Twenty Twelve

Again with the writing ...

School / Key

School! It's almost done! And my Key project is coming to a close too. So far, I've prototyped a web app for funding and distribution, and I'm in the process of documenting that. In the remaining weeks, I'll also be researching and potentially prototyping another application to facilitate open source remixes. The idea here is that songs are uploaded in entirety and as stems (individual instrument tracks) so that others can mix and remix. I'm hoping to look at what would be required to maintain relationships between all of this music so that we could see a (hopefully) interesting graph of remixes. I'm looking at ccMixter and Opsound to find out more about what others are doing in this space.

Music

I've written, scrawled notes about, performed, and recorded phone or laptop demos of the music I've written over the last five years, but I've yet to record and produce something actually polished. I want to do that before I leave school, and before I leave WRUR, in particular. I have a studio there with the tools to record and mix everything, so I just need to do it. And I need to do it before June.

I actually got a decent start on this over the winter break, recording a few acoustic guitar takes for two songs. I need to go over all of that work and finish recording the rest of the guitars and vocals, but it's started. I'm going to try and post updates about this throughout the semester.

Hacking

I never really thought of myself as much of a hacker, no matter how much interest or respect I had for the culture. But I am starting to feel like I might belong. If anyone reading is thinking that I am warming up to identity theft and cracking into bank accounts, that's not what I'm talking about. Being a hacker is about tinkering, exploring, using technology in unusual or unintended ways, and finding unexpected solutions to interesting problems. See the Wikipedia article for Hackers, or to put it in the context of one of my classes:

Hackers ... toy with, or augment expectations of, the normal operating procedure of current systems [and environments]. ... They disrupt the mechanisms of everyday life, repurpose consumer technology, and unravel the nature of digitality.
Subvert! from New Art/Science Affinities, Oct 2011

My first real adventure as a hacker was (still is) creating BbQuick, an open source Chrome extension that makes using the University of Rochester's Blackboard Learn (the online course software) much, much faster and simpler. The normal application is a huge bloated mess, full of frames, and all of the content you actually want and need is buried in or obscured by garbage. So for my final project for Jeff Bigham's Human Computer Interaction (Fall 2011), I started developing this extension with a small group.

It's a really exciting project because I don't have to worry about a lot of things: I'm building a third party application on top of another piece of software, so I don't have to worry about making sure a huge web application works. I just get to collect a few things and display and organize them in a way that actually makes sense. The entire point of this project is to take Blackboard and make it better. I get fix things that aren't good enough. Awesome.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's a walk in the park, and BbQuick has its own quirks and bugs. But it's free and open source software, so if I don't get to something by the time I leave Rochester, I hope someone else will! I'm planning to release it on the Chrome Web Store within a few weeks, and I'll try to get some real student users and feedback.

Employment / Summer

The summer is intimidating. I've been applying for web development jobs on and off, but nothing has gone that well. I still have a handful of companies I want to apply to, but I wanted to get more practice at other companies before applying to the ones I'm really interested in. Unfortunately, all of these attempts have ended with "we're not interested." So I don't know where I'm headed, exactly. Recently, I started thinking more seriously about how to become involved in the arts. I don't know exactly how, whether it's hacking for some digital art projects, working in theater, making music, or something else entirely. I'm still to find that out, but I'm keeping an open mind, and looking forward to whatever it is. I think it will be interesting to see where I'm at in August, after the dust has settled and I (probably? hopefully?) have some real direction.

Writing

Lastly, I want to start writing more for real. So, I hope to put something up here about once a week, about whatever is going on, be it music or hacking or a job (!).