>What have you been up to? Let's get some other thread going - something >more interesting than various rants. What's going on in your life? >Anything big happening? > >Gautam
Actually, I'm going through a personal re-evaluation right now. My job is doing tech support via phone for PC-based cash register hardware and software at Hallmark stores in the U.S. and Canada, and my plan had been to work my way into I.T. management. I'm rethinking that right now, not sure if I want to delve deeper into the technology side or the management side of things. That's one of the reasons I've found the McKinsey Quarterly so interesting lately. It helps me see things from a management perspective that I might not have considered otherwise. In addition to I.T. and/or management, I've been exploring ways to get involved more deeply in music; it's just hard to find a way to make that support a family without becoming a college professor (which I might want to do at some point, but not now) or working in a recording studio (and although I have experience in that area, it's a hard field to break into, and the hours suck). My undergrad degree is actually in Music Composition, Electronic Music Emphasis. That ties into what started my whole re-evaluation process. I was given a copy of The CSound Book(*) for my birthday recently, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was dedicated to one of my former music composition teachers, Dr. Robert Cooper, who passed away a few years ago from a heart attack which he was far too young to have suffered. Two of Cooper's pieces are on one of the CD-ROMs included with the book, including my all-time favorite of his, "Cymbolic." Seeing his name and hearing his music again got me to thinking about how much I learned from him about music and technology. It also got me thinking about all the things he had wanted to do but didn't get to, because his life was cut short. It has really made me rethink my priorities. Other than that, there hasn't been much going on this summer. We're still trying to get unpacked after moving into our new house in January. All the important stuff got unpacked right away, but everything else has been just sitting in boxes in the garage. We've been gradually unpacking them, but we have a lot left. We've already decided that any boxes left over by next January will be discarded. Anita, my wife, had decided to leave the school where she was teaching (she's a elementary school music teacher) and is currently waiting to hear details on two job offers. Depending on how those turn out, she'll decide which one to accept. I've been learning a lot about networking lately. At my job, I've been dealing more and more network-related problems, and at home we set up a LAN with an 8-port switch, and a router connected to a cable modem, and we've had up to 6 computers attached at a time playing multiplayer computer games. Our switch and router are NetGear, and I really love their performance. I've had zero problems with them and when I had a couple of questions about configuring the firewall, their tech support was very friendly and helpful. (And when the switch first arrived and I opened the box, I was pleasantly surprised to find a NetGear t-shirt enclosed!) I had previously had trouble with a different brand, and learned all kinds of interesting troubleshooting tidbits from that... You mentioned that you've been sailing lately. I've never done any sailing, but Anita and I and our friend Mike recently had a great time spending a day at the (surprisingly large) swimming beach at a local lake. Mike and I swam all the way out to the barrier rope. As someone mentioned in a different thread, it's kind of strange knowing that the bottom is a good distance below you (although I think the person who mentioned it previously was talking about swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, which I'm sure it a lot deeper than Longview Lake :-). I wanted to go out boating, but Anita is not a big fan of water; she loves swimming, but only in water shallow enough for her to be able to touch the bottom with her head out of the water. (Needless to say, she didn't swim out to the rope with us.) Hopefully Mike and I will find some time later this summer to go back when Anita is otherwise occupied, so we can rent a boat. I grew up boating with my family, and I miss it. The only other thing I've been doing much of lately is reading. I finally started reading the Ender books from Orson Scott Card. In fact, I just finished the third one, _Xenocide_. It's a pretty philosophical book, but it nicely ties up lots of loose ends from the first two while leaving a couple of really big ones for the fourth book. I've really enjoyed this series so far, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest. I'm also planning on picking up some Banks this weekend, just to see what all the fuss is about ;-). I think that about covers my summer. Anyone else want to share? Reggie Bautista * CSound is a sound renderer. You have one text file that contains code defining digital musical instruments using a variety of sound creation techniques including complex FM and granular systhesis and sample playback (the orchestra file), and another text file that tells those instruments what to do (the score file). You run those files together through the CSound application, and your output is a cd-quality sound sample, ready to be burned onto an audio cd. It's a complicated language, but incredibly powerful. You can control every aspect of every sound up to as many times per second as the sample rate (at cd-quality stereo audio, which has 44,100 samples per second, you can make up to 44,100 changed to each individual sound every second). CSound is also free to download off the internet, and open source, written in C (hence the name), so if there's anything you want it to do that it can't do, you can write your own modules to expand it's functionality. The CSound Book is the definitive resource for CSound info. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
