Blog

Heading out in the morning for the big east coast trip. Three/Four cities in one week (Boston, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia). It is the first vacation we’ve been able to take in nearly three years, so I’m pretty excited. It’ll be nice to be able to visit with friends as well. The worse thing about AM flights is that I can never sleep well. I’ll probably end up waking up 5-6 times and being unable to sleep on the flight. The iphone is loaded with enough music, tv shows, and Ted presentations to keep me occupied, along with a 600 page Hunter S. Thompson book (‘72 Campaign, to keep in the spirit of visiting DC).

Simultaneously inspiring and ego damaging to read about someone (Cameron Sinclair) my own age doing such amazing work. His Ted video is well worth watching. People like him really make me ask why I am wasting my life and how can I move forward. As much as the Ted stuff can be accused of being elitist, there is some goddamned inspiring work.

Thinking of how to keep my life in sync b/w work and home. Normally everything lives in a DevonThink database so all of my research is with me all the time. I’ve been trying to put more of my day-to-day notes and calendar stuff into .txt files and run the risk of forgetting to copy things back and forth to my USB key. What I really want is for my /home to live on my iPod, so I can plug in and work, but that hasn’t happened yet. ...

Been listening to a lot of funk and soul music. I like digging up artists from obscure areas of the US where I never imagined funk to emerge. Listening to ‘The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend ’ right now. Nice touch, James “Baby Huey” Rame was born in Richmond, IN (which if I remember correctly became the home for one of the Graham Brothers) and moved to Chicago at nineteen. ...

Tonight I’ve been flipping between the NCAA basketball playoffs and the NCAA wrestling championship. College wrestling gets little television time, but I’ve never seen any other athletes work as hard as wrestlers. I just saw a wrestler named Mark Perry from the University of Iowa (which has a tremendous history of success at the college level, including 21 national championships since 1975) wresting at 165 lbs. Five weeks out of surgery which involved his meniscus being stapled to his bone, Perry had his knee severely hyper-extended half-way through the second period of his match. He was in enough pain to cause him to crawl off the mat. With his leg failing beneath his own body weight, he held out to win the match. ...

Had a fantastic evening yesterday. Got out of work and picked up a quick meal before heading out to the library. It was great to have a couple of hours to simply think and knock out some work. I finished a paper for school and had some time to think and decompress. Counting down the weeks of class (T-13) and can’t wait to be done. It certainly wasn’t what I hoped it would be, but it was a gamble like anything else, we’ll see how it pays off. ...

Finished ‘Bridge of Sighs’ last night when I should have been working on homework. For the second Russo novel in a row, I wish I stopped reading before the last 50 pages. As in ‘Empire Falls’ the cliches stand out to the point of distraction. When the Magical Negro appears I wanted to throw the book away. In ‘Empire Falls’, the school shooting made me mad enough to mark the page to know when to stop when I get the time to re-read it. Two great books that made me want to rip out 50 pages of them and put them back on the shelf. ‘Bridge’ was absolutely fantastic up to the appearance of ‘Miss Cleo’ and I’m frustrated that I allow that small part to soil the rest of the book.

Every once in awhile I get the urge to dive back into music, to load up the laptop with music software and start being creative again. I blame it on two things; feeling like what I do now is not creative, and my brain trying to keep me from doing what I should be doing (in this case, homework). Since school has turned into a somewhat useless exercise in going through the motions, my brain is trying to save itself from boredom. Calculating the traffic intensity of base stations is not all that thrilling. The pathetic part is that the music I used to create doesn’t even interest me anymore. Knowing how simple it is to create most music has taking away alot of the excitement I used to have. What used to really interest me was the development of new sounds and experimenting with audio synthesis. There’s been hardly anything new in that area for at least 10 years, and the same sounds and processes are pretty deadening. I suppose most of the work has moved onto subtle improvements rather than ground-breaking experiments.

I’ve been trying to spend my lunch hours at work reading. It’s a nice break from IT and gives me time to use the part of my brain that isn’t swearing at servers. My brother passed along a section of Richard Russo’s newest book a few weeks ago, and I just ran across it today. Pages 123-125 captures the most accurate telling of adolescence that I’ve ever read. I couldn’t get that section out of my head and went back to re-read it at least three times. ...

Terence Blanchard’s ‘A Tale of God’s Will’ is my favorite jazz recording of last year, and probably in my top five music purchases as well. It reminds me of Pat Metheny’s ‘Secret Story’ in it’s scope and ambition. Its difficult to marry the jazz ethos alongside a symphonic score, but Blanchard does an amazing job, without becoming sappy or overdone.