two new hobbies, and other ways to spend a day
So … there’s been a hobby I’ve been meaning to pick up since I was around 15. If I had pursued it then, I would have more than a decade of experience at it by now, but money and consideration for the people around me kept me away from it.
But NO MORE!
I bought an electric guitar. Somewhat cheap … it’s a Fullerton, not a whole lot to say about it. Apparently I could do a lot better, but I could also do a lot worse. The initial investment wasn’t terrible (got the starter kit thing for $100), so I figure it’s a good place to test the waters and learn the basics. Then if I stick with it, I’ll do the whole equipment upgrade mode, and if I leave it behind I won’t be out a whole lot. Tax return came, so I could afford it (and the rest of tuition for the semester, and bills and food for the rest of the semester, and that’s about it).
Also, I’ve got another somewhat-musical project to play with. Basically, I have ices (icecast source daemon) sourcing for gotwoot radio, streaming random stuff from my anime/jpop music directories transcoded to ogg. I’m going to write myself a web-centered queueing/rating system and a shuffler and a library manager, which I think will be interesting to do.
Classes are almost over. Still got another 150 or so pages of environmental ethics to read this semester, and two database projects to do. I wonder if the database class is going to give me anything interesting to learn.
So, despite my total lack of a social life, I’m keeping busy =D.
March 18th, 2007 at 12:10 am
Very cool. For PLUG radio, we went with MusicPD (http://musicpd.org) rather than ices, as it has randomization and crossfade available. We talked about writing a rating and request system, but never got farther than finding some python libraries for MusicPD. If you\’re interested in either the radio maintenance scripts (start/stop/restart a station), sample MusicPD setup, or what little progress we did make on the web interface for the request system, let me know.