Sometimes, well a lot of the times, life is weirdly pleasant. Just as I had started to dig in with my spare time and find other ways to up my game and find interesting things to do, I have gotten hit with quite a freight train of work you could say.
So lately I have been laying low, trying to get all my ducks in a row, and coincidentally, I have not been learning how to sew. I did manage to however have enough free time to make this mix last weekend, and finally it is on sound cloud for your downloading pleasure.
Other than that, I am not sure how long this flood of work will last, but I am going to milk it up while I can. Only 30 days or so until I leave for burning man which is insane and awesome at the same time. This year I will definitely be gone a whole week, but not sure how much more than that I will have time for. Very excited about the camp this year though :)
Life has been weird lately to say the least. The oil spill really is very sad and unfortunate, and it seems like there has been quiteabitofnatural disasters recently too which is a bummer. On top of that, I have for better or for worse, come to the realization that (imo) the economy is probably never going to go back to the good ol' days. I hypothesize it will probably make a very slow recovery as some of the other glooming problems in our country are slowly resolved. When people are all employed and things start picking up, I suspect people will be spending their money in different ways.
Taking that all into consideration, I was sort of feeling bummed for a bit. Business has been slow and tedious as we as a small company try to pick up new clientele. It seems as though everyone is trying to cut corners and just try to stay afloat right now. In previous years, our company has thrived from the constant desire of any business to turn their ideas into a reality. We specialize in providing custom software and we will turn anyone's idea into a good program. These days, people do not want to innovate as much, and the ones that do, have a large pool of people like us to pick from currently. It is a hard game out there.
Recently though, I have decided to not just going to sit around and pout about it. As things evolve around me, I must evolve too. So I have decided to arm myself with a significant amount more math. Math is one thing that when you are a kid you just have no clue how this will apply to your life later. You also probably don't (or maybe you do) think sitting around all day writing code is fun, but turns out it can be extremely rewarding at times. I feel like math is one area that I did not take seriously enough as a kid, and now in my career choice I am finally starting to pay for it as I want to expand my programming into different realms.
I am not going back to school or anything extreme like that, but believe it or not I have hired a personal tutor, and plan to be really hone my skills in linear algebra, trigonometry and calculus into hopefully a sharp toolset that will help me take my coding to new places.
Besides all that jibber jabber of work/career/etc, I am also still trying to have some fun. I will be going to element11 here in just another week where Bat Country will be representin' and I will get another chance to DJ, which is very exciting for me. Hopefully I will remember to record my set this time!
Wow I can't believe we are almost 1/2 way through the year! Life has been so busy it has been hard to keep up lately! Lucky for me it's a pretty even split between work and play so I can't complain much!
Work wise we just launched our new website to give us a bit fresher of a look, and we also just attended a tradeshow in hopes of drumming up some more business. Other than that we have had an ebb and flow of business lately, but we have built some really cool things this year!
In other news, Bat Country'sfinal plan was submitted to Burning Man a couple weeks ago! I am very excited about this year, and we have a ton of momentum so far.
Just uploaded last nights mix for your downloading pleasure... Starts out a bit minimal and works it way up to be a bit more housy and progressive near the end.
I have been running an internet radio station for the greater part of the past year now. Originally I had hooked this up to be a mostly auto pilot project, and my setup consisted of uploading mp3 files to one of my co-located servers, and then having mpd stream to shoutcast, so that it was sort of like iTunes in the sky.
As the year has progressed I have been getting more and more into music in ways I could never have imagined. I have been learning how to mix, and gathering an insane amount of music. Needless to say, after the first few sessions I was determined to figure out how to broadcast traktor straight to shoutcast.
At first this seems trivial right, because Traktor has support for internet radio broadcasting, yay! Wrong. Turns out Traktor did not want to pay royalty fees to license mp3 technology in a way so they can stream it so they decided to cheap out (it's not like Traktor is free, c'mon N.I.!) and only support the less popular (but totally decent) Ogg format.
This being the case, that means that to successfully plug Traktor into shoutcast we have to run a middle man program, via one method or another. The first method I tried was Nice Cast which is a mac friendly application that simply takes the raw output of your soundcard, transcodes it to your desire, then sends it to shoutcast for you. In practice this is not too bad of a solution but there was several reasons I was not feeling it, including added latency, wonky gain levels, occasional distortion, and the fact that its closed source and a mac only app (no running it on a unix server).
