Thursday, August 19, 2010

And so it begins....

Well, I've been a musician for almost my entire life, it seems.  I did well at academics, but spent most of my time singing, or learning various instruments.  By the time I graduated high school, I had passable skills on 13 instruments and had even managed to get really good at a couple of them.

During the same time, I began a love affair with technology.  Just like music, I wanted to soak up as much knowledge as I could on computers and gadgets.

I attribute these interests mostly to my father.  He drilled it into my head that I was never, ever, under penalty of death, ever to touch his guitars without him being there.  Same for the old (new at the time) 8088 IBM-compatible PC he had.  Of course, in the 80's, fathers also went to work for a good portion of the day, at which time I would proceed to touch his guitars and his computer without him being there.  With that, I learned another valuable skill:  covering my tracks.  (I told this to him years and years later.  He said he knew.  So kids, beware, no matter how sneaky you think you are, they know.  They always know).

After high school, I struck out onto the club circuit with a few bands.  After a few years, I learned another valuable lesson:  if you want to play music your way, and you are relatively unknown, you will make dick for money.  Thankfully, I had all that, up until this point, useless tech knowledge floating around in my head, and managed to get hired by a small tech company in Orlando doing network, workstation, and server implementations and maintanence.  Fast forward to today, and I'm still working there, although I've taken on application development as part of my core duties here now.

For me, music and application development go hand in hand.  They balance well together to keep my creative juices flowing.  Take, for example, a song I was recording several years ago in a former band of mine.  We were in the studio, and I had just finished laying down a take of a guitar solo.  The engineer working with us, Roscoe (the second Roscoe I've met in my life, the first being the actor that played Roscoe P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazard, who taught drama at UCF near where I live), looked at me and said, "That sounded great, but that last bit, could you make that 'looser'?"  Well, that's a rather vague term.  So I had to think how to auralize the term 'looser' on the guitar.  Another take later, and Roscoe and the rest of the guys in the band agreed that, somehow, I had nailed it.  Development work, to me, is a lot like that.  Someone has a need to do something on a computer, or a phone, or some sort of device, and it is up to me to take that vague idea of 'something' and turn it into something tangible, basically out of thin air.

So,with that, comes this project.  Why a blog?  Well, for one thing, I've always had an interest in writing, but never really had an outlet for that.  Blogs have been around for years, but for whatever reason, I never saw fit to try the medium until now.  Second, I never had an idea of what I wanted to say until now.  And that hasn't really changed now, either, except for the fact that I realize that if I don't say *anything*, then I'll never say *something*.  So I've created this space as a place I can go and talk about things of interest to me (and hopefully, all of you reading) about various things in the world of music, technology, or just goings-on in the world around me.  So bear with me over the next few posts as I work on getting my writing chops up to speed, and hopefully some of you will find what I have to say interesting and/or entertaining.  And if you don't, I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments.

-M

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