Odd creativity

I spent most of this morning manically studying for my Life in the UK test (Friday morning – it loometh!) which in itself is not in the least bit creative. Quite the opposite, in fact, as it’s all kind of rote-learning stuff. Except that I’m absolute rubbish at rote learning and always have been. I still don’t know my times tables – have to add up smaller multiples in my head. So instead I’ve been forced to be super creative in how I look at the tedious statistics and dates and come up with things like:

7 out of 10 people who say they have a religion are Christian (in the UK, obv): If I take 7 away from 10, I get 3, which is of course the Holy Trinity

646 constituencies: All politicians are liars. Lying is bad. 666 is the number of the beast but there have to be a couple of politicians who at least are trying, so I’ll take a couple off the middle of the pack.

Insane, eh? But somehow it seems to be working, to some extent at least. I think the process of inventing the mnemonic is making it stick as much as the mnemonic itself. Certainly in the case of the constituencies… I’d have been stuffed if I thought politicians actually had our best interests at heart!

So that saw me through most of the day, including all the way to Euston and back, seeing Djelibeybi off again – this time to Manchester. He’s home tomorrow, but it was nice to get out and see something of the world, even if it was just an assortment of grotty tube stations.

This evening has been a riot of learning. I started out doing some listening when I got in (Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa and Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica) because I suddenly realised that I’ve got another composition lesson in 2 days’ time and I haven’t done any work at all – got a bit too comfy with the whole 3-weeks-between-lessons schedule and now need to pull myself together. Tabula rasa provided some rather nice minor revelations, especially structurally – hoping to pick up the score for that before Composer Workshop tomorrow, but the RVW left me a little unsettled. I’ve always liked that piece, but I guess I never really listened closely to it before and structurally it leaves me feeling rather adrift. Possibly the recording I was listening to, possibly seeing the score might make some sense of it, but at any rate, stuff was learned, I think.

Then after that I had booked myself in to sit in on a couple of live sessions from the Authority Rules conference I’ve signed up for. Djeli and I have a bit project going with a friend of ours that is going to require some proper promotion in a few months’ time so this conference on content marketing turned up at pretty much just the right time. The first of today’s sessions was on online lead generation and it was pretty interesting – some stuff I already knew, but also some I needed to be reminded of, some new takes on old concepts and so on. It was a good session and well worthwhile. But it was totally blown out of the water by the second session, which was on Search Engine Optimisation. Now, I do know a bit about SEO – I kind of have to because of my dayjob. I know quite a bit about how Google assesses the content in a page to determine if it’s a good fit for a given search query and I try to apply what I know in my sites (not so much in this one – mostly because I’m lazy, but also because I have more important and generally useful sites, I think, to focus on). What I hadn’t really considered in much detail at all though was the idea of SEO strategy, of developing content and working various channels to get stuff out there and actually circulating, as a way of building audience. That’s a very simplistic way of putting it, but safe to say, it was a bit of a revelation to me, the detail it went into and I have come away with all sorts of ideas and plans from both sessions. And a very tired brain that felt like Swiss cheese.

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Daylight

Today was the first day in weeks and weeks that I haven’t felt like I’ve been stuck at the bottom of a dark, dank well. The sun came out, after an horrendous day with the back yesterday today revealed a marked improvement, and I just felt more alert and healthier than I have in ages. Not sure if that’s a factor of the improved back, the sunshine, the fact that yesterday I embarked upon a new plan to delete cow-products from my diet, or just that I slept better than I have in ages (which could have been some of these combined), but it felt like at last I could see a little bit of daylight. It didn’t last the whole day and I felt entirely unequal to doing anything useful at all, but it’s a start.

Had another osteopath appointment this afternoon. I’m taking it as a good sign that I left his office in more pain than I went in. And that after a relatively mild (but still agonising) session. I’m hopeful that next week’s might be the last. Not sure whether it’ll be soon enough though to give me the all-clear to travel to Australia for my mother’s eye operation on 31 May, but we’ll see.

