August 16, 2005

Manual labor rocks

It’s been a week of manual labor, but honestly, it’s been a lot of fun. Wednesday through Friday, plus yesterday, I worked in Carol Ann’s basement helping her to convert it into a studio. Saturday was my second day at Habitat For Humanity. I know it must seem strange to say this, but I really enjoyed it after these years of sitting inside at the lab all day. And it makes a big difference that these are projects I really believe in and want to do; I guess the motivation is pretty important.

Carol Ann’s studio is coming along nicely. After cleaning and painting the basement, we hung some pegboard on the walls and cleaned, painted, and assembled some shelving for storage. Over the weekend, Ben installed a new lighting fixture—he did a really impressive job, much better than I would have done—and now it’s mostly a question of installing some flat surfaces and tools. I’m so excited about this project, I’m really glad she’ll have a space in which she can do her work. She was so miserable working at Art Mart, and I’m hoping that with a creative outlet, she’ll be much happier.

Habitat was both better and more frustrating than the last time I worked there. Better in that I had a single project on which to work—I worked with two other guys, Paul and Gary, to build a shed onto the side of the house. But we ran into so many obstacles that we weren’t even close to finishing it. We didn’t have enough materials, so we had to scavange from other parts of the house, and that took a long time. The concrete slab on which we were to build the shed had been poured too close to the corner of the house, so we had to alter the design of the shed, and the house’s siding had been installed already, so we had to cut it away. Add to this our basic incompetance which cost us some time and do-overs as well. The upshot is that I’ll go back next week and continue working on it.

Anyway, it’s been good to use my hands and muscles for a while. I mean, I wouldn’t want to do this every day for a career, but once in a while on a volunteer basis, I really feel good.

Posted by alex at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2005

Habitat For Humanity

What with all the other craziness recently, I forgot to mention what is probably the coolest thing I did this weekend: I attended the initial Orientation required of all new potential volunteers for Habitat For Humanity. Saturday morning I went to the headquarters over on Forest Park Ave. along with probably 150 other people and sat through two hours of presentation and Q&A about the history of HFH, current projects, volunteer opportunities, and what to do next if you’re interested.

I’m interested. Very. In fact, half-way through the presentation, a man got up to make a plug for volunteers to begin training as Crew Leaders, and I came up to him afterwards to get some more information; I think I’d like to try that. I’m a bit nervous, because I think it’d be a genuine commitment, but at the same time, it’s so totally worthwhile and I think it’d be really good for me. It would involve a fair amount of training in addition to the usual volunteer commitment, but I’d learn a lot, and I think I’d like the responsibilty.

I hit on the idea of volunteering with HFH after talking with Phil Valko, Jeff Susor and my mom. I’ve been thinking about the possibility of purchasing an old home and rehabing it, but I feel as though I know very little about construction. Mom recommended that I try to find some volunteer opportunities to help me meet some better quality people, and so combining these two thoughts made HFH seem like a natural fit.

I guess the next step is to email the volunteer coordinator at HFH and ask about the Crew Leader program. I might start doing some actual construction as soon as this Saturday.

Posted by alex at 07:39 AM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2005

Jazz Collection database underway

This could also be under Computer, I guess, but anyway… I started developing my Jazz Collection database application. So far it just allows the user to add musicians to it, but it’s a start and it works. I have a long ways to go in terms of learning how to create advanced and interesting SQL queries, but I’m excited by the early success.

I don’t care what anyone else says; Blood Sugar Sex Magik totally rocks. Flea is a wellspring of The Funk(tm).

Posted by alex at 01:02 AM | Comments (0)

June 05, 2005

PHP/MySQL

This really could go under the Computer category, or even Music, since that’s my only application so far. I’ve undertaken to learn PHP and MySQL this summer. I went to Border’s and bought a couple of books on the subject, and I began working through one of them a couple of days ago. So far it seems pretty accessible, although I must point out that I’ve only just begun.

Jon came over for about on hour this afternoon and helped me to design the database structure that I’ll use for Sac Lunch. I just knew there had to be a way to code MySQL intructions into a separate text file and then import them—doing everything at the command line just seemed to difficult and error-prone—so last night I dug around a bit and finally figured out how to do it. So now I’m working on building the code for the Sac Lunch database.

Posted by alex at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2005

Pooh recording begins

I recorded the first five chapters in Winnie-the-Pooh yesterday over at Mansion Studios. It went well, but later on I listened to it with Johanna, and she gave me some really good feedback.

I need to slow down and allow the words, as she says, “to resonate.” I had been aware of pacing as a potential issue, but I guess I had been dealing with it by pausing between sentances. A bette approach would be to take my time with the sentances themselves.

Also, I need to think about and come to some decisions about the voices. I thought that pitching my voice differently would do the trick, but Johanna pointed out that some characters could speak more slowly or more quickly, or with different inflections. These are great ideas, but now it means that I have to actually consider how to pull it off.

I’ve mentioned this project to a lot of people, and everyone seems really excited by it. In particular, Jason is really pumped up about it, and he’s got lots of great sound-effect ideas. I’m so thrilled by his enthusiasm! I’m starting to feel more ambitious about this whole project.

But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Right now I just have to go in and do it, and then I’ll worry about what I’ll do with it later.

Posted by alex at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)