All posts by Mark

Fitness

Power 90

Wendy and I were lazing away one Sunday morning earlier this month when we saw an infomercial for P90X, a workout program that claimed to get you “ripped” in 90 days. It totally appealed to me. No silly dancers. No weak ass moves, just intense exercise and a solid diet based on real food.

Why did it appeal to me? I’m tired of being tired. Tired of running out of gas after 50 feet.

So we talked about it, and decided to order it. Of course, not until after I ordered did I find that there’s sort of a minimum fitness requirement in order to be able to do it well, and I certainly am not capable of meeting that requirement right now.

But I also found out that the same trainer has another program that’s been out for years called Power 90, which is meant to be a wight loss bootcamp. And it was half the price of P90X and didn’t require any more equipment than a couple of dumbbells or resistance bands. Can you say “ordered”?

We’ve already started to modify the food we’re taking in, trying to maximize the good stuff and limit the crap. I’m also trying to keep my calorie count down to about 1600 calories a day which should, were I to do nothing else, allow me to lose some weight over time, according to webmd, about a pound a week. But I want more than that. I’m not interested in taking more than a year to lose all the weight I need to lose, and besides, I don’t just want to be a skinny guy with no strength or stamina.

So I’m gonna bust it on P90, then move on to P90X and see what happens. We’re planning on getting season passes to Wild Waves this year, and I want to take advantage of them.

Writing

Oh, Hey, It’s 2009!

So, in addition to my other projects, I’ve added one more. Many years ago, I wrote a novel, one I have an attachment to, but never sold. I started another one, and put a little over 80,000 words into it before I stopped writing for one reason or another. Over the years since then, I’ve started a number of other books, none of which passed the 10,000 word mark. I’ve never really stopped coming up with stories to tell. I just never manage to get around to telling them completely.

So I’ve resolved this year to get one of them finished and dropped in the mail. I’m starting from an aborted NaNoWriMo entry from a couple years ago. I don’t have a whole lot of notes as to what was going to happen after the bit that I have, but that leaves me lots of room to maneuver. I had notes at one time, I’m sure of it, but it seems they’ve gone missing among the piles of files on various computers. I’m going to spend some time organizing those as well, in the hopes that I’ll come across those notes, but I will probably have passed the point where they are useful before I find them.

Motto for the year:

Don’t think. Do.

Writing

Besides, I Don’t Know What’s Good About My Crap, Anyway

One particular article of Dean Wesley Smith’s is this one where he discusses Heinlein’s Rules for writing. Specifically, the discussion of Rule #4 – Mail the story to an editor who will buy it.

He talks about a workshop where they had everyone bring what they thought was their best work, and their worst work, put it in a bin, and then make an anthology out of the works that are in the bin, and the participants were not allowed to use their own work. Read the article. The results are interesting, and have sparked some of this introspection about my work that’s going on right now.

Success

Problems And Resolutions

I like writing and recording music.

I like writing fiction.

I like making games.

Why do I never get anywhere fast with any of them?

I think I’ve stumbled across the reason why.

Mostly it boils down to not being able to accept the output of my effort for what it is and moving on to the next project or song. Hell, it’s kept me from finishing another novel for something like fifteen years, and I’ve written, on average, a song a year since I took up this recording thing. As for games, I’ve started any number of projects since Derelict, but I always seem to see the end result as not being worth the effort of doing it.

On Dean Wesley Smith’s site, I ran across Heinlein’s Rules For Writing:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you write.

3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

4. You must put the work on the market.

5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

And I realized that I was a miserable failure at following these rules. I am bound up in the thought that my crap is really crap and no one will enjoy it, which really is crap, if you think about it.

DWS states, over and over again, the first big step to becoming a professional writer is to write and submit and don’t think about it too much. Just do it, like Nike. And well, I think about it too much. And certainly, I apply that thinking to all of my endeavors.

I’m working up my New Years Resolution right now, probably the first one I will ever have made in earnest, and I’m definitely going to keep those rules in mind as I do it. I’ve created a fairly comfortable life just going with the flow. Time to push it in a direction I want it to go, for a change.

Music

Real Life Example Of “You Don’t Have To Spend Lots Of Money”

I was browsing the website of Brad Sucks when I discovered his recording gear list on his About page. Of the actual recording equipment (not including his guitar effects processor or any of his instruments), the only parts of his setup that cost more than two hundred dollars are his monitors (which appear to have run about $800 for the pair) and his computer and software. Everything else, from the interface, to his preamp, to his microphones, are all fairly inexpensive. In fact, if you don’t count the computer, I wouldn’t hesitate to guess that his entire setup cost him less than $2000.

Moral of the story?

It’s not your equipment that’s holding you back.

Music

Got My Echo

I got finally got tired of the idiosyncrasies of the Firestudio, and ordered a new interface. After searching high and low, I settled on an Echo Layla 3G, and ordered it a little over a week ago. And now, it’s in my rack!

I didn’t really need all of the preamps that were on the Firestudio, which is something I didn’t understand until after I’d already purchased it. The Layla 3G has two preamps, and six straight line inputs, and this suits my needs just perfectly. It also supports ASIO Direct Monitoring, which the Firestudio never did (to be fair, I don’t think I checked it on the last driver update), and the really low latency of the PCI card makes the whole Control Room functionality of Cubase 4 work really well. It means I don’t have to buy a separate device to handle talkback for those few occasions I need it – I can just plug a mic into the first mic input on the Layla and use the talkback functionality in Cubase for it.

The only thing I miss, and it can be worked around with ease, is the lack of routing in the DSP mixer that the newer interfaces have. It’s a minor quibble, and like I said, I worked around it. How? The Cubase Control Room. The only thing I wanted to route was the main mix to all of the stereo pair outputs.

As far as sound quality, it’s at least as good as the Firestudio, if not better. Hard to really A/B it in my current setup, but it sure seemed I was hearing a bit more detail. Not that converters are going to make or break my music, but at least I don’t feel like I’m going backwards.

One other quibble, and this is purely (well, mostly) cosmetic. The rack ears. They could have rounded them a bit so they matched the profile of the box. Couldn’t they? The ears also don’t screw onto the box. There are two tabs on each ear that slide into slots on the bottom of the box. Nice and easy, but there’s a bit of movement when plugging things in. It’s in a rack. It isn’t supposed to move.

Anyway, I’m pretty ecstatic. $500 for great quality hardware and software (that last part, the software, is key). I plugged it in, installed the drivers, rebooted, and it worked. And there’s no funky shit going on.

Here it is in the rack: