It’s been awhile since I last wrote. The deep cold, long dark nights and bleak days continue without interruption. Five weeks now with only one or two afternoons barely breaking freezing. Snow still on the ground from December has crusted up to ice and is covered over by newer layers like a fossil record. I’ve been trying to keep busy by working on music and origami lest the season work its way thru my bones and into my soul. Making progress on that stuff, albeit slowly. A new version of my origami Lizard is basically finished. But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
I have been reading Martin’s blog about his new music recoding efforts. I have some stuff to say, partially in response, about song writing and recoding from my own POV, particularly in regards to the guitar and the bass. But it’s been hard pulling all that together and I realize it’s probably more than one topic, so hopefully I can get to that some time soon.
I’ve also been really busy at work getting up to speed with the Platform Group. A bunch of new people have joined, so the lot of have been going thru three weeks of twice daily meetings to learn about the whole platform architecture, application stack from soup to nuts. As well current state and future plans of the project. It’s valuable stuff but alot to absorb in a short amount of time. Basically like school. And on top of this I’ve been getting into the code base and working on fixing bugs and adding new features from day one.
Tuesday into Wednesday a storm of snow and freezing rain descended on us. I worked from home on Wednesday because the kids’ school was cancelled. That morning my old laptop finally gave up the ghost for good. It went to sleep and wouldn’t wake up. My best guess is the power manager is fried and thinks the battery is dead and can’t tell that it’s plugged in. At least I successfully migrated my music production off that machine, and I have a recent full backup, and most of my most recent work is on a thumb drive, so the timing of it was not too bad. Unable to face the prospect of another week or more of downtime trying, probably in vain, to fix the machine yet again, I went out and got a new computer.
Fortunately there’s an Apple Store right near my office, so I swung by the next morning and picked up a new MacBook Pro. So that’s the end of Microsoft OS for me for the foreseeable future (BootCamp and Parallels notwithstanding), and good riddance. Now instead of trying to recover and old dead machine, I have the slightly less dreary task of installing all the software and my data on the new machine. I feel like I’ve done this so many times that I’ve stacked up the carcasses of old computers like so many cloned conjurors a la The Prestige. Ah well, hopefully this one will last me a few years and it’ll be a good long while before I have to go thru this again.