Work is Good

Just when I thought my work couldn't get any better (nerdier), all this week I've been learning how to test delays and levels and stuff with oscilloscopes and Audio Precision hardware. Woo hoo!

Though I've had to get up and go to work early for the past four weeks (with no end in sight yet), I'm really fitting in well here. I'm getting to know most of the people I work with in engineering and I've really excelled at the tasks at hand.

On a related note, going into work early has allowed me to get out a bit early too. This has given me time to go for a long run almost every day for the past couple of weeks. I'm up to a daily run of about six miles without soreness or fatigue during or after. I've had a chance to go running all over Lowell, really appreciating the city that I'm about to leave (it's not all that melodramatic, though, since I'm moving three miles away to the next town over).

Kimberly and I have really managed to fill our calendar lately. There's barely a day in the next few weeks without a meeting here or a necessary trip there. I used to think that October would be the time when things settled down, but between finishing up the move, Kimberly's trip to South Carolina, and a Journey Group Leader's retreat, that month is getting pretty dense already. November! I'll relax a bit then...

Accountability

Alright, it's been several weeks since I started my new job and even longer since I began my stressful job transition. Before that period started I was on a pretty healthy schedule as far as exercise and diet went. When things got rough at work some of that discipline went out the window. During my two weeks off I did develop a helpful habit of keeping up on the household chores when Kimberly wasn't around. Now this has faded. In the past couple of months I've been practicing my bass more than at any other point in my life, including when I was in college, but I've barely touched it this week. It's definitely time for me to hoist myself back up to par.

Here is the ambitious list of things that I want to develop or redevelop as regular disciplines in the next couple weeks:

1) Exercise/run 4-5 times a week.
2) Count and journal calories.
3) Keep a modest and accurate budget.
4) Spend at least a half an hour a day with God, in scripture, meditation, or prayer. (This would be a totally new discipline for me.)
5) Spend at least a half an hour a day playing my bass or another instrument.
6) Plan at least one night a week to be outside the house with the sole purpose of spending time with Kimberly (be it a 20 minute walk or a dinner date).

I mention these things here to have some semi-public accountability. I'll make sure to note my progress or failure here every week.

Wish me luck...

Checking in.

I had a great weekend. We went to IKEA for the first time ever and bought some cool new stuff (Kimberly wrote about our trip in her latest entry too). We took it home and I rearranged the living room and the office, which was such a breath of fresh air after living with the same configuration for an entire year.

We picked up Harry Potter Seven, but I am still in the process of re-reading #6 so that I can be as up to speed as possible while finally finishing the series. I'm understandably anxious to get this book over with so I can start the one that I've been waiting to read for so long. I just got back from a half hour of reading and eating my lunch in the car. I'm down to the last 100 pages.

Otherwise life is going very well. Our small group just entered new and exciting phase of its existence (a fresh approach to there, just like with the apartment), the new job continues to be an amazingly good fit for me, and tonight we're going to renew our memberships to the UMass Lowell Campus Rec Center and start working out again.

We're still without a working DSL connection, which is frustrating, but we'll survive until we get connected again, somehow. Google wants us all to be connected all of the time. Too bad they haven't accomplished their goals yet. If they had we wouldn't have to stick the laptop in the bedroom window to check our email at night.

A quick update on the new job...

Week one has been great! So far it seems that I'm a great fit for the position, my coworkers and boss are very nice and enthusiastic, and I'm picking things up quite quickly. I am still waiting for the catch.

Thanks to everyone that prayed for me and Kimberly as we went through this long transition. Things can now slowly come to a place of more stability and rest. Things certainly would have been much more difficult if not for our friends.

Over the hump...

...of my work marathon before we leave on vacation this Wednesday.

Yesterday morning Kimberly and I got up bright and early in order to get to Rocking Horse Studio in Pittsfield, NH by 9:00AM. I delivered some 1032A speakers that they purchased from us and measured and calibrated them in their control room. Though I'm quite familiar with our MLS software, this was the first time that I visited a client for a calibration by myself (Kimberly was my lovely assistant). Everything went well and it was great to put my acoustics knowledge to practice and show the engineers there how their speakers were interacting with their control room.


