Living With a Nerd

Just a small little update, I’m working on another track for The Transient Unknown.  It’s easily the darkest music I’ve made…heh, I had to stop working on it because listening to the various textures over and over was starting to creep me out.  I know exactly what I want to happen with this track (which is rather uncommon for me), so completing it will just be a matter of getting my patches set and everything tweaked.  I may have to brighten it a little; it’s an awesome dark track, but I think it may be a little too dark to fit in with the rest of the album.

I also recently completed a short interlude track for The Transient Unknown, entitled Cosmic String.  It’s under two minutes long, but I did it as an exercise in layered textures.  There are 15 different synths/samplers in it, can you separate them all out?  I barely can, and I made the darn thing!

Nearly half of my previous blog entry has become completely irrelevant.  Rather than expand the music section on my own website, for now I’ve decided to just make everything available on last.fm.   Compared to making yet another webpage, I’ll get far more exposure, bandwidth won’t be strained on my own server (although that honestly wasn’t much of a problem), and it’s just cool to know that I have music on last.fm now, just like the big boys!  Or something…

In other related news (and continuing the theme of making my previous entry irrelevant), I created the first track for Lost on the Way to the Laundry last weekend.  I was working on Solar Winds (which is still pissing me off, because I can tell there is a great song hiding underneath what I have down so far, but I just can’t seem to find it.  I’ve been working on this track for what…4 months now?) when I took a moment to swivel around in my chair and look around the room.  Warm morning sunlight was beaming in through the window, scattered puffy clouds were floating by, Fizzgigg and Brittnie were softly snoring away in bed…it was just a really pleasant and peaceful morning.  Lotwotl was the result of that morning; I feel it represents exactly how that morning felt, and is quite possibly the closest I’ve come to taking the music in my head and making it into something I can share with others.  So how does this make my previous post irrelevant?  Well, as you can tell by listening to it, it doesn’t contain elements from either dubstep OR ambient.  I really like the sound of it though, and I’m going to strive to make the rest of Lost on the Way to the Laundry sound similar in style.  I’m having trouble finding other music to listen to for inspiration, though…it sounds like a Nightmares on Wax/Future Sound of London/some other group I can’t think of combo…any suggestions would be much appreciated.

In non-music news, The Crazies was pretty good…I was glad to see that it really felt like a proper remake, rather than just taking a concept and crapping all over it.  You can catch my full review of it here.  Hopefully, we will get a chance to go see the new Alice in Wonderland this weekend, so if all goes as planned, I’ll have a review of that ready on Monday or Tuesday.  I also recently took the plunge into gaming on my Dell Mini 9…I wrote up an article with some tips I discovered during this so-far short journey, while also going over some of the games I tried and how well they worked.  You can read it here.

I managed to catch Shutter Island over the weekend (full review here.)  While it certainly wasn’t Scorsese’s best, it was more than worth the price of admission.  I hope to catch a viewing of The Crazies this weekend, although up until a couple of hours ago I was completely unaware that it is a remake of a 1973 Romero film.  I’ve since moved it up to the top spot on my Netflix queue, so I’ll get a chance to see the original before I see the remake…a required tradition when it comes to remakes nowadays.  Look for a review next week.

In other news, previous plans to charge for my music have been completely scrapped, at least for now.  While I’m quite proud of the tracks I’ve put together, I don’t think they are of high enough quality to charge for them.  Since I’m doing this primarily to provide people with enjoyable experiences instead of a way to get rich, I have no problem giving it all away.  Who knows, if I get popular enough maybe one day I’ll release an album and actually charge for it.  For now, the music page remains unchanged, but sometime in the next few days I will update it to include previously unreleased tracks.  The other advantage of releasing the tracks for free is that it lifts any arbitrary release date I put on myself, thus reducing the stress associated with production.  Since I won’t be charging for it, I can make it exactly how I want without any worry regarding whether it has monetary worth.

I think I lost the Reason file for Circumstellar Disk, so unless I can locate it, the unfinished version currently on the music page will become the finished version.  I may use that as an excuse to put together a small drone project, which is something I’ve wanted to do since I discovered Stars of the Lid.  Drone ambient is relatively easy to make, yet is still very creatively satisfying for me.  Regardless, there are still at least two tracks to finish on The Transient Unknown (IC-443 and Solar Winds).  After that I plan on doing Lost on the Way to the Laundry, which (I’m hoping) will be a dubstep/ambient hybrid, although that could change radically when the time comes to actually do it.

Once there is more content than just The Transient Unknown, I will likely switch from a single page to a seperate Wordpress website specifically for the music stuff.  It will still be located at livingwithanerd.com/music, but making it its own Wordpress site will allow me to keep everything more organized.  For now though, I’m going to stick with the single-page design.

Things have been crazy around here lately.  Work has been consuming a large portion of my mental capacity, which is why there haven’t been any new articles in quite a while.  I’m going to put some serious time into writing this weekend, to get things back on track.  It’s been a relief not worrying about the website, but it’s time to bring things back to normal.  Starting Monday, our normal posting schedule will resume. 

