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Archive for October, 2007

Swamped with Projects

Recently I've been drowning in projects. None are what I would regard as either very low or very high priority. They are all kinda medium priority.

God, blogs are boring. I am bored already. By the way, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3.1 today. No big whoop. No small whoop either. It was trivial, just like this blog.

Anyway, here are my current music projects:

  1. Trex – copy Kim's tapes to computer. I had sent 24 tapes to my cousin Kim back in 1988 and 1989. For almost all of the songs, she had the only copies. A couple years ago I asked her if I could copy them to my computer and then send them back to her. Finally, this month, at my sister's wedding, Kim handed me the box of tapes. Today I finished copying them to the computer. That's the easy part. The hard part is:
  2. Trex – create CDs from Kim's tapes. This involves editing and documenting each track on the Trex website. I'm having to spend a lot of time editing, since the original songs were so sloppy (I was in my early teens). The most time-consuming part is the documentation: writing down every word of the lyrics and chatter, adding descriptions, date information, etc. Very tedious. It's taken me 2 weeks to finish processing 6 of the tapes (resulting in 3 CDs). 18 tapes to go. Sigh.
  3. Trex – record new practices. These are mostly guitar. I have a rule that everyday I can record at most 2 new songs. This forces me to slow down. I was recording too much music, about a tape a week. It was crazy.
  4. Trex – copy practices to computer. I've finished copying everything through 2006, plus a couple tapes in 2007. There are about 20 tapes from 2007 that I still need to copy. 20 and counting (thanks to project #3).
  5. Trex – create CDs of practices. I'm caught up through 2006, but haven't finished any from 2007. This is on hold until I finish creating CDs of Kim's tapes.
  6. Tripecac – create new songs for Whatcom Home. This is my latest album. I'm hoping to finish it within the next couple days. As soon as I finish it, I will start the next album.
  7. Tripecac – add more sounds to my Triton. I need to figure out how to use my "E" bank, which is currently empty. I'd like to try out a bunch of acoustic sounds and then use them on my next album. However, I need to figure out 1) how to get sounds onto the Triton and 2) how to save/load sounds with each song, so that it doesn't matter if I overwrite the sounds later.

In addition to these music projects, I have a video editing project (for my sister's wedding), and my Travart project, which I discussed in a previous post. Video editing is awaiting raw video from my Dad. Travart is back-burnered once again.

These projects have been swarming through my head this month.

Today I decided to focus only on Tripecac. No Trex. And it was great! As soon as I was done with work, I hopped on my music computer, had 2 productive hours, managed to finish a song. Yay! It was a nice feeling.

However, tomorrow I will probably get back to processing Kim's tapes. 18 to go. The only way to get that number out of my head is to keep plunging my head into the vat of molten tedium.

Franklindrive.com – What now?

A few years ago, I setup tripalot.com and franklindrive.com. If you're reading this blog, then you've probably heard of the former. But the latter? Nope. I never mention franklindrive.com, because it isn't doing anything. I added this to its home page today:

My initial reason for creating this site was to get more online disk space. I had been filling up txe.swa.com with Tripecac mp3s, and wanted a separate server for storing mp3s, photos, and possibly videos. I also wanted a server for trying out some mysql/php projects.

In the past couple years, the need for franklindrive.com has disappeared. Tripalot.com now hosts my mp3s, flickr hosts my photos, and I still haven't digitized my videos. There's enough room on tripalot.com for videos when the time comes. As for playing around with php and mysql, well, tripalot.com lets me do that too. So, franklindrive.com continues to be unused. It just sits here collecting dust at a rate of over $100 per year.

So how am I gonna use franklindrive.com? Some possibilities:

  • host for content too "serious" to be associated with tripalot.com (e.g., my parents' sites)
  • mirror of tripalot.com (though there is little point, since both are hosted by the same company)
  • encrypted online backups (although I already have a million backup points)
  • ditch the account, redirect the domain name to tripalot.com (like I've done with my other sites)
  • defer any decisions for another year

Hmm…

Okay, see you next year!

After I typed that, I figured it was kinda "bloggy", so I copied it here. After that, I added the intro paragraph and then this closing paragraph. After that, I clicked "Publish". After that, I clapped my hands once, crackled a couple knuckles in my left hand, and then spat my green gum into the trash.