Something I used to do everyday for hours without even thinking about it now is something I have to consciously schedule time for. Yes, I’ve been playing guitar for about 15 years now, and yes I’m married and own a home. None of those are excuses to not practice, though. No, the boring truth is that my talent peaked a while ago, and my creative ideas are more sparse and are often funneled elsewhere. Instead of something I initially binged on, losing myself in the art, playing the guitar is just something I do occasionally now, and I’m really just largely known for having played it more than actively plucking the strings.

This makes me sad.

Deep within the myriad web tutorials, eBooks, and tinkering/spelunking of others' projects on and with Ruby and Rails that I've penetrated with my curiosity comes an official announcement: I've embarked on my first, really real Ruby on Rails project.

In case you’re not actually seeing this post in its natural habitat, Lazy in the Blog has the new look above. Let me explain why.

Yesterday, I tweeted. This is not a signficant event anymore, but a friend responding to it directly can still be seen as something to make note of. The tweet was as follows:

As a composer, my biggest failing is continuously accepting mediocrity. Also, trying to compete in the age of the Internet.

Said friend asked for me to expand on this in an LJ post. I feel like the best way to do that is to actually start with the second statement first, as it’s more of a global issue, and to finish with the first, which seems more personal. Here we go.

It used to be a series of rituals each day. Check email to see if I got any comments on my latest LJ post. Check my LJ friends list to see what new posts had been made. Read the comments for the posts I was interested in. Maybe reply to one of the comments. Maybe become inspired to write an LJ post of my own. Check my LJ friends list to see what new posts had been made since I wrote up my latest post. Read the comments of those posts. Maybe reply to them. Lather, rinse, repeat. If all else failed, I’d add some new funny “interests” or upload a new usericon to amuse myself and others. Exhausting my friends’ content meant I could just look at the friends of my friends’ content and sometimes find a diamond in the rough I could add to my own personal coffers.

I bet I’m not the only one who had this routine at some point.

Through a combination of Firewire target disc mode, an external hard drive, Dropbox, and a few Internet downloads, I’ve got my new computer up and running for the most part. It is usable (to me). It’s not a proper DAW yet, though, as I still have to install my newly-acquired Logic Studio (10.0?) software and remake all of my symlinks to sound libraries. It is then that I will attempt to finish “Dumeh”. As far as being a good programming environment, there’s a lot to do there, too. Besides installing Textmate, I still need to migrate my old command line prompt environment, configure Apache, and install a bunch of Ruby gems.

My brand-spankin’ new MacBook Pro, hopefully without dent, has been shipped!

Making music is a way for me to express myself. It combines the somewhat mechanical method of constructing something new out of existing parts, but it also allows me to emotionally imbue something in a symbolic way. When words fail to properly display how I’m feeling, creating structured sound sometimes does the trick.

Over the course of my history of computer programming (which stretches from the simplest markup language to full-on compiled languages), I've tried out a lot of things. When my family got its first personal computer, an AST rocking a 100MHz Pentium 1 processor and Windows 3.1 (MPC level 2, baby!), it came with QBASIC alongside its foundational copy of DOS 6. I remember playing Gorillas on it, later marveling at the source code, not really understanding how it all worked.

A friend of mine mentioned doing the RPM Challenge back in February of 2010. Much like MUSIK 2003 and MUSIK 2006, it was a month-long challenge to make some music. Instead of doing a song a day, which is quite a drain of one’s creativity, the RPM Challenge was just to make an album in a month, considered to be either 10 songs or 35+ minutes of music.

You know it when you see it: bad code. It's not necessarily code that doesn't work (but it often is). Bad code is hard to parse, has needless complexity, and doesn't take advantage of the language's constructs for making your code easy to follow, edit, augment, and fix. We all have probably been guilty of producing bad code, either through ignorance or laziness. However, it's always something that should be avoided, if possible.

As evidenced by the subject, I'm on Github.

I recently completed (more or less) the Git Immersion tutorial by Jim Weirich, which walks you through the basics and intermediates of Git, the popular version control system.

I use SoundCloud because their little visual music players are rad as hell. They are easily embeddable anywhere. Their interface is well-designed and fun to use. With a free account you only get so much space to upload music (unlike my own host), but there’s a community worth contributing to so I try to put my best tracks there.

A Kotaku article about someone gaining the “courage” to ignore video game music was published online recently.

A blogger I respect, Cruise Elroy, wrote a response to it.

I am now writing a blog post responding to both.

Redmine is a great project management web application written using the Ruby on Rails framework. I've been using it to help myself organize all of the many coding (and recently music) projects I work on.

While I have one main, official musical collaboration under my belt (that of Pure Yellow Colour), I have met up with other musicians many times to do what we improvisers like to call "jamming". Break out some instruments and start playing. Sometimes there's a plan or some notes or words, but often it's just one person starting to play something while the others try to join in. It's a dance between a group of musicians that I can actually perform.

The exciting conclusion to Fallout: New Vegas was finally within my grasp last night. Be warned: there be spoilers abound.

My two flagship websites, Nebyooweb.com (web portfolio), and Nebyoolae.com (original music), have been updated to versions…uh…they’re newer.

Nebyooweb.com (Nebyoolae + web; genius, I know) is my personal web development/design portfolio. If anyone wants to know how I build websites, then this is a good portal. This new version has quite a few changes.