A proper start

More reading today (I suspect there’ll be a lot of this!) – finished Chapter 1 of the HTML 5 book and now powering through Chapter 2. Very interesting to read about the outline model – that’s going to have interesting implications in the future. Plus it appeals to my cataloguer’s heart

Also made a rough list of content I want to include in the site and started thinking about how to display it, esp on the homepage. Currently thinking along infographic lines. Possibly not hugely original, but I’ve got to start somewhere. Most of the designs I’ve made for this site in the past have never got past the scribble stage simply because I lack the illustration skills to make them work. At least flowcharts don’t require much in the way of drawing!

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Taking the plunge

Just because I don’t have enough to do, I’m taking on the Creative Pact challenge. Yup, that’s it. Not content with the 50 + tasks on my to-do list, I’m deciding to go forth and take up a new challenge. Except that actually it’s an old challenge combined with a new challenge. And it’s something that’s been on my to-do list for rather longer than it ought. 3 years at least, in fact. So I figure the time has come to do something about it.

So what is this thing, I hear you clamour? Well, you’ll be amazed to hear that it’s a website. Wow. That shook you, didn’t it? But not just any website. It’s bugged me for a while (see the thing about 3 years) that my minim-media.com site is such a mish-mash of stuff – music, publication, webstuff, writing, blog, photography – most of which don’t really belong on a business site, and mostly they just serve to take focus away from the music stuff, so I’m rethinking it all and want to build a site that’s music-focused (but not exclusively) and which will be a better forum for random me-stuff too: sort of a digital exploration of caitlin-the-composer covering all the various bits that actually go into my music. The new challenge is that I want to use this project to learn more about HTML5 and CSS3.

So my Creative Pact is that I’ll do a bit of work every day for the month of September (advance warning now that I’ll be in Paris for a week later in the month, so posting may not happen every day but I’ll try to at least do the work every day) with the goal of sending the site live on 30 September. That’s the plan.

Because work on this may cover a number of categories and overlap with some other stuff (design, art, music, etc.) I’ll tag each post on here that’s related to the pact with creativepact2010 so they can be easily perused as a group (because no doubt I’ll still be baking and walking and composing in between, so it could get muddled otherwise).

Tagged with: blogging, code, completion, experimenting, incentives, self-promotion, web | Add a comment

Played around with my new camera

Found an interesting-looking graffittied gate on Brick Lane on my way to the station and just had to pull out my new camera and have a play.

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Did some composing

Messed about with the Pianist app on the train – discovered you can record one line, then record another directly over the top, so you can do chords in 2 or 3 passes rather than trying to crush your fingers. Also had a look at ranges in the Whitman songs. If I move everything up or down a bit in every song, I can get them all to fit within my range at least, if that’s suitable (problem being a composer with a not-so-common voicetype – i’m a true contralto, bordering on female tenor) – but now they’ve all shifted away from the same basic related keys, it feels a bit haphazard and like it needs some glue to fill in the cracks *sigh* Might have to try another tactic.

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Bought some ink

I’ve been ‘drawing’ my own manuscript lines for little fragments of idea while working on the Whitman piece. I bought myself a manuscript nib a little while back and it works well – but I’m finding that drawing them in black ink means I have to make my noteheads fairly enormous if they’re to be seen easily – very unlike my usual anorexic noteheads, so I wove my way up to the Atlantis art shop which is just round the corner from my office and bought an assortment of coloured inks which I plan to experiment with: Burnt Orange in the Dr Ph. Martin’s Radiant Concentrated Water Colour (absolutely gorgeous – might have to get some more of these…), Red in the Dr Ph. Martin’s Bombay India Ink (a lovely rich red, feels very Erik Satie), and the Apple Green Winsor & Newton (a lovely colour, but felt a bit flat after the other two).

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Started reviving the Whitman songs

Following Twyla Tharp’s example, I made a folder for the Whitman songs, wrote out the texts I had chosen (that almost felt like setting them free from the notebook they were in!), read up a bit in Walt Whitman’s life and followed a random lead which had come to me while Reading the poems (Patricia Wrightson’s The Nargun and the Stars, a book I hated as a child, but on reading the section on Google books I found the descriptive writing at the start to be quite beautiful. Totally lost interest the moment she started in on the narrative though. Guess it’s still not for me). Then I downloaded Leaves of Grass, some Whitman essays, some essays by Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden onto my iPod for some related reading. I can feel ideas beginning to peep out already!

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Made a Greek mushroom pilaf

Experimenting with recipes from my new Greek cookbook and cooking kn the dark because the lights had blown. Felt adventurous and the results were tasty too.

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More knitting

but… ah ha! Not all the same knitting as before. I’m back to working on djeli’s scarf which is my first illusion knitting project and this evening I’ve finished the first pattern repeat. On the down side, it doesn’t look as effective as we’d hoped. On the plus side though, I managed to improve the less-than-clear chart so that it became much easier going. Djeli’s going to think about it overnight and see how he feels about the pattern so I guess tomorrow I’ll know if I’m continuing with this or starting from scratch.

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Tested out a new productivity technique

I’ve read a lot lately about a productivity technique called the pomodoro technique which I’ve been thinking could be useful as a way of organising myself into some more regular composition. So I gave it a go today while working from home and I have to say first impressions are quite positive. I’m definitely going to continue the experiment.

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Played around with GrooveMaker

On the iPod Touch. What a cool little programme – loads of fun. Would be even funner if one could load up one’s own loops, but maybe that will come in a later version. At any rate, it made the train trip home fly by.

Tagged with: composition, experimenting, music, play | Add a comment