With her tax return, Brittnie decided to pick up Guitar Hero 5 and an extra guitar for me.  I had only played Guitar Hero a couple of times before, and have never owned a rhythm game, just like Brittnie.  For once, we had a game where our skills were about equal.  In the 5 days since we got it, it’s pretty much all we’ve done at home.  We have both progressed fairly quickly, with myself already getting 95% on “Sweating Bullets” from Megadeth on medium, while Brittnie is getting quite comfortable playing bass for any song on medium (she always plays bass, I play guitar.)  It feels almost like I’m late to the party since I never really got into the whole rhythm game thing when it was big, but whatever…we are enjoying ourselves quite a lot.  The last time we gamed this much together every night in a row was right after we got our Wii.  She picked up World Tour two days ago because of all the classic rock on there, so that has been super fun.  I noticed that World Tour is easier than Guitar Hero 5, although the leap in graphics between World Tour and 5 is immense.  Haven’t unlocked the Tool songs yet, but we are actively working towards doing so.

Hopefully, I’ll get out to the movies this weekend and see either Wolfman or Shutter Island.  Look for a review in the coming days!

No doubt you have heard about the insane snow we have had for the past week here in Maryland.  A storm last weekend dropped around 30″ on us, and a storm just three days ago dropped an additional 18″ on us.  Right now, our back yard looks like a snow swimming pool…the snow is only about 6 inches below the top of our fence(!).  Luckily, it should be above freezing for most of the next week, so hopefully a lot of it will melt.  It was awesome getting some time off from work though:-)

I’m about half way through Bioshock 2.  My opinion keeps shifting from “meh” to “more time in Rapture!  Huzzah!”  I’m still not quite sure what I think…on the one hand, it’s been cool to learn more about the Big Daddies and the various backroom deals that went on while Rapture was still a functioning city, but on the other hand the whole thing feels unnecessary and at times forced.  The new hacking mini-game is far and away the best change to the formula, but I’m not sure playing as a Big Daddy was the right move…it feels wrong that I’m a Big Daddy but can be killed by a splicer pummeling me with a wrench.  In the first Bioshock, if you just stood there whacking a Big Daddy in the skull you would be turned into hamburger.  I realize you are a “prototype” and not as well armored, but still…you’re in a freakin’ diving suit.  A wrench shouldn’t do anything to you.  I’ll reserve final judgement for when I finish the game, as I’ve heard the storyline kicks into overdrive in the final couple of hours, but for now I think I’m on the “why did they do this again?” side.

In other news, I just ordered a set of Audio-Technica ATH-AD700s.  I can’t wait to see how they sound with gaming, and the extra wide soundstage reported by many owners has me excited to see how they present The Transient Unknown.  From what I’ve read, they are a bit lacking in the bass department until they get burned in a bit, so I’m going to put together a playlist to run through them for a while.  I’m still going to actually use them during the burn-in period so I can hear them change, but I’m making sure to keep my expectations low at first.  I’ll likely go for a Nuforce uDAC in a month or two, but for now the control pod on my Logitech Z4 2.1s will have to do.

Special thanks to the members over at the Head-Fi forums and the [H]ard|Forum for helping me in my purchasing decision.  Keep an eye on livingwithanerd.com for an initial review on the AD700’s and a follow-up review once I have broken them in.  The main page has been neglected this week due to just general insanity going on around here…I hope to get things relatively back to normal next week, although I can’t promise that.  At the very least, the next entry in our Healthy Gamer series will make an appearance on Monday.

Mass Effect 2 is almost everything I hoped for.  There were a couple of major changes that I kinda wish they hadn’t done, but overall it’s good stuff.  You can check our full review of it here.

As of right now, I’m running a 250 gig hard drive as my primary system drive, with two 500 gig SATAII Seagates running in RAID 0 to hold my archives.  My only backup drive is a 750 gig maxtor SATAII stuffed into a Rosewill RX-358-S BLK enclosure.  Well, that is about to change.  I just recently ordered a Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EADS to replace the two 500 gig drives.  Since the WD 1.5 TB drive is going to be standalone, I ::knock on wood:: shouldn’t encounter any of the problems people are having when running them in RAID.  I decided to go with the Green edition since they are supposed to generate less heat than the others…the power savings are nice, but will hardly make a dent in the power consumption of my system.

So now what am I to do with these two 500 gig drives?  Stuff them in an enclosure and use them for backup, of course!  I also picked up a Kingwin DK-32U-S enclosure.  So, with the two 500 gig drives running in JBOD along with the aformentioned 750 gig drive I’ll FINALLY have enough space to back up EVERYTHING.  It’s pretty exciting, I can’t wait! 

Next steps for upgrades include getting another Asus VH236H (and giving Brittnie my Dell 2005FPW, currently used as a secondary monitor), upgrading my CPU, Motherboard, and RAM, and…well, that would be it for a while, actually.  I would LOVE to replace my system drive with an SSD, but the cost isn’t worth it to me.  My system isn’t nearly high-end enough for the hard drive to have that big of a difference.  Still, even if I don’t go SSD, I will likely replace the system drive soon.

