Things!!!

To prove my point about lists, as mentioned in the last post, I did three things yesterday. Woo-hoo! Break out the champagne!

Seriously, though, it's a good strategy. Write approximately ten things on the whiteboard that I could possibly work on today. Strike them out when they're mostly done, erase them when they're totally done. Add stuff as it pops into my head. Pick whichever one I want. Notice that the list does not include things like "look at porn", "watch whatever is on TV", or "spend about 5 hours babbling on IRC".

I think I did burn myself out a little, but that's okay. The three things I did were:

• Play with snippets of Kim's voice in Praat, analyze them, think out how I am going to design a piece of software that makes her into a renderable instrument (I call it the Kimthesizer), primarily for backup accompaniments. Though I didn't tangibly move many molecules -- or sorry, these days we don't move whole molecules, just electrons -- I did fire off some productive synapses in the brain. I am getting closer to a real plan of attack.
• Lay down a new bass part for the middle "chase sequence" of an oldie-but-creepie, known to (and despised by) my old friends as Insomnic Hallucinations. That section of the song is still a bit of a mess, and now so is my left hand. Most of the track is from one of the first few takes. Then I decided to do a few billion more.
• Code a video effect for applying a median filter to a series of bitmaps. Unlike the median filter in your imaging software, it doesn't compare to surrounding pixels. Instead it compares to the same pixel in several consecutive frames. Gives a sort of mild "trail" effect.

It's already 3:30 PM and so far this day has been mundane for me. What three things can I do today? I'd better get up and start walking around so my brain wakes up. Every day is a gift. Don't keep throwing them away.