The big news of the day is that, having managed to reserve an iPad 2 online last night, I actually got into town in time to do so! So now I’m writing this on my very own iPad. Yaaaayyy!

So most of the afternoon has, of course been spent setting it up, loading apps, transferring settings, syncing, etc. And generally playing about, This was taken with the iPad’s camera using PhotoBooth:

Not sure that app will get a huge workout, but hey, it’s fun.

Also did a tiny photo walk today while waiting for Djelibeybi to arrive at Holborn for us to go and fetch the new member of our techno-family together. In the rain. Some nice shots, I think, but they’re on Flickr so I’ll add them in later.

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Well, not seriously. I didn’t really expect to just be able to walk in to the Apple Store at Shepherd’s Bush and walk out with an iPad 2. And look! I was right! But I did achieve my officially-stated goal of inspecting the covers. They’re very cute. Such a shame they didn’t make one that covers the back too. I mean, it’d be less sleek, but a whole lot more effective if you drop the thing. And of course there are no third-party covers out pretty much at all at the moment that one can inspect for feel, style and weight, so I guess I’ll have to go with an Apple cover, even if only for the interim. I was going to get an orange one but in RL the orange is a little yellowy and not really that grand. The red leather is gorgeous but way too expensive. The green is practically fluoro. So I’m thinking I might go for the low-key pale grey. Keep it nice and neutral. And maybe get a nice bright neoprene pouch for it to travel in. Summat like that. But of course first I have to get my paws on an actual iPad all of my own. Apple’s now opened up instore reservations from the website for next-day pickup, which I made an attempt with, but the wretched system let me get all the way through before telling me there weren’t any slots! VERY annoying.

I shall cease to talk about that experience any more. It was very frustrating. I shall probably be similarly frustrated every evening for several weeks to come.

Apart from that, not too much to report. I watched the last bit of the summary videos for the end of the first week of my JavaScript refresher course. So far I seem to understand everything. There’s been one or two newish concepts (or rather, concepts that I knew existed but didn’t know quite how they fitted in) but mostly – understandably – the first week’s been mostly about basic principles. I’m pleased to say that I got through the week’s coding challenge first time, and worked it out in just a few minutes. Huzzah! Not as dim as I felt I was!

I also finally sat down and went through the new orchestral song thingy trying to pick out themes. There really aren’t that many to speak of, which is a little disturbing. The piece itself seems to have stalled somewhat following its superhero start, which is disappointing. I should push myself more with it. The plan is to send it off to my tutor on Wednesday so he can see what I’ve been up to and prepare stuff accordingly if need be. Um.

And had a bit of a panicky doubting think about jobs and what I should be doing about them. Conclusion: I have no idea. I’m a total mess and don’t know what I should be doing. I’m enjoying the composition teaching, but that’s not really a money-making option (not enough private students and academia is out because a. I don’t have any contacts and b. I don’t have even a Masters degree). I like building websites but I don’t really like dealing with clients. Or people in general. I like publishing and so on but ditto. Which kind of seems to wipe out the work-for-myself option because there’s no getting away from clients when you’re freelance. I’m beginning to think that, in spite of all the conceptual journey I’ve been on over the past couple of months, I’m kind of back where I started: short term web contracts, while trying to bring in a little money from this and that on the side. Which is a little depressing. But I think it’s more practical. I got so caught up in the sideline stuff of getting my own business running that the music kind of got shunted to one side. And when I de-shunted it because it became clear that I might need to have to find a job sooner than expected and I didn’t want to waste composition time, then the business stuff ended up shunted. Maybe I can’t actually do both. How depressing. I want to be superwoman! (I’d prefer Batgirl because the outfit’s cuter, but still…) Anyway, thoughts still bubbling away, ideas about priorities and how do I deal with them. Still no solution on the if-I-get-a-real-job-how-do-I-keep-the-music-going-while-not-letting-down-either-my-employer-or-myself issue. Perhaps there never will be. If you have any suggestions, please comment away!

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Still recovering from the dental work and lower back pain. Honestly, I feel like an old woman! Must sort myself out before I crack up entirely. But it was a good day nevertheless. Small achievements.

