Preview day!

Today I have sent the site preview to my client, negotiated a little, created my first 2 training videos and posted them to YouTube (think I’ll probably have to remake them due to screen furriness and general burbling – this video-making thing is hard! – it’s a usable start for this client at any rate, who doesn’t have time for me to train her one-to-one), did some fluting for only the second time since the root canal and took delivery of my very own copy of Structural Functions in Music (very excited about this). I am now repairing my disk permissions and – after a restart because Finale is choking on the sheer number of instruments in Carrion Comfort – am about to do some composition work for my lesson tomorrow.

Achievements? Tick

And just because it totally made my day, here’s my friend Omar from the Durham Midwinter Composers Masterclass proposing to his girl.

Tagged with: completion, composition, dayjob, gtd, learning, music, programming, recording, teaching, tools, video, web | Add a comment

A busy day!

Super-productive today. As with a lot of my days recently, I’ve been largely focused on self-promotion stuff rather than strict creativity per se, but it does exercise my creative brain in that I have to think up new ways to do things.

The last few days I’ve been working on getting a proper mailing list established for caitlinrowley.com using MailChimp. I have to say, that I am absolutely delighted with MailChimp. Great-looking product, easy to use, very generous with their free account (2000 subscribers! 12,000 emails a month!) and the whole thing seems to be completely customisable, assuming you’re willing to put in a bit of coding work. I had some difficulties and emailed their tech support without much hope of anything coming of it (because tech supports in general are pretty useless for anything other than pre-scripted issues) and WOW WOW WOW! Not only did I get a reply within 2 hours, but the guy had actually read my email (SO rare) and had multiple solutions for me, even though it’s not an off-the-shelf problem. SO impressed. And when you set up a campaign they give you a PDF download to make your own papercraft chimp. Now that’s got to be a winner.

Anyway, so the list is set up now. Today I also posted a new blog post and have linked via the signup form to the score of the piece – it’s a temporary measure because getting it working properly is going to take a little time, but it’s better than the SoundCloud option I’ve been trying out which turned out to just be incredibly clunky and uncomfortable (and some regular internet users said they couldn’t even see the link to download. Fail).

So super-excited about all that. Hoping I should get some subscribers soon. It’ll be interesting to see if and how well it works…

Oh, and the on-again-off-again film project is on again. Got a call on Monday about that one. And I went to see a potential client about a website project yesterday… and came away with another film score project (and a website one) – woot!

Tagged with: blogging, code, completion, composition, dayjob, experimenting, learning, music, programming, publishing, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

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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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.

Tagged with: code, conversation, dayjob, events, learning, programming, social life, study, thinking, tools, web | Add a comment

Quiet achievement

Back on the quintet today. I’ve deleted a chunk off the end of the piece and put it to one side for use later on – I was just feeling that it was coming in too soon and I needed to stretch out what I had a bit more before this particular bit recurred. Haven’t quite found what I want to do in the space now, but I feel it’s edging its way, crab-like, towards a new jumping off point. Just wish it would get a move on – I’m off to Portugal for a week on Tuesday!

Also finally got back to the new website and I’m very excited to report that I’ve now fixed it up for IE7 and 8. Firefox 2 is looking pretty broken, but FF2 makes up only 0.3% of the site’s visitors so for the moment (as in “launching by Friday”) I’m going to ignore it. I’ll come back to it later – apparently there’s a hack you can do to make FF2 recognise HTML5, but it sounds a little fiddly, so low priority it is. Opera likewise makes up a mere 1.2% of the minim-media.com populace and Opera 10 is certainly pretty much in need of no tweaks at all, so again I’m going to ignore that for the launch and focus on the one remaining browser that is both significant in usage and crap at rendering. And I don’t think anyone who works at all on websites will be in any doubt as to which one that is – yup, our old friend IE6. It’s pretty gebrochen – indeed unusable at present – so it unfortunately has to be a pretty high priority, but hopefully a touch of zoom: 1 here, a little position: relative there and a few numerical adjustments and it’ll come back into the fold.

I think I’ve basically decided to not apply for the London Sinfonietta’s fabulous-sounding Writing the Future programme – everything’s getting too squashed, I need to provide a live recording, and don’t have one for anything I’ve written in the past decade and there have been some issues with getting a reference (mostly because there’s really only one person who could write it, and she’s snowed under [although very generously willing to do her best]) so it’s feeling like really it would be best to just set it to one side, ask the London Sinfonietta to put me on their mailing list and hope they’ll do another one I can apply for next year. Disappointing, but I think there are enough opportunities coming up through the Composers Forum to keep me well and truly occupied – including a four-session workshop on writing for percussion in January! Can’t wait!

And I discovered a fabulous recording of chamber music by the Russian composer Taneyev. It’s on Spotify or check out the details on Amazon. The piano quintet’s scherzo is particularly awesome – very cheeky!

Tagged with: code, composition, programming, thinking, web | Add a comment

Breakthough!

