Being Productive Like a Mofo

I finally got some quiet time this weekend to get some stuff done.  I finished the 5th track for Tesla, and already knew what I wanted to do (more or less) for the 6th, so I started working on it on Saturday night and finished it up today.  Just two more before Ron can do the artwork and his coder can cobble together the app to submit to the App Store.  There will probably be two more tracks to do for an update later on, bringing the total to a full “album” at 10 tracks.  I’m kind of excited now that I’m kind of in the home stretch.  Although the update to Theme Park Madness with my 4 tracks will probably be out before this AmbiScience app is released, I’m rather more excited about this.  The TPM tracks were extremely short (~30 seconds to a minute and change) and partly made to spec, while the AmbiScience tracks are all my own creations.  Thematic, yes, but my theme, too.  Apparently other artists have approached Ron at Tesla about doing music for some other AmbiScience tracks.  It’ll be interesting to see if their material is decent.

Okay, so I didn’t get any reviews done this weekend.  What else is new?  I really wanted to get work done on the songs since I really didn’t get a chance to over the last week and change.  I picked at track 5 here and there, but I was either too tired or too busy to give it the attention it needed until this weekend, where I got plenty of rest, which resulted in me getting my mojo back.  Now if only I can carry this into the week ahead.

Anyway, I’ve got to head off to continue to make dinner and snap some screenshots for more reviews.

Tags: ambiscience, movile, music, tesla software, theme park madness

Zombie

I was a zombie yesterday.  A card-carrying, brain-munching, shambling zombie even George A. Romero would have been freaked out by.  It’s that time of year, y’see, as I mentioned in my last post, and Monday night, the night time temperature was right at that shade where it’s too cool to sleep with just a light sheet, but not enough to fully require a blanket.  As a result, I just couldn’t get comfortable and ended up tossing and turning most of the night.  The last time I remember looking at the clock it was just past 5:00am.  My alarm goes off at 6:30.  I did hit snooze a few times for some extra Z’s, but it didn’t help any.

I should have just stayed up and pulled an all-nighter.  I haven’t done that in years — age steals your energy — but it probably would have been better to keep trying to fight off sleep I never got than shake off the woefully insufficient sleep I did. Heck, I could have gotten a few things done maybe.  Oh well, done is done.  I made a point of getting to bed early last night (11:30pm is early for me), but the temperature was warmer — actually quite comfortable once I settled in — so I fell asleep pretty quickly and got a decent amount of quality rest, which means I’ve got my shi– stuff together today and I’m ready to get back to blogging throughout the day and get some iPhone-related work done this evening; I should have had at least one more track sent off to Tesla by now, but I’m late.  I did make headway on it but not as much as I’d like thanks to the damn weather and lack of AC.

But I should get to the blogging before I get too busy with my actual day job.

Tags: sleep, the cranberries, weather, zombie

Long Weekend Absence

Yes, I know I haven’t been posting to Frapstr this weekend.  It’s the Victoria Day long weekend here in Canada, and I’ve wanted to take the opportunity of the extended time off work to get a few other things done that has demanded my time.  Primarily I’ve wanted to get some mileage on the music for Tesla so I can finally get that done and shipped off to the App Store.  I’ve also been recovering from last week, where I really didn’t get a whole lot of sleep during the week.  The main culprit there is temperature: I live in an apartment building in Brampton, Ontario, and there are city bylaws which dictate when apartment buildings can turn on the central air conditioning in the spring.  (And likewise, the heat in the fall.)  Unfortunately the city has adopted a relatively unreasonable position on this, because the AC doesn’t come on ’til mid June.  So there is a period throughout the latter part of May, and especially into June, where the nights are uncomfortably warm without AC, so I have fans blasting to help cool down.  Unfortunately there’s sometimes no happy medium where I can get wholly comfortable and get some sleep, so I end up tossing and turning for half the night and not getting a decent night’s rest.  It’s one reason I want to get the hell out of Brampton.