• Had a letter from ING Direct offering me a fancy rate on a cash ISA for next year if I pre-ordered. And for once I actually just filled out the form and sent it straight away. So that’s good. Don’t need to think about savings for another year (apart from actually putting money in the thing).
• The bonus from my last employer for referring a new staff member to them came through. This is very exciting. £1000! Half of it is going to a friend because the girl I recommended is a friend of my friend. I’ve actually never met her, so it seemed only fair to share the loot. His half is going on a tax bill. My half is going on dentistry. Woah. Stop this crazy fun-filled ride?
• Wrote a blog post! For the first time in a couple of weeks my head was actually clear enough to think about and then write stuff. I think it might be mildly interesting to some folk. Maybe. Hope so. The hardest part about blogging is actually thinking up stuff that others might find interesting to read, but I guess that’s all part of finding your “Right People” – if it’s something you find interesting, then hopefully someone out there will find it interesting too. Time will tell. Traffic on caitlinrowley.com had a mysterious spike last Tuesday. No reason for it. I haven’t created much new content – posted a couple of files to SoundCloud (the Three Whitman Songs, if you missed it ), but that doesn’t usually generate backlink traffic because most people just play them and don’t read the blurb or go hunting for more info. And the promotion I did for those was directly to SoundCloud so no clue what’s happening there.
• And we watched A Single Man, which was amazing. Colin Firth is just incredible. So glad Djeli picked it. And he made me soup because I still can’t eat anything much that’s not squishy. What a darling. (Djelibeybi, not Colin Firth.)

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Alas, attempted is the word. Given yesterday’s root canal and ongoing lower back pain aggravated by an hour in the dentist’s chair, I wasn’t quite up to getting to the Apple Store at Shepherd’s Bush at 9, so I didn’t get there till 4ish and unfortunately that was too late. Shortly after I joined Djelibeybi in the line, a friendly Apple employee came by and told us that all the 3G iPad2s of any persuasion were claimed, so there wasn’t much point hanging around after that. Still, it was nice to get out of the house and smell the summery air – didn’t even need a jacket! Absolutely beautiful day.

Will try again early next week, but failing that I guess I’ll have to join the hordes ordering online and waiting a month to get theirs. *sigh*

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Not in that order! I finally pulled out my convoluted setup for recording stuff into Pro Tools this afternoon. Because I don’t have a proper microphone, this entails plugging my mini mic into the MiniDisc player, finding an expendable MD disc to put in the player, hitting pause & record, plugging the MD player into the Mbox, then the Mbox into the computer, then starting up Pro Tools and hoping everything finds where it should be without any trouble. Which it didn’t. Of course. And it took much grumbling and muttering and rude things said before I worked out that I had the wrong cable, then waited for Djelibeybi to get home from the gym to pull down his Big Bag of Cables and fish out the right one. But I got there in the end! YAY! And I even worked out comping to do multiple takes, one after the other which can then be patched together, which actually made a big difference. Not so much with the patching as with just being able to keep on singing and so generally improve my confidence and let my voice warm up over three or four takes. Very handy.

The result of which is that I have a rough but usable recording of my Three Whitman Songs very nearly ready to go. And just as well – the opera workshop thingy I need it to apply for is due on Monday, which means I need to get the whole thing in the post tomorrow, or first thing Thursday at the very latest, given Thursday’s root canal extravaganza.

I also did Day 3 of my JavaScript course, which was pretty good. Looking forward to really playing round with some proper code tomorrow.

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Feeling – if possible – even worse today than yesterday, so I’ve spent a lot of time in snooze-mode, which seems to be helping. Glad I started the antibiotics now. Not helped though by intense lower-back pain which I think has been caused by the landlord’s crapulous couch. Ow.

Day 2 of the JavaScript course today. Lots of reading. LOTS of reading. But it was really quite well done – digestible chunks. And I think I’m finally starting to see where Objects fit in. I understand why they’re a good thing, but I’ve never really got how they connect with other elements of the language and I think that’s starting to become clearer. Anyway, I guess I’ll find out when I start using them.

Amazon delivery arrived today: The ABRSM Grade 5 theory books, which I need for my teaching. Plus a book called Made to Stick, which sounds like it might be good for the eBook writing that I’ll get around to sometime.. very… soon.