Nothing musical at all happened today. But I am about to listen to some Satie to redress the balance. Otherwise, did some knitting, listened to a webcast recording on content marketing, read some of Unstuck which continues interesting, although this chapter (on finding guides) I’m finding not quite so interesting as the previous chapter on nutrition and intolerances. I also read a bit more of Made to Stick which is also excellent. I’ve slowed down with this one recently, but very much still enjoying it and feel (or at least hope!) that my writing may be the better for reading it. At any rate, it makes me more aware of what’s going on in other people’s writing which is very interesting indeed!

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Reconsidering

Well, this month really isn’t getting any better. And today definitely contributed to the downhill slide into dismal oblivion with the news that my very first composition teacher, Eric Gross, has died. Prof Gross was really a lovely man and a very fine composer, although I didn’t really get either of these things when I first started learning with him and for a long time I thought that he was just the wrong teacher for me.

But today I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that experience and I suspect that a large part of the blame lies with me. If I had been less timid and a bit more confident in my own abilities, if I had asked more questions in particular, what might that first year have been like? At the time I thought his music was terribly modern inaccessible. Now, after 20 years’ worth of listening and studying and writing and thinking, I find this is most definitely not the case and I wonder what I could have learned from him were he my teacher now instead of then.

So I’ve written a blog post about it which will go up on caitlinrowley.com tomorrow afternoon.

Rest in peace, Eric. I’m looking forward to exploring your music properly and learning as much as I can from it that I wasn’t ready to learn from you 20 years ago.

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Erratic

So I know I need to pull myself together, but somehow it’s not happening. And I suspect things will stay kind of erratic for the next few weeks still – back pain + intense dentistry does not for regular happy blogging make. But rest assured I’m still doing stuff. Just being kind to myself and taking a break. The past week’s activities have included a bunch of listening (including Bax’s Symphony No. 3 and the BBC’s Hear and Now broadcast of the Unsuk Chin Total Immersion concert), knitting and sewing (I’m making a case for the new iPad and then diverged and made a cowl out of the leftover yarn) and yesterday I went to the Trinity Laban Open Day to find out about Masters degrees, which was inspiring and frustrating probably in equal measure (as well as painful – I don’t recommend trekking across London with a messed-up lower back. And probably especially not if you’re still bruised from seeing the osteopath the night before).

Anyway, I’ll be back soon. And then the whole adventure will start all over again

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Catching up

Yes, I know things have been a bit quiet round here, but it’s not like it’s been uneventful. There’s been the back-pain drama, there’s been the dental drama (round 2 of drilling and filling today so back on the painkillers again), there was a birthday, which resulted in lovely presents from lovely people, including: 1 proper real-live microphone, Nigel Slater’s fruit cookbook, a book on libretto-writing, one on poetry-writing, 2 seasons of Chuck. Plus of course the presents I bought myself: the iPad (which you know about and seems to become more useful and awesome with every passing day) and Logic Studio, which arrived on the birthday day but took us a couple of days to install due to my having dropped my laptop several months back, meaning that DVDs go into it but can’t really be relied on to come out again… Still working on how to get the software instruments that come with Logic up and running…

So there’s been a lot of playing about with toys. Mostly the ones I bought myself though as I need to get a cable for the mic, I’m finishing up other books before I start the libretto ones and my back has hurt too much to do much cooking (barring a culinary experiment which resulted in an apple-enhanced caramel cake which went down quite well).

So I’ll just slide over the missed days and focus on today. Obviously, I went to the dentist. He says that this should be the last of the deep drilling (thank heavens). Been pretty uncomfy though, but yay for painkillers! And also yay for spectacularly beautiful summer’s day even though it’s only spring! It was so lovely, I decided to walk home instead of catching the bus (which was taking too long and I was also getting bored), so I walked back through the sunshine and the intermittent smell of jasmine, listening to the birds going twit in the hedges and chatting with a friend in Australia via IM. Rather lovely, actually.

Once home I actually didn’t immediately have a nap, as I’d expected. Instead I did some work on my new piece. It’s been a little stuck lately but I managed to prod it forward a little and flesh out some of the earlier parts too.