I didn’t do much gaming this weekend, but there was a media marathon overload over the past 72 hours.  Over the weekend, we watched/went and saw: Sherlock Holmes, Pandorum, Burn After Reading, discs four five and six of Ergo Proxy, about three hours of Bill Nye the Science Guy, and about two hours of Clone High.  Numerous South Park episodes from the 4th and 5th seasons were also watched.  I continued with reading Cerebus, and on Brittnie’s recommendation started reading The Host written by Stephenie Meyer (yes, that Stephanie Meyer).  I have been pleasently suprised so far…although I couldn’t stand even just the 5 minutes of Twilight that I heard while Brittnie was going through the audio books (she hated them too, thank the goddess), The Host is a well written and entertaining story.  I’m only about 70 pages in, but I’m interested enough to finish it out.

The most exciting media happenings out of the weekend was that my copy of Warren Ellis’ first novel Crooked Little Vein showed up on our doorstep.  Ellis’ stories are always really twisted, and his writing style magnificent.  I can’t wait to dive into it…there will 100% for sure be a review of it on the main site after I finish it.

I finally took the plunge.  I wiped the hard drive that had Windows XP SP3 32bit on my gaming system, and installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit…and wow, what a big difference!  The whole PC feels like it is way faster.  I’m not sure if that is just how it “feels” or if it actually is, but I DO know that according to dslreports.com both my download and upload speeds have increased by about 300k.  Since I never did Vista, it is taking me some time to get used to where everything is in Windows 7, but suffice it to say it is awesome.  As an added bonus, I didn’t have to install a single driver for any of my hardware…I was even able to pick up and connect to my wireless network during the setup process!  I’m still a bit of a noob when it comes to Windows 7, but it is showing a lot of promise.

A few months ago, I put the album on hiatus.  Morale about the project was low, I couldn’t come up with anything that satisfied me creatively, and for a few weeks straight I was scrapping everything I put together.  Rather than continue to get more and more frustrated, I just set it all aside for a later date.  That later date is now.  Listening to old favourites of mine like Saafi Brothers and Redshift while finding some new artists and listening to a bunch of Hearts of Space episodes has reignited the spark back in me.  I don’t have any definite plans yet, I’m just going to get myself back in front of the MIDI controller and see what happens.  I’ve spent the past few days amassing a sizable collection of freeware ReFills for Reason, so I’m hoping to find some interesting stuff to either use or tweak from that.

My production skills haven’t really increased, but I have been trying to listen to ambient differently.  Rather than just relaxing and chilling out, I’ve been trying to pick apart the tracks; identify the individual sounds, work out what someone did to get them to sound the way they do, and even try to picture the producer putting the track together.  I hope to eventually release The Transient Unknown on magnatune, but it’s quite possible I’ll just make this a freebie and give it away.  Either way, the four tracks I have up on the website will ALWAYS be available at no cost.  I really enjoy those tracks, and I want other people to enjoy them too.  Since I’m not planning on making a living out of this and realistically don’t expect to make any money, giving some of the tracks away for free just feels like the right thing to do.

So I recently found out that a proper sequel to Divine Divinity was released just a couple of days ago here in North America (and a few months ago over in Europe.)  I didn’t put much time into Divine, but I did play the hell out of its spin-off, Beyond Divinity.  Not the greatest games in the world, but entertaining enough to check out the sequel.  According to Wikipedia, it uses the Gamebryo engine, the same engine used in Oblivion/Fallout 3.  Considering the progression between those two games, I am very interested and even a bit excited to see how they have further tweaked the engine.  I’m glad to see that Emergent Game Technologies, the current company that owns the middleware, licensed its usage to such a small Belgian developer like Larian Studios.  I’m even happier to see that Larian have kept development in-house, considering they made the first two entries as well.

In other news, 2010 seems like it is going to be the year of the tablet.  A convertible tablet (one where a screen docks onto a keyboard with a more powerful set of hardware) seems like the perfect thing for Brittnie, considering her job.  Right now it looks like Lenovo is the only one with such a device almost ready to go, but I’m sure there will be others.  Being able to record grades or prepare lessons on it in laptop mode, then just grabbing the screen and walking around the classroom seems perfect.  She could just use one of the tablet notebooks out now that have a screen that swivels, but then she is carrying an entire laptop around…quite a different animal when you have a classroom full of special needs kids all vying for your attention at the same time.

Brittnie’s desk has now been reorganized, giving her full use of the desktop and maximizing the use of her new speakers.  I don’t have any pictures of what it looked like before, but rest assured it looks much better now:

I figured with how much music she listens to, Brittnie deserved better speakers than the horrible ones she was using.  She didn’t have much room, and I wanted her to get the best sound she could in a small package (and for under $100), so I decided on the Creative GigaWorks T20 Series II.  They aren’t the best, but for their price and their size it’s hard to beat them.  They have excellent stereo imaging, and likely their best trait (aside from their classy looks) is their complete lack of localization…unless you concentrate and stare directly at them, you can’t really tell where the music is coming from.  I figured they would sound decent, but their output really does defy their small stature.  The bass/treble controls, as well as the headphone and aux-in jacks on the front are icing on the cake.