Ploughing through my to-do list now, in spite of fuzzy, limited-capability brain. The new GTD system I’ve implemented seems to be working well. YAY. Next I have to find some time to revamp my paper files and do a TON of scanning. That will be less fun. Maybe in front of the TV sometime.

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Crappy-feeling day today which culminated in me deciding to finally take the antibiotics the dentist prescribed for me, just in case. And then realising just afterwards that the timing means that I’ll still be on them when I go to the dentist. Hoping they won’t interfere with the anaesthetic. I can’t imagine they would, but that would just suck.

Yesterday’s browser conference really made me feel how old-fashioned my skills are. Oh I’m grand at the HTML and CSS, but over the course of my last contract I was beginning to feel increasingly like a bit of a dinosaur because my JavaScript skills are such a mess. Basically, I learnt JS way back in 2000, but it’s a completely different beastie and with DOM scripting cobbled on top of my stone-age knowledge, and trying to mash in the whole object-oriented concept, it just hasn’t been working. Couple in the fact that I’ve not had much chance to use my JS in a considerable period of time and what you get is a horrible monster that looks nothing much like JavaScript at all. And there’s soooo much cool stuff you can do with it now! Especially in the realm of mobile apps and creating extensions for browsers and it’s starting to feel like if I don’t do something soon, I’ll be totally left behind and semi-unemployable. I’ll never be a JS ninja, I’m sure, but I can at least take a stab at getting my skills to a level where I can write stuff that ninjas can then optimise without sniggering.

Fortuitously, SitePoint is having a sale. So I’ve signed up for their offer, which is a 3-week online JavaScript course, plus a 3-week online course in PHP/SQL plus 3 books on website hosting in the cloud, PHP/MySQL and SQL, which can’t go astray. And considering the cost of the whole bundle is less than just getting the two courses, I’m pretty happy with that.

So I did lesson one of the JavaScript course today (leaving the PHP for a little – I’ll either do it when I’ve finished the JS, or at least when I’m a little further along so I’m not doing two rounds of beginner stuff at once, even though I’m not an absolute beginner in either) and it’s looking pretty good: HTML5 for the HTML parts and in the course of creating a simple “Hello World!” alert, the tutor managed to slide in a nice point about the difference it can make between putting your script in the head of the document and at the bottom of the body. Smooth

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Today was the State of the Browser one-day conference organised by London Web Standards. Which meant I had to wake up at stupid o’clock in order to be in North Greenwich somewhere in the vicinity of 9am, which was painful, but it was a good day – some interesting stuff out there, but unfortunately the chap who was going to talk on IE9 couldn’t come as his wife had been in a car crash the day before. Which was, of course, entirely understandable (I believe she’s fine though, if you were concerned) but I was a little astounded that Microsoft couldn’t manage to provide anybody else at all to talk about their latest and much-hyped browser to the people who have to develop for it. Who knows why? But bizarre. Apparently the guy who was supposed to speak is going to record the speech once everything settles down and it’ll be distributed to the attendees online, which is cool.

Anyway, the summary basically is: all browser manufacturers are doing cool stuff with HTML 5. They are not all doing the same cool stuff. Which was all kind of a given, but it was still quite nice to see the sort of cool stuff that’s being played with.

The breakout sessions were good – I went along to one on Jetpack, a new streamlined way of creating Add-Ons for Firefox 4 using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript, then one on “Performance Optimisation for HTML 5 apps” which wasn’t actually about HTML 5, it was about JavaScript. Still interesting and useful, though I was a little out of my depth in places.

There was a lot of JS being bandied about and I think the time has come to do a bit of refresher work on mine – I first learnt JavaScript from tutorials on the net way back in 2000, when it was an entirely different beast. Gluing on DOM manipulation and vague half-understood concepts of Object-Oriented Programming has not helped my confidence in my JS skills. I can write JavaScript, I’m just not really writing MODERN JavaScript.

I can read (eventually) what’s going on in a script, but I lack the skills to mostly be able to say “Oh, this and then that and … ah. This” – it’s more “um… I think this… then that? Maybe… ooh – what’s that???”. I can get there in the end, but it requires so much looking up and testing and re-testing to do the simplest thing that it’s just not the best use of my time for the client.