Then there was tinkering about with Logic Studio. I’m really enjoying using this. Fascinating to discover that the interface basically hasn’t changed since I was using microLogic at uni – 15 years ago! so it’s mostly familiar, and the bits that are less familiar – the audio-editing side of things, isn’t that dissimilar from Pro Tools, so I seem to be picking things up pretty quickly. And I can’t begin to express how much easier and more comfortable it is to work in it, not needing to be tethered to a hardware box at all times. I don’t have to think twice about opening it up for a small sound-file-trimming job. And I’ve discovered some cool stuff – beat mapping to make a MIDI file sound more like it was played by a human than a robot to start with! I borrowed a book from the TVU library yesterday and started working my way through it this afternoon. Finding out some interesting snippets, but I’m hoping I can get away with just borrowing the book and not having to buy it. Would rather spend my birthday Amazon voucher on the Advanced volume

And then when the sun was setting, I got all inspired to grab the iPad and try a little bit of drawing. It’s not great, but it was fun to do and an interesting exercise, messing round with silhouettes and trying to get the sunset colours to blend a bit

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Second attempt

Well, not seriously. I didn’t really expect to just be able to walk in to the Apple Store at Shepherd’s Bush and walk out with an iPad 2. And look! I was right! But I did achieve my officially-stated goal of inspecting the covers. They’re very cute. Such a shame they didn’t make one that covers the back too. I mean, it’d be less sleek, but a whole lot more effective if you drop the thing. And of course there are no third-party covers out pretty much at all at the moment that one can inspect for feel, style and weight, so I guess I’ll have to go with an Apple cover, even if only for the interim. I was going to get an orange one but in RL the orange is a little yellowy and not really that grand. The red leather is gorgeous but way too expensive. The green is practically fluoro. So I’m thinking I might go for the low-key pale grey. Keep it nice and neutral. And maybe get a nice bright neoprene pouch for it to travel in. Summat like that. But of course first I have to get my paws on an actual iPad all of my own. Apple’s now opened up instore reservations from the website for next-day pickup, which I made an attempt with, but the wretched system let me get all the way through before telling me there weren’t any slots! VERY annoying.

I shall cease to talk about that experience any more. It was very frustrating. I shall probably be similarly frustrated every evening for several weeks to come.

Apart from that, not too much to report. I watched the last bit of the summary videos for the end of the first week of my JavaScript refresher course. So far I seem to understand everything. There’s been one or two newish concepts (or rather, concepts that I knew existed but didn’t know quite how they fitted in) but mostly – understandably – the first week’s been mostly about basic principles. I’m pleased to say that I got through the week’s coding challenge first time, and worked it out in just a few minutes. Huzzah! Not as dim as I felt I was!

I also finally sat down and went through the new orchestral song thingy trying to pick out themes. There really aren’t that many to speak of, which is a little disturbing. The piece itself seems to have stalled somewhat following its superhero start, which is disappointing. I should push myself more with it. The plan is to send it off to my tutor on Wednesday so he can see what I’ve been up to and prepare stuff accordingly if need be. Um.

And had a bit of a panicky doubting think about jobs and what I should be doing about them. Conclusion: I have no idea. I’m a total mess and don’t know what I should be doing. I’m enjoying the composition teaching, but that’s not really a money-making option (not enough private students and academia is out because a. I don’t have any contacts and b. I don’t have even a Masters degree). I like building websites but I don’t really like dealing with clients. Or people in general. I like publishing and so on but ditto. Which kind of seems to wipe out the work-for-myself option because there’s no getting away from clients when you’re freelance. I’m beginning to think that, in spite of all the conceptual journey I’ve been on over the past couple of months, I’m kind of back where I started: short term web contracts, while trying to bring in a little money from this and that on the side. Which is a little depressing. But I think it’s more practical. I got so caught up in the sideline stuff of getting my own business running that the music kind of got shunted to one side. And when I de-shunted it because it became clear that I might need to have to find a job sooner than expected and I didn’t want to waste composition time, then the business stuff ended up shunted. Maybe I can’t actually do both. How depressing. I want to be superwoman! (I’d prefer Batgirl because the outfit’s cuter, but still…) Anyway, thoughts still bubbling away, ideas about priorities and how do I deal with them. Still no solution on the if-I-get-a-real-job-how-do-I-keep-the-music-going-while-not-letting-down-either-my-employer-or-myself issue. Perhaps there never will be. If you have any suggestions, please comment away!

