plink, coding, and my asshole neighbor.
The Plink record is out. Finally. Sales have been decent, but not as brisk as I had hoped for -- but we haven't done any real marketing yet. In the meantime, I want to shake my friends and say FOR THE LOVE OF GOD BUY A CD WE HAVE $2500 TO MAKE BACK HERE HOW CAN WE POSSIBLY KEEP RELEASING RECORDS but I won't. Truth is, if you're counting on your friends to buy the CD or to fill the club, you still have work to do.
I spent the last 3 weeks camped in the office, working crazy hours with three other developers. We had a few weeks to do a small internal project and wanted to deliver a lot of new functionality. I worked 160 hours in two weeks and totally enjoyed it. My brain was buzzing the whole time. It only does that when I'm doing a ton of coding, or when I get to take a week to mix a record. I came home from work at midnight, iced my wrists (ow tendonitis), went to sleep, and hopped out of bed the next morning to charge back to the office. Man. Find me a project that lets me stay this fired up and get the hell out of the way.
A few days into said project, I stopped using XEmacs(!) and starting using IDEA, just to try it. Holy shit that's a good piece of software. Java development has never been so enjoyable. I honestly believe IDEA not only increased my productivity a lot, but it also increased my code quality. It's all that refactoring stuff. It just works. It's sick. And finally, a decent Java debugger -- actually, a really damn good Java debugger. You could actually argue that we wouldn't have been able to finish this project in time, had we not all been using IDEA. Good good stuff. First software I've used in a long time that I geniunely look forward to using and learning.
My neighbor's landlord is a psycho. You hear about bad neighbors, the kind that are happy to leave things at stay the fuck away from my property, you don't bother me, I won't bother you. I just discovered that we have that neighbor. This guy is just mean. What a miserable way to go through life. But I've mellowed in my old age and when someone is deliberately hostile, I'm all thrown off instead of hostile right back. I say "nice to meet you" and he says "wish I could say the same" and instead of taking a swing at the guy or displaying my sharp wit, I'm just like wow, you've got to be kidding me. I'm too rational for my own good. Surprise.
Interesting realization I had about software development vs. music production: with music, the "bugs" are part of what end up making the final product good. The guitar tone is kind of weird, or the drum room sounds lousy, or the vocoder distorts unpredictably, or a TB-303 is a one-trick toy. And those things give a recording character; they make it stand apart sonically from other recordings. Take all that shit away and you end up making a Whitney Houston record. Of course, none of that applies to software. You don't really want software with "character". Oh look, the controls don't reposition right when you resize the window, how quaint and memorable DIE IN A FIRE INCOMPETENT PROGRAMMER. Not sure where I'm going with this, but realizing it made me feel clever and that's why we're here, folks.