Confessions of a Leisure Enthusiast

Just kidding!  Really though, I just finished my first wiki page and as I said, it isn’t much, but it will eventually be really cool, so if you want to check it out and hear some of my mixes and the tracks I have written, feel free to check them out and give me feedback =)  the link is:  http://wikihost.org/wikis/primmitiv

Just thought I would drop in to share a funny anecdote from today.  I am building a wiki to host some of my music and mixes so that people can check my stuff out and we can collaborate back and forth and such.  So, thanks to this class, I feel I have learned something (wiki) that will benefit me for a long time to come.  Even more interesting is the fact that I was getting ready to upload a file to the page and I couldn’t remember how to do it, so I was thinking about how I figured it out last time, and remembered that I had documented it on this wordpress page, so I came back and checked it out.  Now the page is coming along, I still don’t really know what I am doing, nevertheless, I am functional, so that’s all that matters for now.  I am sure the page will get better looking as my skills progress.  Just thought I would share =)  As for my project, I’m going shopping for stuff today at a few thrift stores downtown to see what I can find for the moving heart piece.  I’ll post more later =)

So, I have no other choice but to figure this out. Once again, as with pretty much everything so far in this class, I am clueless as to how to do something, but am positive the information is out there, I just have to go find it in the great abyss of knowledge that is the world wide web. I first attempted to simply copy what the others had done by checking the edit section on the page, but that didn’t help much. After fumbling around on the wiki and in the discussion list for a bit trying to find directions for uploading files to the wiki, I decided the information must be located somewhere else. I tried wikihost.com and wikihost.org much to no avail. Then, I went to gebogebo.com and checked their faq. Noticing that apparently everyone that uses these sites has a great deal more amount of knowledge regarding this subject than I do, I laughed at the 3 FAQs on the site, as I had no idea what the h3ll they were talking about, although I am sure it is basic stuff. Anyway, you know what they say, yeah? “When all else fails, check the manual….” Tee hee. I managed to locate it on the same page at gebogebo.com as the FAQ. For anyone else who hasn’t got their crap together yet, this is the link: http://gebogebo.org/programm/gebo.prg?name=manual:uploading .

This is making a lot of sense – that was dripping with sarcasm if you coudn’t tell. As I’m looking over these instructions, I vaguely remember John going over this in class and am now rifling through my class notes in a vain attempt to find the corresponding lecture day in which the instructions were given. I just want to see how I interpreted them, as I am sure that I wrote them in English.

K, so I am just going to try random things until I get it right. First, I am looking the other links on the wiki page “week of february 6th”, and I see that each person’s link starts like this: ((file, so I am doing that.  As I was doing that, I remembered that Jon said the link would be red because the page wasn’t really there yet.  Then, I read in the instruction manual the same thing – in a different language, but I recognized it this time.  So, I finished the line out like this:  ((file:bam ram ewe and ewe and ewe 2)).  Then, I clicked on it, and POoF!  there was the upload form!  Wow…it’s amazing what you learn if you try hard enough.  The best part of this is, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself right now.  The worst part of this is, I probably shoudn’t be due to the fact that I was actually supposed to have this done a couple or a few weeks ago =)  It happens.  I didn’t give up, and on top of that, I used my resources to teach myself how to do something I am completely unfamiliar with and don’t completely understand.  I feel that is a goal that this class is centered around and I have acheived it.

Wow, I’m sitting here getting ready to upload my pd thing to the wiki, and I can’t even remember how to get my file on there.  I should be ashamed of myself.

And I am. 

For my hello world, how are you assignment, I altered Steve Gu3’s Bam Ram Ewe.  I changed the oscillator to a phasor, and keyed the metronome down to 200.  This created a sawtooth in the array and measured points in the array less frequently.  I feel it created a very interesting sound.  It didn’t take long, I feel like a jerk for not getting it done sooner =(……..  =)

Never did work on that English homework, I made some soup and decided to try Pd instead.  The lecture today made me want to use Gem as part of my project, because there is a monitor in it.  If people could manipulate it while they’re standing in front of my project, that would be awesome.  However, I’m finding that I never got the Gem library in my computer correctly and didn’t think I would need it, so I never fixed it.  Should have known that would come back to haunt me.  Ah, the toils of being inept.

This is exactly what I’m talking about.  This manual automatically assumes that I will know how to use a voltmeter.  Right.  Because I knew a lot about this stuff before I signed up for the class.  Oh well, I feel like my mistake this semester is just getting too much on my plate, then getting frustrated and instead of persevering like I usually will, I have become overwhelmed and walked away.  It is not too late, though.  I am going to turn this ship around.  It may take a few more hours and a lot of blogging, but suprisingly the blogging helps.   Maybe I’ll figure out how to use the voltmeter on my own, seeing as how the instruction manual assumes that I already know how to use it, too.  .  I am sure some of you guys are laughing, because this is pretty rudimentary stuff, but I am also just as sure that there is something you know nothing about.  This stuff is pretty alien to me.  I prefer to buy my alarm clock.  Maybe next year I’ll build it.  Probably not.

Man, this thing is really frustrating.  Pd seems as clear as day when I’m watching someone do it, then I go to sit down and do something and it makes absolutely no sense.  In addition to that, my Pd doesn’t look the same when I pull it up as John’s does.  When Pd first comes up on his screen, all of these things are scrolling across on his.  Mine doesn’t do that.  I haven’t loaded the GEM library in there yet, though, so maybe that’s it.  All of these numbers and terms that I have no concept of the meaning of make it really hard to even teach yourself what to do.  So here I am w/a deadline of Thursday and nothing made yet.  I have faith that it will come together, I am just feeling ultra overwhelmed today and quite disenchanted.  That’s all I’ve got for now.  I need a cigarette, and not in a good way.

So, I realized that I have been slacking badly on this end of the project. This class is going to take a large amount of what little free time I had, I feel, at least until I get the basics of all of these new things I’m trying to learn down. I feel that this Pd program is incredibly interested; I am very excited that we’re going to hear from so many great lecturers, yet I am intimidated by the amount of work it’s going to take. John is right, it’s a bit overwhelming, but I’m willing to bet that it’s worth every second. More to come later, I’m going to work on Pd right now.   I’ll upload a file of what I accomplish =)  c u.  andrea

Fortunately, this is not as complicated as I had initially thought.