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Singing and cursing

Not in that order! I finally pulled out my convoluted setup for recording stuff into Pro Tools this afternoon. Because I don’t have a proper microphone, this entails plugging my mini mic into the MiniDisc player, finding an expendable MD disc to put in the player, hitting pause & record, plugging the MD player into the Mbox, then the Mbox into the computer, then starting up Pro Tools and hoping everything finds where it should be without any trouble. Which it didn’t. Of course. And it took much grumbling and muttering and rude things said before I worked out that I had the wrong cable, then waited for Djelibeybi to get home from the gym to pull down his Big Bag of Cables and fish out the right one. But I got there in the end! YAY! And I even worked out comping to do multiple takes, one after the other which can then be patched together, which actually made a big difference. Not so much with the patching as with just being able to keep on singing and so generally improve my confidence and let my voice warm up over three or four takes. Very handy.

The result of which is that I have a rough but usable recording of my Three Whitman Songs very nearly ready to go. And just as well – the opera workshop thingy I need it to apply for is due on Monday, which means I need to get the whole thing in the post tomorrow, or first thing Thursday at the very latest, given Thursday’s root canal extravaganza.

I also did Day 3 of my JavaScript course, which was pretty good. Looking forward to really playing round with some proper code tomorrow.

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Hibernation

Feeling – if possible – even worse today than yesterday, so I’ve spent a lot of time in snooze-mode, which seems to be helping. Glad I started the antibiotics now. Not helped though by intense lower-back pain which I think has been caused by the landlord’s crapulous couch. Ow.

Day 2 of the JavaScript course today. Lots of reading. LOTS of reading. But it was really quite well done – digestible chunks. And I think I’m finally starting to see where Objects fit in. I understand why they’re a good thing, but I’ve never really got how they connect with other elements of the language and I think that’s starting to become clearer. Anyway, I guess I’ll find out when I start using them.

Amazon delivery arrived today: The ABRSM Grade 5 theory books, which I need for my teaching. Plus a book called Made to Stick, which sounds like it might be good for the eBook writing that I’ll get around to sometime.. very… soon.

Ploughing through my to-do list now, in spite of fuzzy, limited-capability brain. The new GTD system I’ve implemented seems to be working well. YAY. Next I have to find some time to revamp my paper files and do a TON of scanning. That will be less fun. Maybe in front of the TV sometime.

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Refreshing

Crappy-feeling day today which culminated in me deciding to finally take the antibiotics the dentist prescribed for me, just in case. And then realising just afterwards that the timing means that I’ll still be on them when I go to the dentist. Hoping they won’t interfere with the anaesthetic. I can’t imagine they would, but that would just suck.

Yesterday’s browser conference really made me feel how old-fashioned my skills are. Oh I’m grand at the HTML and CSS, but over the course of my last contract I was beginning to feel increasingly like a bit of a dinosaur because my JavaScript skills are such a mess. Basically, I learnt JS way back in 2000, but it’s a completely different beastie and with DOM scripting cobbled on top of my stone-age knowledge, and trying to mash in the whole object-oriented concept, it just hasn’t been working. Couple in the fact that I’ve not had much chance to use my JS in a considerable period of time and what you get is a horrible monster that looks nothing much like JavaScript at all. And there’s soooo much cool stuff you can do with it now! Especially in the realm of mobile apps and creating extensions for browsers and it’s starting to feel like if I don’t do something soon, I’ll be totally left behind and semi-unemployable. I’ll never be a JS ninja, I’m sure, but I can at least take a stab at getting my skills to a level where I can write stuff that ninjas can then optimise without sniggering.

Fortuitously, SitePoint is having a sale. So I’ve signed up for their offer, which is a 3-week online JavaScript course, plus a 3-week online course in PHP/SQL plus 3 books on website hosting in the cloud, PHP/MySQL and SQL, which can’t go astray. And considering the cost of the whole bundle is less than just getting the two courses, I’m pretty happy with that.

