iBook Returns With No Change

I received a call from Visual Graphics and went to pick up my iBook with a replacement drive the day before my warranty expires. Of course, like the car that won’t clunk for the mechanic, she wouldn’t give in to their poking and prodding and they determined that the drive was fine. The night before I brought it in, it wouldn’t stay powered for more than 10 minutes.

I guess if we weren’t SITCOMs then I’d be a lot more comfy with the situation. I’d work with it until it broke and then just run out and get a new PowerBook. They’re coming out today, right? Hah (that’s the rumor anyway).

Unfortunately, I don’t have that luxury, so I’ll just be very gentle with Miss iBook and pray that she remains healthy.

I’ve also become pretty excited about performing some solo stuff on stage, but until I can get together the resources to perform effectively (read: money for synth) I’ll restrict myself to writing the stuff I’ll perform.

Delays…

Yeah, so I promised a big announcement and can’t deliver today. Sorry. We’ll do it Monday instead. Work is busy and you know how everything else is going. Stay tuned…

Thursday Bits, Stay Tuned

I feel like most of my day so far has been spent switching between one context and the next. Somehow the iBook has come back to life. If you’re wondering why this is a bad thing, I’m about 100.1% confident that this hard drive is on its way out and I’d much rather it go in the next 6 days while the thing is still under warranty. I did make an image of the entire drive in preparation.

I’m making significant progress on my daily activities. I think that while it might be temporarily adding a near-unhealthy urgency to everything I’m doing, in the end it’s only going to make my goals more achievable.

Since I’m limited on time, I just want to make sure that anyone reading from the Columbia area is going to want to check in with space-age wasteland tomorrow morning for a big announcement.

Bryan and Murphy

Just as if I needed further convincing that I’m in the wrong place, the yesterday’s work day was beyond terror. The sick feeling I get when walking in the building was met by a few brilliantly-placed and crafted processes (read: “who came up with this idea?”), personality conflict and overall frustration.

Then Murphy bears his wicked countenance. The (50-week-old) iBook’s hard drive has crashed. Like has happened so many times to me, it seems that the platters are bound or there has been a head crash.

“Ok, don’t panic. Bryan when’s the last time you backed up? Crap. Ok, what did we lose? Crap. The pictures, Quicken, music, my music, the custom scripts.”

Damage control proved more fruitful on yesterday’s iBook crash than it has in the past. After spending an hour in the refrigerator, the hard drive decided to spin up again long enough for me to pull a few really crucial files off.

After sitting cool again overnight, I was able to pull about 15 GB of additional data onto my external drive. I hope and pray that after sitting again all day, I’ll be able to pull the last 10 or so days of pictures from it (those are the ones I missed with my last iPhoto-to-DVD backup). After that, I’m going to drop it off to our local Apple Certified Repair place (of course we have no Apple Store). After that, I presume I’ll be without the iBook for about 3 weeks. Sigh.

Daily Progress

Yesterday I promised myself I’d squeeze in a daily activity into my schedule. I didn’t really commit to anything because I’m already reasonably overextended, but I knew it had to be something that was related to my passion.

If nothing else comes of this commitment, I’ll have earned the fruits of practice. Zack pointed out that I already have a daily activity because I take and post pictures of my daughters each day. I think this is one of the most important parts of my day. Now I’ve added to the daily activities with my daughters and have committed to reading two of their books to them each day. This puts my time with the girls at the top of my day and will hopefully strengthen our bond.

But what about something that will advance the progress of my latest goals? Music is it, folks. I can’t say I’ll write or record a song every day. Jonathan makes good use of Oneword.com to practice writing – it’s short and you only have a minute. So I’ve decided that I’m going to put 4 lines of text to music. Any 4 lines at all. Last night, I actually put 16 lines of text to music in a Psalm that I arranged for Sunday. We’ll see what happens tonight.

“Everyday I Write the Book”

Reader’s Digest has a feature, Only In America, which highlights “Ideas, trends and interesting bits from all over” – all over America, I presume. October’s edition of this feature included two very interesting storiettes. The first of these mentioned David Allen and GTD, clutter busting, and feng shui.

The fruit of the meme, however, was a brief about Jacob Berendes, who runs a small record label in Worcester, Mass. A friend of his had recorded one blues song a day for an entire year and it inspiried him to find an everyday activity. The Macguffin here is that he went for the “original stuffed toy a day” idea. His toys are quite interesting but the true fruit is, oddly enough, in the root of this idea.

Since the progress of my goals is evident but slow, I am inspired to squeeze this idea into my schedule. I don’t think that ‘writing a song a day’ is an achievable goal, so it doesn’t pass the SMART test. It’d be much more realistic for me to come up with a progression a day, or a melody line a day. For now, I’m going to brew on this and leave the loop open for now.

Bye-Bye Bloglines

Ok, it seems odd that only about 2 weeks ago I committed to using Bloglines to aggregate my feeds, and now I’m already moving on. Yes, Google (of course) has caught my fancy with this slick (and very Web 2.0) news reader/aggregator. Since I use my Google account for gmail, personalized search, and the ig personalized homepage service there was really no setup to do besides importing my OPML export from Bloglines.

Once again… good job, Google.

Birthday and Bits

Today is my oldest daughter’s first birthday, so I’m not going to take a whole lot of time to disclose any updates because I haven’t taken any time to make any progress.

Zack has once again mentioned that he’ll be working on the redesign of space-age wasteland. Even if it seems like he keeps putting this off, it’s really a low-priority personal favor and he’s a really busy dude. You should start noticing minor changes coming in one at a time.

And for everyone perpetuating this glorious meme, keep it up! We’re all on the right track.

A Productive Tuesday Afternoon

Today, I put in some massive effort towards 2 of my ‘passion intersections.’ A group of the teenagers I lead at church are volunteering to help repair the home of an elderly woman and there’s a good amount of organization and paperwork that need to be done in the next few days to make this all happen. I made some headway on that and then began planning some other activities we’ll be doing in the next few weeks.

In the midst of this organizational work, I got to do some composition. It’s my responsibility to put the music together for October 16th’s liturgy, and in true Bryan style I’ve already written the Psalm Antiphon with a good start on the verses and plan on writing a song for the entrance. *

I also mentioned to one of my neighbors that had expressed prior interest in music lessons that I’d be teaching. I may have found my first student, but all is yet to be seen.

*I had an idea to put up sort of an open-source liturgical music planning guide to allow musicians to provide ideas and advice for song selections based on the theme of the liturgy for a specific day. This could also probably bleed over into other worship settings that aren’t based on specific cyclical liturgies but on a theme or set of scripture readings. I think a wikipedia-like implementation of this could really work if enough musicians shared their experiences. I know of several resources that provide this information on a subscription basis, but none are free, and none are as accessible as this would be.