The Nuclear Family has been released on Hancock Street Records! Ask for it at your local independent record store or buy it here!

30 August 2009

What a Weekend

... capping off what a week. Let's start with the week, OK?

At work, a crisis with Volkswagen in Shanghai. Essentially what we needed to do to localize results from our scans slowed down the processing afterward to a crawl. We were able to put in a simple fix that improved the performance of this processing step by a factor of 60. That we were able to do this tells me that we didn't do a great job of performance testing before the last version of the product was shipped. We need to (and will) do better in the future. In addition, we found a synchronization issue in our logic (and produced a fix) and fixed two other defects. With any luck, the "patch that never ends" will finally get shipped out within the next two weeks and I can breathe again.

On top of all of this, I spent two nights in the studio this week mixing the CD (eight songs down, three to go) and I re-started my jazz guitar lesson. So, come Friday afternoon, I was really looking forward to the weekend, and all I had on my plate (beside the regular household stuff of getting ready for the week) was to listen to a song that one of the guys in AMA wrote (and give feedback) and listen with a somewhat critical ear to the rough mixes for the CD and make notes about minor tweaks. Plus, I also wanted to get a haircut. A weekend of happiness and bliss (not to mention an opportunity to sleep in on Saturday morning) lay before me.

However, it is now Friday evening. Let's examine the note on the message board via which my midwestern band communicates. It states that our next planned rehearsal is scheduled for the weekend of October 17. Now watch me recoil in horror as I have (two days ago) confirmed with AMA (the Portland band) that I would be available for a gig on October 16. Also watch as I mention this to my other band and watch me cringe with shame because the practice date had always been October 17 and not later in October as I had remembered. Now to be fair, the October date was set in June at a practice that I was unable to attend and, after a few brief messages flitting across the message board (which I was unable to read in real-time because my email relay from the board had gone down), the practice was always referred to as "the October practice" with no mention of actual date, so it was completely understandable... OK, the reality of the situation was that I fucked up. This is why a portion of my weekend time (soon to be limited as the reader will shortly see) was used to set up a Google calendar having all of my musically-related commitments (and any other large chunks-of-time commitments) listed. The reader may now follow along with my hectic musical life here.

So while my bliss is rapidly disappearing in a sea of panic, unbeknownst to me, my daughter (who is staying overnight at a friends house) is jumping on a trampoline and manages to sprain her ankle. Of course, she does not want to cut short her visit, but I am informed at ~9pm about not only the sprained ankle, but also that, due to a commitment that her friend has, I must pick her up at 9am Saturday morning. So much for sleeping in. I go to bed in a rather dark frame of mind around 12:30am.

I am awakened by my alarm clock at 7:30 am, get up, shower, and feed and walk the dog. I call my daughter at 8:30am and she tells me that her friend really doesn't need to do what she thought she had to do and that I should pick her up at 10am. Of course, the fact that I have been deprived of a potential hour of additional sleep does not register in my daughter's fifteen-year-old mind, as the universe (which revolves around her, of course) was unimpacted. So at 10am I pick up my daughter and am alarmed that her ankle has become rather swollen. I take her home, put a couple of ice packs on her ankle and call the doctor. An hour later I am called back by the doctor who says to bring her in (yet) another hour later. An examination and an x-ray later, my daughter is in a compression bandage and air cast and I have purchased a $42 pair of crutches (something that I am unlikely ever to get any additional use of, as no other member of the family regularly jumps on friends' trampolines). Of course, it is now also 2:30 pm and I have done nothing that I had planned to do this weekend. I go get my hair cut in a bitter frame of mind.

Now to spare the reader the boring details of the reminder of the weekend, let me simply state that I listened to my AMA co-members song and made a couple of suggestions, the midwestern band has regrouped and we will now practice Halloween weekend (understandable, as we are monsters of rock), the Google calendar is now set up, I have dropped my wife and daughter at a play, and I have a few moments to breathe (or more precisely, to blog). I have not listened to any of the rough mixes and I have had no additional time to practice.

So I'm still a bit behind and I am certainly not sure what next week will bring. I know that on Tuesday, I'm back in the studio mixing again. If we have a long night on Tuesday, we will have another night or two of tweaking the roughs and then mastering. After that, I need to start working on getting the cover art and CD images ready for duplication. With any luck, by the end of September, the CD will be ready to go. Of course, I still have to deal with all of the stuff from work. Some folks are being recalcitrant about particular server changes and I'll have to hold the line. Iteration 2 (of 3) of the next release continues. Iteration 3 will be re-planned based on customer feedback. The patch that never ends will (hopefully) bet put to bed (and out the door next week). I'm in the last month to finish my MBOs. So it's never-ending fun at the office. We'll see how it goes...

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