After we finished up there we went a couple of towns up to Tilton, to the Tilt'n Diner and then the outlet stores. I got a new light jacket at Wilson's for a wicked deal, and Kimberly got some new dressy shirts for the conference.

Today I got up bright and early once again and went to worship band practice and church. After second service I stopped by the house to pick up some food and then went down to Acton to the Wellspring Sound for a recording session. I engineered a three song demo for a young operatic tenor with his teacher accompanying on piano. It was a ton of fun to be back in the studio, especially after taking a half hour or so to refamiliarize myself with the nuances of the setup there.

So now I have two working days before our vacation to Pittsburgh, and I'm expecting them to be long ones. Since all of our freight for our next trade show in April will be shipping the week that I get back, I have to have everything packed before I leave on Tuesday, which is no small task. I'm feeling much better after finishing everything exciting and stressful I had lined up this weekend though.

In other news, our ram overlords are closer than you might think.

It's 2:15AM and I find myself awake and contemplative...

Stress related insomnia :-/

So I've decided to go back to school, one way or another. Most people with bachelor's degrees go on to careers, or post-graduate studies, or both. I am inclining rather strongly toward the initially less lucrative, counter-cultural second bachelor's degree. Many considerations have gone into this decision and I'd like to lay them out for my own benefit.

The first vital step is examining my current degree: Bachelor of Music, Sound Recording Technology, Magna cum laude. This degree is presented as being not of the trade school, instructional sort, but rather as conceptual and theoretical. That is, in fact, exactly what it is. I did not finish the program with total understanding of the workings of a professional music recording studio, but rather with a foundation that allowed me to adapt and quickly comprehend a host of audio related concepts. This wonderful sounding truth is exactly where I find myself in trouble.

At this point in my life, I'm on the verge of regret over choosing and completing this degree. I cannot, however, bring this sentiment to its conclusion. I do not regret pursuing a recording degree. I love this art, and I am proud to have worked so hard to be a part of it. If I do regret anything about my tertiary education thus far, it is that I didn't sooner understand the state of my industry, sometimes ignoring signs about my personality or direct but sparse warnings from others.

The state of my industry is such that the barriers to being an architect or pioneer of the technology are too great for my degree to bridge. The signs about my personality were that though I love recording, I'm fundamentally not a producer, but a conceptualist. The warnings from other similarly minded people were that if they could do it all over, they would have a double major in recording and proper engineering.

Though proper engineering will forever remain a fundamental component of my industry, a trend that began decades ago, digital audio, has come to totally dominate. More and more functions that were once in the domain of mechanical and electrical engineers are now the brainchildren of computer programmers.

So I find myself craving entry into a world that is just out of reach. My solution is to take a cue from this industry trend toward bits over circuits and supplement my education with a second foundation: computer science. The end result of this huge undertaking will be that I'll be in a rather elite position of being intimate with both sides of the industry, which is the point at which I will truly find myself at home in professional audio.

Monday

Wow, I actually finished everything on my list for yesterday evening. I think I was partially motivated by the fact that I wrote it down here. Taxes looked scary for a while, as Kimberly had an improper amount taken from her check at both of her jobs early in 2006, but I found an educational credit that she hadn't been eligible for in the past that she could take this year, so we'll be getting a decent refund!

I also had the chance to check out a bit more of a PHP tutorial last night. I've recently decided that I'm going to go back to school to get a second bachelor's degree, this time in computer science. Any survey of the music industry will reveal the host of opportunities that this sort of degree could provide, and the deeper I get into this industry, the more compelled I am by acoustic research and product development.

I've begun studying PHP in particular not for these ends, but because (with the invaluable help of Tony Astolfi) I've been working on an idea to help increase the transparency of the warehouse at my work. If we had a web app that could interface with our printed product codes, it would be very easy to communicate the location of any item in the warehouse.

This evening we're picking up a book for one of Kimberly's classes at the Lowell Public Library and then heading out to do some shopping. It is looking like Wednesday will be our first full evening staying in since last Monday. Making proper use of the time we are given is a constant challenge.

Stand plate, anyone?