A man and a musician

A quick thanks to the guys at Zero Paid for writing about my article on my music being on BitTorrent now. I’d like to add to any readers who may have come my way that soon I am putting my releases on public BitTorrent trackers as well. And a quick warning that my music is kind of odd

Also, has anyone seen the Nova Song Records page I put up? It’s a good way to follow all my releases, because I don’t always release under my name, and I like to organize things. That page is the best way to keep up to date with the material I may have created but never released. Can you say “rarities”?

I went to Michigan last week, sort of. It definitely started out on the wrong foot – my brother and I were supposed to get on this one flight out of Philadelphia International Airport, but it got cancelled. That wasn’t before we were stuck on the plane on the runway for a good 4 hours, at least (no exaggeration!). The airport gave us hotel and meal vouchers because there weren’t any flights left that night, so we made our way to a hotel… only to be told that since I was under 21, I couldn’t register a hotel room in Pennsylvania. Totally stupid considering I have done it in other states before. So we cross a bustling highway with our luggage and go to a shadier hotel which took us, no questions asked… it was nice, even if the elevator smelt a bit funky. The next day, we got on another flight after waiting in the airport for 6 hours (met the coolest dude ever however). That flight gets delayed for an hour or two before we finally get in the air.

It was nice to finally get into Michigan (Detroit Int.), even if it was at like 11PM. Went to Cedar Point the next morning with a bunch of Liz’s friends, it was a nice 2 hour drive with some total strangers. Had a good time there, even if I wussed-out of a lot of the roller coasters. The next day was filled with packing mostly all day, with a going-away dinner for my sister that night. The next day was pack, pack, pack some more, now with a truck we had to load. It was a long, long two days, and the next day wasn’t anything to scoff at either. Close to 12 hours on the highway (a 10 hour drive + 2 hours simply because the truck maxed out around 65MPH and like 55 up hills). I drove most of that, too, I’d say about 9 of those hours were mine.

Anyway, it’s nice to be home now, my sister has been doing job interviews in New Jersey, and I’ve been toying around with electronics, because I got a whole crapload of parts in the mail while I was 500 miles away. tk47srebgd

For the last week or so I’ve been looking up ways to build my own synthesizer. One thing led to another, and that led to me discovering and reading up on the Arduino. It’s a sweet micro processor which makes it easy to build circuits and program them on your computer. What really sold it for me, besides all the already amazing features, was that the development IDE was available on all three main OS platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X).

My first circuit with the Arduino

So I just got mine in the mail yesterday and already I’ve fallen in love with it. So much so that I’ve been scrounging around the house for more electronics parts. I opened up an old junk remote and scrapped an LED and a capacitor… an old motherboard gave me a 3.3 miliFarad capacitor (that’s just the start, too). I ordered some more components, such as resistors, an LCD screen, a speaker, more wires, LEDs, etc. from AllElectronics (I used to order 1/4″ -> 1/8″ adaptors from them). The thing is, they probably won’t arrive until Friday when my brother and I will be on a flight to Philadelphia. I won’t even be able to play around much with it until August rolls around.

To the right is a picture of a push button circuit I made with the Arduino (alas, only following an example). Push the button and a light goes on. Look out technology, here I come.

Well, I’ve finally given into temptation and a few other factors and switched my website to something a little more manageable. So instead of having to browse through endless lines of code to get something done on my website now, I can just let WordPress do all the work for me. Pretty sweet I guess, but I don’t think it will ever replace the soul of my old website. Anyhow, I’m still manageing the switchover so some things are still a little weird. My site root (http://www.novakeith.net) is probably temporary at the moment. This theme has a few tweaks I need to put it through yet. But still, it feels good not to have to code this stuff anymore (as the person who helped me set this blog up, Flowsion, had said, it sucks having to reinvent the wheel).

So besides working on this site migration I’m fairly the same. In about 3 weeks time, my brother and I will be in Michigan with our sister, for a week. Musically things have been a little dry, but that happens. Looking forward to some new prospects though, we’ll see how they all pan out (this entire sentence feels inspired by a gold rush).