So I think some sort of brief refresher might be a good place to start. SitePoint is doing online training courses now and have a special deal for a 3-week JS course + a 3-week PHP course (which would also be very useful and hopefully consolidate the bits and pieces I’ve kind of picked up by poking at it in the past) plus 3 e-books on PHP/SQL sites and cloud hosting, all for less than the two courses would cost on their own.

Special’s only for a couple of days, so I’ll sleep on it and see how I feel about it in the morning. Feels like a lot to take on, when I’ve got so much to do anyway, but I’m beginning to feel like I need to do something just so I don’t flounder so much. Feel so old! And that wasn’t helped by the leader of the 2nd breakout session saying “Who remembers Netscape 4?” and me being the only person to raise a hand, while thinking to myself “I remember Netscape 3. And IE 2. Good grief. How did I ever get so old??” Things like this shouldn’t happen shortly before birthdays.

Had a great conversation over lunch too with Jamie Knight (and Lion) – really lovely to just be able to chat so freely with someone. Normally I find talking to strangers quite hard work – either it’s hard to find common ground, or I can’t think of anything to say or I end up feeling deeply inadequate, especially if the conversation takes a turn into unfamiliar waters. Of course, it can be rewarding too, but it’s just wonderful when the chat just flows along. Kinda made my day

Anyway, I ended up not staying till the end. By the early end of the second breakout session my brain felt extremely full, so I figured I wouldn’t hang around for the 45-odd minutes till the Q&A session started, but head home to a quiet cup on tea and a contemplate while my brain was still capable. Mmmm tea.

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It feels somewhat miraculous to have achieved a second composition lesson, given the stops and starts there’ve been. But yes, it happened this evening. And it was good. Simon brought along the scores of Paganini’s Caprices and Bach’s Partita and we looked at violin writing and what else might be done with the (ostensibly completed) Diabolus. Still some good ideas coming through – some of which I think I might touch on in the blog post when I (hopefully) get around to writing it on Sunday. In particular I liked his idea of making a bunch of versions and sending a different one to various violinists I might know, asking them each to make a recording, then listening to them all and seeing what works. Might actually follow through on this – might be a really good way to see how various things sound rather than just guessing what sounds right. Guess I’ll need to make a list of violinists now…

The rest of the day was pretty tame, but quite nice. A troubled night due to the troublesome dentals (6 days to root canal) and woke up with a crashing headache – haven’t had one of those in months, so I didn’t push myself too much but mostly tinkered around with fixing up my GTD implementation – my to-do lists in Remember the Milk had become insanely unweildy and totally unusable, so I deleted everything except my Tickler list and am starting again with a new approach. Ended up shunting about 15 projects into Someday/Maybe which had crept into Current, but just weren’t being dealt with and weren’t about to be. Someday/Maybe now lives in Evernote, which I think will help keep RTM much cleaner and entirely about the “what am I doing now” rather than the “hmm, what to play with next?”. I also went to Ryman’s and bought a stack of manila folders because my filing system’s no longer a system and needs help. Feels really, REALLY good to be getting organised again and feeling more confident that I know what needs to be done and what should be done nowish.

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Today I finally managed to get to a Composition Workshop class at TVU. I felt a bit nervous going in – after all, semester’s been running for about 5 weeks now so it felt a bit weird to just be sauntering in so late in the term, but I needn’t have worried. It was an interesting session – I can tell I’m going to learn all sorts of unexpected stuff in this class. Today’s 2 hour lecture-demonstration was on creating a dubstep remix of Pierre Schaefer’s 1948 musique concrète work Études aux chemins fers with particular focus on the artifacts of time-stretching, so it was all about pulling the base sound around and listening to the weird and fabulous effects created as Logic attempts to fill in the gaps created by the stretching with granular synthesis. Way cool. Not that I actually know what dubstep is. Guess I should go and look that up, huh?

Made a little progress on the new piece. Another 10 seconds. And I seem to have found a text too. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Carrion Comfort:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

It’s raaather longer than I had been thinking. Indeed the whole piece seems to be thinking of itself on a somewhat epic scale, but anyway, I’ll see how it goes. If it’s coming along well but is incomplete, it may be appropriate anyway for Manchester. I can write to them a little closer to the date and see if that would be acceptable.

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