; everyone had an opinion. We got all the way through, made some concluding remarks, and cut the tape. I have only given it a brief listen since then, but what I’ve heard sounds promising. I’m playing around with some ideas for format for the show, and it still needs a name as well, but I’m pretty excited about the potential that this project has.

I don’t get sick very often, but who I do, it always seems to be at the most inconvenient of times. Today, I’m in the midst of a very busy reading week, and feel like absolute crap. I’m sitting at the bus stop, waiting for a bus to the university so I can go work on one of the fifty projects and assignments that I have. Boo.

On the plus side, it looks like I might be able to catch a couple sweet concerts in Australia on my arrival; Justice and The Whitest Boy Alive are both touring Aus starting in January. Gotta figure out which place I’ll see which band in!

It seems to me that if one is to blog successfully, one should be able to do it whenever inspiration strikes. Lucky for me, there’s this pretty great WordPress app for iPad! Looks like it’ll be pretty easy to manage posts from this app exclusively, and I think the reduced friction to create an entry will lead to me writing more!

That’s all for now, I really just wanted to try out the app.

A while back, I had this notion of logging my projects here, but then I got so busy with school that no projects took place to be logged. I’m sure the same thing will happen again, but it can’t hurt to try!