Back In Action

I'm still a bit sluggish/tired, but in whole my cold seems to have finally dissipated. I'm not stuffy or struggling with the aches and pains, thank god-- Friday was pretty brutal and I was down for the count mid-day. Plenty of tea, good food, good company from Amy, and a healthy dose of video games (a la Project Torque) made for a relaxing Friday night.

Over the weekend I got a wild hair and splurged on buying a Nintendo Wii. Fred Meyer near my house had 3 in stock and nobody knew about it so I sauntered on in and picked one up. I had a few Best Buy gift cards I had earned from my previous team at work (over $100 worth) and promptly plopped it all down on another controller, 2 games, and some rechargeable batteries.

The Wii is redonkulously fun! Mario Galaxy is insanely cool, Wii Sports is simple but fun, and Puzzle Quest (while not the best quality) is addicting as all hell and I'm enjoying console gaming again! I was also playing around with some of the wireless capabilities.

I bought the Opera browser for Wii and it's pretty neato.. I wouldn't use it as a replacement for booting up my computer, but I suppose it's nifty enough to have on hand. I bought it because I was trying out the current methods for streaming video content to the Wii. It doesn't compare to the quality of my LAN wired Xbox (1st gen, chipped, with XBMC), but the possibility is there and I think with the right software the Wii could turn into a competative multimedia interface to a media PC.

I plan on putting together an order from EBWorld and Amazon full of the Gamecube games I missed out on, and I'm really looking forward to new versions of Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, and Mario Kart!

Last night I attended a 3-Day information meeting. I'm thinking about doing the 3-Day walk with Amy this year.. I have to raise $2,200 dollars though. Intimidating as that may seem, I think I can pull that off between donations from coworkers, friends, family, and donations made from a charitable music release... HMMMmmm. Expect more info soon ;)

Ew.. Head Cold!

I managed to get sick. Today I was wiped out but I went to work anyway... against my usual school of thought. Oh well.. I came home early, crashed, and had a relaxing evening at home.

I fixed my www.sliptide.com website. I'm not sure where I'm headed with it but there will be some changes in the future to better integrate my music with the site, as well as other aspects of my life (my love of point-and-shoot photography, volunteering, projects, and what limited views I can give about my IT lifestyle and job).

I also uploaded a few photos to my Flickr account. I was a Picasa fan early on, and honestly the Picasa software blows away Flickr, except for the fact that the Picasa online stuff just isn't as big of a deal as Flickr is right now. I don't mind trying to use Flickr, and I think it will be a good exercise for me as I also want to integrate it into my website and a few interesting web projects. You can find my stuff [right here]

It's time for bed. I'm not sure if I will be going to work tomorrow or not. It all depends on how I feel in the morning! I had planned a small outing after work with some peeps down in Factoria but that may be cancelled due to my sickness and bad timing for a lot of people that won't show (who would otherwise be there).

The Status of Things

I can' t seem to let it all loose. Epic, building, queued inside my head the sounds swim together in one giant cauldron of unorganized thought. I think I need to start hand writing thoughts for my music throughout the day as I go through the motions of my day job.

Trance, yes.. I love trance very much and would love to incorporate the ideas behind the melodic trance disciplines into my current projects.

Down-Tempo, yes.. it will always be on my plate because we all need to chill at some point.

Lyrics, yes.. I need to focus on my writing ability and story telling/emotion conveyance through my words and singing; not to mention I need to practice my singing ability.

The emotions, energy, control.. they all need to be processed and poured out into molds of performable music that will blow someone's mind.

I have some thinking, and always more practice, to do.

Haps

I went with Amy to do a night scenery photo shoot last weekend. It was a ton of fun! We went to Kirkland "downtown" waterfront:

View Larger Map

I can't show you the results of her shoot, but it was awesome to see her getting some great results w/the FZ18 at night. It was around midnight and we used the light pollution to our advantage with a bunch of different ISO and f settings paired with anything from 20 to 60 second exposure times. I learned a lot in the 2 nights we did this last weekend, and it makes me gawk at my little Pentax Optio A10 ^_^
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I haven't worked on music this week. I have been very busy with a plan to stay physically active every day of the work week. So far that is going very well and while I might be a little sluggish in the early AM hours, I am feeling like I have more energy overall. The goal is to just get into better shape and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

That being said, I've at the VERY least picked up my guitar every day to pick around and play with some song ideas and progressions. I'm very excited to sit down this weekend for a long session to work on some open projects, revive some older ones, and record a few ideas in my head (as well as play w/the mic more to record guitar and vocals).

There are two samples of things I have been playing with in the fan club. (Only members can view and download).
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I have a few web projects on my plate now so I'm very excited to be getting into development. I can't share much in the way of details, but I get to use my DBA skills and some of my know how with PHP (may go another route, who knows..) to get some engine stuff working for a web application, then Nick is probably going to give everything some shiny gloss with his design skills. fun stuff!

Alrighty.. back to work I go!