Anyway, I love spring, really, it’s just that one sticking point with the AC that pisses me off and causes some sleepless nights.  Work isn’t the only thing I’ve been devoting this weekend to though.  I’ve also made a point of getting some quality time in with Fallout 3.  I love this game, though I’m annoyed at how Bethesda borked the levelling system.  It isn’t so much the way you level up, but the speed at which you do so, because they put a cap on the maximum levels you can achieve: Level 20.  If you’re an explorer and want to go through the whole map completing as much of it as you can, you’ll be maxed out before you even get to the halfway point.  Fortunately some nice third party hacks have opened up the levelling cap and bypassed some of the problems associated with doing so, and now I’m continuing on with the game like normal.  Fun.

I’ve still got a number of reviews in the queue to post so I will be getting to those shortly, either later tonight or tomorrow.  But for now I’m making dinner, and I’m hongry.

Tags: ambiscience, bethesda, fallout 3, long weekend, music, teslasoft, victoria day

Crazy Days

Well that was a short weekend, and it was followed by a crazy Monday.  The weekend saw no reviews done. Instead I was working on the tracks for Tesla.  Well, one track in particular, as it was a bit more complicated than the two others I’d done.  I finished it on Sunday night though so now I can move on to the 4th track.  I think I’m going to stick to keeping it relatively simple so as not to drag this out too long.  I’m pretty pleased with the work I’ve done so far though.  I’m really getting to explore musical territory I’ve never ventured into before — both thematically and compositionally.  It’s fun, and it’s broadening my horizons, which is never bad.  I’m still really just feeling my way through it though, but I think the end result will be good.

Not every waking hour was spent composing though.  I did get some quality time in with Fallout 3, too.  I finished it once because I inadvertently started following the main plot almost exclusively, so it ended rather suddenly with a dozen side quests unsolved, dozens more undiscovered, and a ton of unexplored territory.  Now I’m going through it while following through on side quests and exploring everything I missed.  It’s weird, because in Oblivion there were so many side quests that I felt like progress on the main quest was slow — but that was good.  Although I got bored of closing Oblivion gates all over the place I enjoyed the loads of side quests.  It seems like there are fewer of those in Fallout 3 — though again there’s lots I haven’t explored yet, so I’m probably missing loads of them.

I didn’t get much sleep last night though, and I’ve been dog tired all day, hence the lack of reviews today as well — though I’m still going to get one done this evening so I’m not too long between reviews.  It’ll be an early night tonight, both because I need it, and because the work day was relatively nuts.  It’s always tougher to head into a seasonally busy time of year suddenly when the last while had been comparatively quiet.  Good for business, bad for stealing time away from work to blog.  So it goes.  But I’m positively beat.  I’ve got other things to do this evening but if I can get one review in, great.  If I get some quality sleep tonight then I should be able to polish off one or two tomorrow — work permitting.  I’ve got a decent backlog I’m working through, so there’s plenty to keep me busy on that front.

Touch Podium seems to be dead.  The last post was end of March.  A month without a post.  I feel bad; I mean, Jody and I started that up from scratch and built it into a pretty decent news site.  But ever since Frapstr took off I’ve been busy with that, not to mention my various iPhone projects, beta testing a few apps, learning iPhone development, and so on.  I hate to see TP languish like that, but I’m spread agonizingly thin as it is; I can barely scrape together the time to juggle what I’m already doing.  *sigh*  If only we had the money to hire a few pros to take some reigns.  Maybe when I finally learn iPhone programming well enough to churn out some good stuff we’ll have some spare cash to spend on writers.  I guess we’ll have to see how it goes.  I know Jody’s working mad hours which explains his absence from the site.  Life first and all that.

For now though it’s back to doing what I need to do this evening.  Just wanted to post an update.

Tags: ambiscience, fallout 3, music, oblivion, tesla software, work