So I did lesson one of the JavaScript course today (leaving the PHP for a little – I’ll either do it when I’ve finished the JS, or at least when I’m a little further along so I’m not doing two rounds of beginner stuff at once, even though I’m not an absolute beginner in either) and it’s looking pretty good: HTML5 for the HTML parts and in the course of creating a simple “Hello World!” alert, the tutor managed to slide in a nice point about the difference it can make between putting your script in the head of the document and at the bottom of the body. Smooth

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Web nerd for a day

Today was the State of the Browser one-day conference organised by London Web Standards. Which meant I had to wake up at stupid o’clock in order to be in North Greenwich somewhere in the vicinity of 9am, which was painful, but it was a good day – some interesting stuff out there, but unfortunately the chap who was going to talk on IE9 couldn’t come as his wife had been in a car crash the day before. Which was, of course, entirely understandable (I believe she’s fine though, if you were concerned) but I was a little astounded that Microsoft couldn’t manage to provide anybody else at all to talk about their latest and much-hyped browser to the people who have to develop for it. Who knows why? But bizarre. Apparently the guy who was supposed to speak is going to record the speech once everything settles down and it’ll be distributed to the attendees online, which is cool.

Anyway, the summary basically is: all browser manufacturers are doing cool stuff with HTML 5. They are not all doing the same cool stuff. Which was all kind of a given, but it was still quite nice to see the sort of cool stuff that’s being played with.

The breakout sessions were good – I went along to one on Jetpack, a new streamlined way of creating Add-Ons for Firefox 4 using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript, then one on “Performance Optimisation for HTML 5 apps” which wasn’t actually about HTML 5, it was about JavaScript. Still interesting and useful, though I was a little out of my depth in places.

There was a lot of JS being bandied about and I think the time has come to do a bit of refresher work on mine – I first learnt JavaScript from tutorials on the net way back in 2000, when it was an entirely different beast. Gluing on DOM manipulation and vague half-understood concepts of Object-Oriented Programming has not helped my confidence in my JS skills. I can write JavaScript, I’m just not really writing MODERN JavaScript.

I can read (eventually) what’s going on in a script, but I lack the skills to mostly be able to say “Oh, this and then that and … ah. This” – it’s more “um… I think this… then that? Maybe… ooh – what’s that???”. I can get there in the end, but it requires so much looking up and testing and re-testing to do the simplest thing that it’s just not the best use of my time for the client.

So I think some sort of brief refresher might be a good place to start. SitePoint is doing online training courses now and have a special deal for a 3-week JS course + a 3-week PHP course (which would also be very useful and hopefully consolidate the bits and pieces I’ve kind of picked up by poking at it in the past) plus 3 e-books on PHP/SQL sites and cloud hosting, all for less than the two courses would cost on their own.

Special’s only for a couple of days, so I’ll sleep on it and see how I feel about it in the morning. Feels like a lot to take on, when I’ve got so much to do anyway, but I’m beginning to feel like I need to do something just so I don’t flounder so much. Feel so old! And that wasn’t helped by the leader of the 2nd breakout session saying “Who remembers Netscape 4?” and me being the only person to raise a hand, while thinking to myself “I remember Netscape 3. And IE 2. Good grief. How did I ever get so old??” Things like this shouldn’t happen shortly before birthdays.

Had a great conversation over lunch too with Jamie Knight (and Lion) – really lovely to just be able to chat so freely with someone. Normally I find talking to strangers quite hard work – either it’s hard to find common ground, or I can’t think of anything to say or I end up feeling deeply inadequate, especially if the conversation takes a turn into unfamiliar waters. Of course, it can be rewarding too, but it’s just wonderful when the chat just flows along. Kinda made my day

Anyway, I ended up not staying till the end. By the early end of the second breakout session my brain felt extremely full, so I figured I wouldn’t hang around for the 45-odd minutes till the Q&A session started, but head home to a quiet cup on tea and a contemplate while my brain was still capable. Mmmm tea.

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