Did quite a bit on the site today and had a bit of a breakthrough – I’d been exploring ways to get the latest blog post out of my WordPress blog and onto the homepage (which is a static page, not hosted within the blog) and finally I worked it out, thanks to various posts online, so now I have an auto-updating blog post on the homepage! Whee! Haven’t yet been able to get the Twitter feed working though, so I’ve hidden it for now. And I’ve got the navigation working correctly (highlighting the correct sub-navigation items) across all pages and I’ve added in a home link to the menu for pages which aren’t the homepage.

I also started testing properly in IE6 and I think I’m going to need the JavaScript fix Bruce Lawson talks about in Introducing HTML 5 to get the CSS to apply itself to the new HTML 5 elements that Our Friend doesn’t recognise. I was pretty amazed to see, though, that it’s picked up the fancy font, thanks to Font Squirrel’s easy-peasy generator… although, oddly enough, it has a problem with the blockier font. It’s nothing to do with the position of the definition – it doesn’t make a difference whether I move the blocky font definition to the top of the file, or whether I even remove the fancy font, it doesn’t show up in IE6, so I’m thinking it could be something within the font file itself. Not too disturbed though. After all… IE6 (although obviously I’ll have to see what it does in other versions of IE and that’s likely to do the same thing, I guess). Tossing up whether to put in an IE6 disclaimer. It might be a good idea. Just so that IE users know that what they’re seeing isn’t the actual design. While in general, I feel I should support any browser that is commonly in use, in practice, it’s getting ridiculous to still be fully supporting such ancient technology, when there’s a better, more semantic way to achieve things, so I’m thinking the hybrid approach – ensure all content is accessible, include a note letting IE6 users know that it’d be a better experience if they upgrade – is the best way to go.

Oh, and I made a cake. Chocolate, with chocolate ganache topping. And came to the conclusion that the oven thermometer my mama brought over with her has serious fail. I’m sure the oven’s running hot – it’s been burning everything at supposedly the correct temperatures. So I tested it out with the cake today – I cooked it at the official temperature on the oven dial, as always (because I know it works at that temperature, although it overcooks if you don’t keep a close eye on it) – 180 C, which the oven thermometer then said was only 160 C. Grrr. Might have to invest in another oven thermometer to see if it can do better.

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WordPress overload

Got an absolute truckload of work done on the site today and now the blog is pretty much ready to go – very nearly entirely. I think the only thing left to do with it is to work out the custom template so I can import the latest blog post into the homepage. Worked out some cool features too – selecting subnav items depending on whether the post is in the news or article category (or if it’s a category list page of either) and setting the posting date within the <time> tag automatically.

Also accidentally watched The Omen. I’ve avoided this one for years, but it came on and nobody turned it off… and by the time it got halfway through then I was stuck and had to watch it right through to the end. Really good film – very suspenseful, and much more effective than a lot of more modern movies that have to rely on effects to be creepy.

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Last day

I’m afraid I’ve failed at my overall mission for Creative Pact, which was to have caitlinrowley.com online today. But on the flipside, it’s been TOTALLY worth it. I’ve had a fantastic time doing it, and achieved a ton of work I wouldn’t have otherwise, and the site’s very nearly ready to go – I’m hoping I can send it live on the weekend sometime, or at least early next week.

Today was spent messing around with PHP – I sorted out the include files for header and menu and so on and go all that working. I’ve also pulled together a basic WordPress template for the blog (which, bizarrely, has already received its first spam comment – how, I don’t know, given that it’s not been linked from anywhere at all) which is starting to look pretty good. I’ve moved some files around so that the detail pages are in a subfolder to keep the upper levels clean and I think I’ve pretty much decided – at least for now – to use variables in each page which indicate which section should be open in the left nav. I’ve also – I think – worked out how to include the latest blog post in the homepage automatically, although I haven’t yet had time to test it out, but it seems pretty clear how to do it, which it wasn’t before. I found a useful page on creating custom RSS feeds using custom page templates, which made me realise that I actually don’t (probably) need anything that complex, that I should be able to achieve it with a custom page template which consists solely of picking up the latest post ID, and that blog post’s basic code, then reference that as an include file directly from the homepage.

So I’m feeling pretty good about what I’ve got through today, and it’s really starting to come together, and feel like going live very soon is a real possibility, which it wasn’t feeling like two days ago, but there’s still quite a lot of work to be done: Fixing up links between pages to make sure they go where they’re supposed to, testing the whole template in various browsers and implementing fixes as needed for IE6 and other contrary beasts, which will probably take a while of course, getting the twitter feed on the homepage sorted (or possibly I might just hide that until I get it working properly – there seems to be an issue with the script I found and my PHP isn’t quite good enough to work out what’s wrong with it), copying across all the various assets for the composition pages – flash files and cover images and PDF downloads and so on, which I haven’t done yet because there didn’t seem to be much point when I was working on the iPad… And I’m bound to think of other things too. It’s enough to keep me off the streets a little while longer, but I’m still confident it’ll go up very soon.

But SO glad I took the plunge and actually did Creative Pact, in spite of my misgivings. It’s been a difficult month for me personally, but it’s been fantastic having a clear goal to work towards and knowing that if I did just a tiny bit each day then that’s at least a small win for that day. And I’ve met a bunch of really awesome people online through it too, doing some fabulously interesting work so YAY! Bring on next year’s!

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