Category: Journal
Random thoughts on life, technology and music.
Bravery
“Courage isn’t an absence of fear. It’s doing what you are afraid to do. It’s having the power to let go of the familiar and forge ahead into new territory.” ~John Maxwell
Whitespace
I decided to jump ahead and use the new WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme once they released it today on WordPress Core. I already love the new style, and post options (much like Tumblr). Highly recommended, even in this not-even-close-to-complete state.
Connection
I’m going to the NAMM show this year, for the first time in almost 20 years. I’ve been saying 12 (when I last moved from Carpinteria, and its comfortable, less-than-8-hour drive to Anaheim), but doing the math it’s been 20, as I didn’t attend NAMM any of the years I lived here last, either. Craziness. In case you’re confused, NAMM stands for “National Association of Music Merchants”, and is *the* biggest music conference of each year. To be looking back at 2 decades of avoiding NAMM as a constantly-working musician is, frankly, a bit strange to me. Maybe even a bit embarrassing, honestly.
Simplification
While making coffee and preparing for our Sunday this morning and absent-mindedly tap/swiping my way through my email inbox on my iPad, I realized that my regular routines these days are almost diametrically-opposed to how they were just a year ago. In a nutshell, I haven’t ‘sat down at a keyboard’ in almost 6 months now, at least at home. I have three laptops – only one of which sees any action and it’s when I fire it up – like a desktop machine – each day at work, and then put it to sleep when I leave. Only rarely is it undocked for meetings in favor of the aforementioned iPad, and even those moments are further apart and fewer than ever before.
What’s changed? Unconscious simplification. I never intended an iPad to be my main computing device, but by nature of it’s rather innocuous and carry-friendly footprint it’s weaseled its way into my life quite definitively. Although there’s still professional recording, video editing and a handful of tasks that still need the extra beef of a full-blown computer, even those tasks – up to a certain point – have become manageable on a tablet today, and what was hopeful curiosity a year ago has become convenient reliability in recent weeks.
My old arguments against a tablet-based life usually revolved around power (the processors and display weren’t beefy enough for real work) and a mix of ergonomics and efficiency (virtual keyboards, to be frank, just never work as well or allow you to work as fast as real keys on a real alphabetic or musical keyboard, not to mention all the reasonably-good audio interfaces aren’t generally compatible with iOS devices).
What made the difference?